Real Good Fitness Community Day: Giving Back at Long Ashton Community Centre
On Saturday 17th May we spent several hours getting sweaty at the Long Ashton Community Centre - but no, it wasn’t for our usual outdoor small group fitness sessions, this time we wielded shovels instead of kettlebells and spent the day giving the flower beds of our beloved centre a face lift.
The Community Day idea came from Connor, our head coach and owner of Real Good Fitness. He hosts sessions at the centre several times a week and often can be seen picking up bits of litter as he walks to and from class, popping bits of wrapper and drinks cans in the bin while moving his equipment from his van to the MUGA. After one session, he suggested that maybe we as a group could do a bit more to give back to the community and the team jumped on the idea, ready and willing to lend a hand.
The centre gave us a “wish list” of jobs, including removing weeds, digging up old lavender plants, scrubbing dead vines from the wall and giving all paths and walkways a good scrub, sweep and jet wash. They asked that we weeded one flower bed, created a wooden edging for it, and then filled it with stone gravel, a pretty hefty job but one our coaches decided to ear mark as their task for the day.
So we gathered, in sturdy shoes and suncream, and we dug, swept, scraped, jet washed, laid gravel and litter picked, slowly ticking off jobs while explaining to passersby what it was we were doing. Connor put together the edging for his flowerbed and as a team we all lifted it into place and held it while our youngest volunteer of the day gleefully whacked it into the ground with a mallet.
After three hours of hard work we celebrated with a team picnic to cool off - before coaches Connor and Kody got back to it finishing off the epic task of that giant flower bed that needed filling in with stone. The final look is pretty impressive, and it’s great to see what can be achieved when you work together.
The Long Ashton Community Centre have sent us a message of thanks, saying how impressed they are with everything we accomplished in just a few hours, which really makes all the hard work worth it. All volunteers on the day were given free Real Good Fitness credits as a thank you for taking part - these credits can be used at any in-person session at any of our three locations. So if you’ve now got FOMO, keep your peepers open, as this was such a success we think we might make it an annual event!
Blog Written By: Karen Slater, Member and Social Secretary