During the community-focused phase of my career, one of the projects we organised had very little to do with exercise itself.
Through JW Training and our bootcamp community, we launched a Winter Warmers campaign to collect clothing and other essential items for people experiencing homelessness during the colder months.
The initiative was picked up by the local newspaper and formed part of BBC Radio 1’s #1MillionHours volunteering campaign.
Working with the community we had built
By this point, our bootcamps had created a strong community of clients and local people.
Rather than only bringing everyone together for exercise, I wanted to see whether we could use that community to help elsewhere too.
We began collecting items through the gym, from personal training clients and from members of our bootcamps.
We asked people to donate things such as:
- hats
- gloves
- scarves
- unwanted warm clothing
- sleeping bags
- duvets
The idea was simple. Many of us had perfectly usable clothes sitting at home that we no longer needed, while other people were facing winter without some of the basics required to stay warm.
Winter Warmers
The newspaper covered the campaign under the headline “Help company clothe homeless.”
Alongside collecting physical donations, we also set up a fundraising page as part of the project and encouraged people to volunteer their time.
Once everything had been collected, we took the donations to a homeless shelter in Reading.
We then stayed and volunteered for the day, helping out in the kitchen and supporting the work being done there.
That part of the experience was particularly important.
It wasn’t simply about gathering some clothes, handing them over and moving on. Spending time there gave us an opportunity to contribute directly and see the work being done to support people who were going through an incredibly difficult period in their lives.
Fitness can create communities
Looking back, this project represented something I was beginning to understand more clearly during that stage of my career.
A fitness business can become more than somewhere people go to exercise.
If you build a genuine community around it, you also create a group of people who can come together around other things that matter.
Our clients and bootcamp members responded by donating items, getting involved and helping us turn what started as a simple idea into something that could genuinely benefit other people.
Part of a wider period of community work
Winter Warmers sat alongside many of the other community projects we were running at the time.
We organised free family bootcamps across Bracknell and Yateley.
We hosted charity 5K fun runs that raised thousands of pounds for Youthline.
We encouraged families to become more active together.
And with projects like Winter Warmers, we tried to use the community that had grown around fitness to support people beyond it.
It became an important part of that chapter of my career.
Looking back
My work today is very different, but I’m proud that community initiatives formed such a significant part of the journey.
Fitness gave us a reason to bring people together.
Once those relationships existed, there were opportunities to do more with them.
Sometimes that meant helping someone take their first steps into exercise.
Sometimes it meant raising money for a local charity.
And on this occasion, it meant filling bags with warm clothes, taking them to a homeless shelter in Reading and spending the day volunteering.
For me, that was always the bigger idea behind the community work.
Use what you’ve built to try and leave something positive behind.
