Today we were involved in an international women’s day event that merged women led local community groups with an upcycling event focused on ladies clothing!

This idea was the brain child of Tirza from Slough Anti Litter group supported by Riffat and Clarissa from The Slough Bid; Rosa from Together As One (and GoodGym); Sbba from Asian Star Radio and Knit your socks off; Samina from Sakoon through Cancer and Knit your socks off; Bep from Thrive365; Claire from I Got Style and of course us!

Each group had a host of volunteers supporting the event from set up to swap shop to manning stalls to panel interviews to decant! Well done to all the team members. Great unity!

Need some hanger management?

So we started the day by helping to hang up already donated items. Sut was already on it by the time I arrived. So I hanged around letting her get on with it.

We soon had a few rails already to go and dressed to impress! Just needed customers now.

Has that cardi-gone?

So what is a swap shop? It’s an up recycling event whereby you can select up to 10 items to donate, pay a donation fee, bring in your clothes to the swap assistants (us), and collect tokens for the value of your items which can then be used against other donated items!

We had a tight slot of 30 minutes to receive the swap items, code them to a value (we had a Strava vs parkrun coding system going on so as to not offend anyone if we thought the value was lower (parkrun … sorry parkrun we love you really), or higher value items aka Strava! We then dished out the tokens for the customers to use against other clothes.

Dior to Dior sales

Although the event was a pre book event we didn’t want passerby’s to have FOMO so we had Agni out in the mall handing out flyers letting people know that they could come in too!

Purse-Shoe your Dreams

Whilst the swap assistants were busy sorting and hanging, there were workshops and panels interviews going on where some really insightful and heart warming stories were being shared… I loved that Anita loves red (we have a tshirt just waiting for her), Samina loves trainers (we know where you can use those!) and Claire’s advise on wearing a different colour each day next week might just be my challenge (I’m sure I have race t-shirts in every colour of the rainbow).

Even The Mayor Amjad Abassi and local MP Tan Dhesi came along to support the event.

Really positive feedback from the customers with loads being ‘bought’ during the swap shop opening time.

Thank you to the team for getting involved.

It’s bank holiday Monday (the extra one) and 35 locals have all decided to offer up 2 hours of their day to help on a huge community litter pick. Now that’s what I call Love Slough!

Lend us a hand

The original idea came from a meeting I had with Rif from Slough Bid (Love Slough). We wanted to work together on a task and create more unity in Slough.

I mentioned I had this idea that we could get lots of community groups/members to all do a litter pick across Slough on The Big Help Out Bank Holiday.

Rif mentioned that Leonie from St Mary’s Church was also looking at doing a task that day so hey presto… an idea was born all in a 10 minute chat.

We spilt the tasks with me liasing with Slough Council for pickers, bags and collection of bags at the end. Rif would do the poster and liaise with Leonie on the task at the Church and with Tagreed on volunteers via Slough CVS.

Within a few weeks our plan was coming together nicely.

Graveyard Shift

What is it with Bank Holidays and the weather. One day rainy, next day sunny then Monday with predicted heavy downpours at the time of our event!

But the sun shines on the righteous as 35 volunteers trickled into the church grounds for the safety briefing and equipment collection, the clouds drifted away revealing a shining sun over Slough.

We then spent the next hour collecting litter from the beautiful grounds of St Mary’s Church. We had The Mayor, The Mayoress and their granddaughter, 10 employees from McDonalds branches across Slough, employees from The Moxy hotel, volunteers from Slough CVS, St Mary’s Church, The NHS as well as local councilors, local residents and of course 5 of our own team members and 2 from The Slough Bid team.

In 35 minutes we had collected 29 bags of rubbish! Including the usual haunts of food wrappers, cans, but also light bulbs, umbrellas, clothing, hangers and discarded sleeping bags.

Teddy bears picnic

After a quick photo with the collected hoard we ventured into town with another 45 minute time frame given and a meeting time of 13:30 in the town square.

Again an amazing effort by all especially those who hit the alleyways! Another 16 bags of litter collected making it a total of 45 bags!

Luckily the refuse team were on hand to collect the bags from us so no rubbish was left lying around… another great result!

The event finished with a finale of meeting Teddy from Teddy’s playtime. I’m sure more adults had selfies with him than children. We finished just before 2… just in time for our picnic lunch from Jack’s!

Lending a hand really does make change happen. Today’s event was full of co-operation, networking and of course making Slough cleaner and greener.

Huge well done to you all - and thank you for coming on a Bank Holiday.