About

The story so far:

The Good Gym arose out of a frustration with normal gyms being a waste of energy and human potential.  After a year or so of thinking, testing and developing ideas the project was submitted to Social Innovation Camp in December 2008.  The project was rapidly developed by a wonderful team of people and won first prize.   Since then The Good Gym has grown an advisory board and put together the basis of a pilot project to prove the concept and its potential impact.

the good gym has the support of :

Why are we doing it?

Loneliness and isolation are key issues for older people in Britain today:   13% of people over 65 in the UK say that they always or often feel lonely,   and 17% of those living alone see family and friends less than once a week .

As one person describes it: “With aging you lose a lot of friends. It’s really sad, and it does affect your quality of life.  Loneliness is difficult to cope with.” - Joan Boulter, 87

The Good Gym aims to make a contribution to improving quality of life for older people.

Making volunteering easy:

Research by UK volunteering organisation TimeBank has shown the difficulty of recruiting volunteers, and highlights the importance of developing volunteer-centric roles for volunteering. The Good Gym is a “fine grain” approach to volunteering, where participation is based on frequent low impact activities that are integrated usefully into the participant’s life.

The Good Gym aims to develop a new model of voluntary action by focusing on the positive experience of the volunteer. It is hoped that this approach will result in a higher number and quality of volunteers. The model aims to make it as easy as possible for people to integrate voluntary participation into their lives.

The service that is provided per episode may only have a small impact on the user but the ability to mobilise more volunteers should give the project a large impact overall.

A wasted resource:

In gyms all over the country people all over Britain work away furiously; peddling, pushing, lifting, running and achieving no external benefits. The Good Gym aims to harness this energy by making it easier for people to channel this energy towards social good.

What’s the plan?

Over the Summer and Autumn of 2009 the Good Gym will test the working and processes of the project in Tower Hamlets with a diverse group of volunteers and older people.  This will form the outline of a pilot project which will run for a year and be fully evaluated.

If you want to get in touch about the pilot project please email Mark Herbert: mark@thegoodgym.org