The GoodGym Nottingham volunteers came together on 10th December for their annual festive social at Bustler, Sneinton Market.

With rounds of mulled wine, other alcoholic and non-alcoholoc beverages, and tasty food from Bustler's streetfood stalls, we marked another year-full of helping organisations and projects around Nottingham and various milestones achieved.

As always, conversation and debate flowed, with the key questions of the night:

"How is it that several group members had not seen Home Alone and is this really as shocking as some thought?"

"What is the best apple?"

"When is a berry not a berry?" (for the benefit of those not at the previous years Christmas social)

A big thank you to everyone who attended (and to Rose and Vytautas who made a brief surprise appearance before joining their rival party). We hope everyone has a lovely, relaxing break and we're looking forward to more good deeds in 2026 (we've already got loads of tasks booked in, check them out and sign up here.)

On the chilliest night of the season so far, nine GoodGymers returned to the Meadows Foodbank and Pantry for our Wednesday task. Mark always has lots of lovely jobs in store for us and this evening was no exception.

Jules, Marie and Rachel worked through a pile of recent donations in the clothing section, picking out anything that was warm and wintry to go on the clothes rails. Anything else was sorted and put away in the boxes and some items were bagged up for the charity shop.

Meanwhile, Leah and Nigel headed upstairs to the stock room, finding the nearest and furthest ‘best before’ dates on a range of food items. Tom and Hannah started making up some small bags of miniature toiletries that had been donated to the foodbank, whilst Matt and Khiltee sorted out some toiletries gift bags upstairs before heading down to help out on the shop floor.

We welcomed Marie to her first ever GoodGym task, we hope to see you again! We were also joined by Talia, a journalism student from Nottingham Trent university, who is writing a report on community initiatives as part of her final year assessment project. It was lovely to chat about GoodGym with Talia and we wish her the best of luck with her report (hopefully we will see her back as a GoodGym volunteer in future!).

Thank you to Mark for hosting this at the foodbank. It's always such a pleasure to do tasks there and we hope to return very soon.

Full commitment from six GoodGymers as we tackled painting the kitchen at Sherwood Community Centre. With shoes off (Matt and Peter) and overalls on (Nigel and Pete) we rolled up our sleeves and got stuck in
Somehow we kept out of each others way and managed to get a coat on all the way round the kitchen. We also welcomed Lisa for her first ever GoodGym task, hopefully the first of many!