Social Lab

The Good Gym aims to connect good causes and people who want to get fit.  It will help community and public sector organisations, charities and individuals by supplementing and supporting their services in small ways.

It will help people who want to get fit by giving them meaningful places to run to and by connecting them with good causes in their area. 

The Good Gym was founded in September 2007 and has been developed in consultation with fitness enthusiasts, older people and third sector organisations.

The volunteering challenge:
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.

A wasted resource:
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.

A new model of volunteering:
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 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.

Prospective focus: Loneliness and Isolation amongst the elderly: 
Loneliness and isolation are key issues for older people in Britain today.  Elderly people can sometimes go for days without any human contact. In the pilot project, the good gym aims to make a contribution to solving this problem.

Pilot Project Aims:

• To Develop a new model for voluntary action.
• To Provide regular human contact for elderly less mobile people.
• To provide elderly less mobile people with useful contact with the outside world and to increase their quality of life.
• To test a new way of engaging volunteers.