3 of our regular volunteers went to help May sort out Summer Clothing, they had plenty sunshine which meant plenty smiles all around.

Maya we like your outfit and the colour too.

There are still plenty clothes that need sorting so please look out for more dates posted shortly on our website.

We were back at St Mary’s Church on Church Street for our Monday #DoGoodGetFit task. We all had ‘active travel’ to get to the Church on time on a lovely cool Monday evening.

On arrival, Jean our task owner gave us access to the Church and asked us to do a few tidy up jobs that the Church desperately needed.

So we got to work pretty quickly with Jason taking the sweeping job (once he was happy with the broom!), Maya also went on sweeping duties then onto iron gate cleaning.

Devajani was already giving the iron work a good clean whilst Agni and Jean were all over the pulpit with Jean giving us her worldly advise.

I took some time out to sweep the altar and wipe down the pews with the rest of the team joining me once they’d finished their areas.

The areas looked so much fresher once we’d finished. Such a beautiful church and we were very happy to help give it a spring clean.

We look forward to returning in a few weeks time.

Next week we will be at the allotments on Stoke Road. Hope to see you there.

This was our first task helping the Ramgarhia Gudwara on Woodland Ave.

Agni has sourced this task for us as she already helps out in the Gudwara.

On Sunday the Slough Gudwaras (Singh Sabha and Ramgarhia) are conducting the annual Nagar Kirtan march for Vaisakhi from one Gudwara to the other.

As it ends at The Ramgarhia Gudwara they had asked for our help in weeding and litter picking the beds. The grounds generally looked great but there was some TLC needed to the flower beds.

In the hour we were there we did manage to fill 3 bags of weeds and rubbish but there is more work to be done here so we agreed with the President of the committee to slot in another session on Monday evening.

We hope we've made a positive impact to the grounds.

Tonight's task has a theme going through it...and I'll give you a pew to what it is!

When I checked the sign up list last night and only I was signed up, I did have a momentary panic so I sent a little note on the whatsapp group to see if anyone else could join me...luckily both Peter and Sara were able to come along...pew for that.

I knew Leonie (our task owner would be present), so I wasn't too phased if I did have to do the task alone, however it's always good to have some company.

Our meet up point was Upton Court Park at 6.30pm with the option of a walk or run down to the Church. Only Peter met me at the park, the rest of the team made their own way to the Church (on time)...on arrival we did see a few people lingering around the entrance so I personally was very grateful to have Peter and Hamid (who was now with us too) to wait with....a blessing in disguise!

We were soon joined by Devajani so were ready to go inside to see what our task was.

Leonie explained that they had a concert on Sunday and needed some help with sweeping the floors, vacuuming the altar, cleaning the pews and the entrance area....and a little bit of high dusting!

We had a web of laughter as we chatted, caught up on our weekly antics and cracked on with the task in hand.

Peter and Hamid took to the sweeping duties like pro's whilst Sara was on hoovering and Devajani and I took a pew.

It is always amazing how quickly and efficiently we can all work and get the task done. Within 50 minutes we had swept, hoovered and wiped. Then Hamid took the longest duster we have ever seen and cleared away cobwebs that had most likely been hanging around for years! And that's no web of lies! But pew we did it!

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.