This was our first task helping Kate and Alice from the Not Just a Store shop in Slough. This community initiative was set up last year and has been supporting Slough residents with low cost food/household items as well as a community fridge.

Imagine a charity shop that was not clothes, but food instead!! That’s us.

Here's a bit more about Not Just from their website :-

This is a fundraising community store for our non-profit NotJUST (International) CIC. We work with distributors all over the UK that end up with food and items that are past best before and surplus, and save it from landfill in bulk. The food is then sorted into our food banks, sharing with smaller community groups, and going into stores like this!

This store is a social supermarket that is open to every member of the public: no membership required. A lot of our food is past its best before, and a lot of our food and items are sold at a discounted price. We also have some items ‘available for a donation’, where you can choose how much you wish to donate. It’s entirely up to you, but the more you donate, the more people in crisis we can help. We also run a community fridge, filled with goodies also available for a donation.

'It's a sin' to waste so much food when it is perfectly edible and this is just the type of waste warriors task we like!

I first touched base with the store back in November when I went to have a little nosey at the store and introduce GoodGym to the team. We then went our separate ways until December when we reunited at the Slough CVS Community Network event. The Not Just team were 'Always on my mind' so it was great to go say Hi again and see if they had a task for us. And low and behold they did!

You'll need a big team

Said Alice!

With 19 attendees we did not let her down!

It was great to have Ryan return for his 2nd task. A very warm welcome to Vineet and Sheena on their 1st task, and thank you to Clare from Stoke Park Active for bringing her team members down for this task - their very 1st GoodGym experience (welcome to Salman, Mansoor, Ray and Michelle). We had other important numbers floating around today....Huge congratulations to Sara on her 250th good deed today. Sara has been supporting Slough since we launched in 2018. She was our Queen shopper during Covid, a community missioner with a passion and our mission making possible member (helping older people with one off tasks) and she has always been an integral member of our team - well done on your 250th.

On Sunday Pam knocked out her 350th good deed, very closely followed by her 351st and today her 352nd. Known affectionately as Ninja Pam, Pam again has been a core member since 2018. We wouldn't know what do to without Pam's gardening knowledge and general calmness. Thank you for all our efforts over the years.

Thank you to Claire for coming over from the Windsor and Maidenhead GG Team - great to meet you

The Task:

I popped in to see Kate earlier today to see the areas we would be working on. This helped me work out the run/walk route as well - only question I had was do we Go West or east?...lets go west... I decided on a shorter route today as my lunchtime run left me with frozen ears! I did wonder 'What have I done to deserve this? Then I remembered that I run for pleasure!

At the warm up which Hamid did so very well...we all decided on a walk from Greggs to Costa. Ruth lead the walkers whilst I back marked. Our total time out walking was around 20 minutes. We all just wanted to get back as quick as possible for the warmth of inside where we met Kate and she gave us the lowdown of the tasks.

We had two areas to concentrate on today:

• Creation of the Pet Shop area;
• Sweeping and mopping of the 'football' sized space upstairs

I knew Sara would be great at leading the Pet Shop area as she likes pets! haha...no point having me there! And Sweeping Sandy and Rocking Ruth helped to lead the upstairs task. With so many of us in attendance at times, there was a bit of 'Domino Dancing' going on but both teams did a great job of their respective tasks.

The Pet Shop Boys (and girls) did a smashing job at banging the back panels in place before fitting the shelves. Vineet and Sheena got stuck into this task with excellent guidance from everyone expect me...I'm clueless at coming up with racking suggestions. Agnija (our birthday girl) managed to source a hammer and banged the panels in place. Overall, the team made a shelf-improvement to how it looked at the beginning.

The Va Va Broom team upstairs had mastered a team method at sweeping (put two brushes together and Bob's your uncle...a greater area is covered). They then cracked on with mopping the floor. What a mop-tastic job they did!

The Broom Challenge

Our fitness part of the session tonight was a game of chase the broom. The team stood in a circle each holding a broom stick in their right hand, on the call of 'go', they had to release their broom and as quickly as they could grab the broom of the person on their left. If you didn't get to the broom in time you were out. Well done to Ryan and Hamid for making it to the final. Our eventual winner was Hamid!

The January challenge

Thank you to everyone getting involved in the January challenge. We met our good deeds target on Sunday and have now exceeded it thanks to all our attendees tonight. Well done team #GGSlough. Just got to get that 750km distance target met now (half way there!)

There are still plenty of January sessions to get involved in. See you at one!

We returned to Slough Outreach's community hub shop for another clothes sorting task.

On Friday we made good headway by clearing a mountain of donated bags into 3 piles and we had managed to find the floor again by the end of that task. Tonight we were repeating what we did on Friday however we did not think the mountain could have grown that fast in just 3 days..yet it had!

We met directly outside the shop with the intention of doing a run before we started the task. Did you feel the freeze today?? So did we! With Hamid, Mehdi and Ali arriving super early, I watched them doing football style drills to keep warm! Hamid had created a star shaped warm up which on arrival new member Ryan plus Ruth and Gauri all started doing. With 20 mins still to go before Shin was arriving we decided to get some walking km's in by going for a round robin loop around the shops. We managed to squeeze in 1.6km before starting the task!

Once inside we did a task brief on what went in which bag.

• Bags for rags;

• Bags for the homeless and;

• Table top of shop saleable items

Oh and a bag for summer clothes

Quickly we got to work. We managed to get the hang of deciphering the good from the bad (via the sight test) and the odour to the odourless (via the sniff test).

Great to have Ryan join us on his first session and Ali returning for his second! Thanks for coming along guys.

Slowly yet surely, we watched the mountain melt down to a small hill to a valley of emptiness! You could see the floor again! Superb efforts by everyone.

We are only in week one of our January challenge and so far we have already clocked up 34 good deeds! Keep up the great work...we should totally smash our target this year.