Welcome back and thank you to the team who turned out for our first session of 2025. And what a great one to start with - sorting donations for Care4Calais at their East London storage facility.

We were met by one of their long term volunteers, Andy, who explained what needed to be done - essentially weed out any donations not worth keeping, and then sort the clothes into piles of similar items (childrens, mens, womens etc) - and that we could approach it in any way we liked... This brought back memories of similar "sorting" activities from our lockdown-era sessions for Crisis at Christmas and we were only to happy to put our experience into practice. We made a good dent into the big donations pile, leaving behind what we hope is a more usefully organised pile that can be distributed on to people seeking asylum across East London.

We'll be back there again in a couple of weeks (and potentially beyond if they still need our help...) - as the pictures show, it's dark, so please remember head torches if you've got them! We've also got some other great tasks lined up for January - Hackney Marsh Adventure Playground next week (soon to be listed) but also a long awaited return to the Up Garden on Saturday to do some painting - sign up here.

Saturday morning - perfect time for a parkrun goodgym combo! Wanstead flats the meeting point. For some of us the first time parkrunning at Wanstead flats! Great morning for it. One of the few occasions I haven’t seen someone taken down by the muddy section. Good warm up for a couple of Sunday morning half marathon heroes in the group.

Then on to Emmanuel church. Anticipating the big crowds of Sunday morning, the church were keen to get the leaves that had fallen on the paths around the church cleared - avoid some potentially hazardous situations. Initially, we divvied the task, boys to bag the leaves, girls to rake (hence “bag boys for life”) but ultimately everyone was chipping in with everything. We counted up and think it was probably around a squillion leaves that we cleared between us and the other volunteers at the church so all in all, job well done.

Watch out for more Saturday parkrun goodgym combos in the coming weeks as we’re trying to work out when our next instalment is gonna be and we’re definitely thinking this side of Xmas!