We were back at South Reading community Centre on Saturday, continuing to get some of the building painted and looking lovely and welcoming. We were able to admire the upgrade made to our white painting of the corridor last time, with the cartoons now covering the walls and bringing some more colour to the space!

Our task for this weekend was to give to entrance area a lick of paint, and it definitely needed it! With grubby walls, scrapes and some cobwebs, we had plenty to get stuck in with! Shirley got stuck in with some pro-polyfilling, Jeni (for her first GoodGym task!), Chris and Jenni got to work with masking taping around all the doors, windows and the posterboards on the walls, and Emily got to work with the magic sponge trying to get off the worst of the marks.

With all the preparation done, we were ready to get stuck in with painting! We worked from one side of the space to the other, taking it in turns with rollers and brushes, and making sure the high bits were done in between, to get everything looking much brighter, cleaner and welcoming.

As we were finishing up, the owner of the community cafe next door popped in to check our handy work... and a request for us to paint some walls for them in future, so we'll be back again at the community centre soon!

On a very chilly Monday evening, six goodgymers met in Reading town centre, for our first task of the year! Emily, Mike and Zelie joined us for their first task and are now able to get their red t-shirts!

We set off towards a known-littery spot around Broad Street and the Hexagon and we weren't short of litter to fill our bags, although some of the spots we went to were suprisingly (and pleasantly!) litter free!

With cold toes and fingers, after 45 minutes we called time with 8 bags of litter collected, we set off to warm up with hot chocolate, mince pies and something tasty for dinner on the cards!

Our next session will be on Saturday, and this time we'll be inside! Join us for painting at South Reading Community Centre

After our first task of the morning to get us prepared for painting, and refuelled with tea and biscuits, we got to work on the painting. A transformation from off-white to white is hard to detect in photos, but it certainly looked a lot brighter in real-life!

To maximise our speed for the task, Chris used the extendable roller to get to the top of the walls, and I started along the bottom... hopefully there were no spots missed, but we'll be back again in January to do any last bits if needed!

Chris and I got to work preparing the corridor for painting, ahead of the second part of the task!

With sanding, poly filling, wiping down with sugar soap and resending, it was a lot to get through in 2 hours, but it made the painting for the second part of the day much easier!

Monday night was GoodGym Reading's last task of the year! With almost 200 good deeds across Reading completed this year, we thought we'd make things a little bit competitive and celebrate our achievements.

So, what does a chilli pepper, a santa hat and some medical gloves have in common? They were all things we found during a round litter picking bingo!

Four goodgymers, including Meg who joined for their first session, set out to find everything on our bingo cards to dispose of during our session.

Between us we managed to collect almost everything on the bingo cards, but Jess was our winner managing to find most of the items! She generously shared her prize between us, which went down as the perfect dessert after our festive burgers at Siren bar after the task!

We'll be back again for more good deeds in 2026!

Four goodgymers met in Caversham for a quick round of flyering for Thames Hospice Superstore on Richfield Avenue. If you need an outfit for the party season, its well worth checking out!

This evening we were joined by Jen who often does GoodGym in Windsor & Maidenhead and Slough areas. Jen is a seasoned pro when it comes to GoodGym, so she was dressed ready for a wet and windy evening, in the snazzy GoodGym gear!

Armed with a stack of flyers each, we made our way around the streets in central Caversham and with all four of us working together, we flew around the estate and managed to get them all through letter boxes in no time at all! Thankfully the weather wasn't as bad as we feared, apart from a few spells of cold rain!