Summer Break

This week, a lot later than many units was our Brownies’ last night of term. I think it varies as to how late people stay open, but we’ve always stayed open about three weeks after the schools close.

With families going on holidays and just generally enjoying the summer weather (when it’s here!) we do get quite a smaller number of girls, but its nice to do something a bit different.
The first summer themed week was sports; we had some fantastic weather to do races and the like outside, then we headed inside to make some medals. We had around seven on that week which was a big contrast to our usual number!

Last week we had a beach party, and unfortunately the weather wasn’t quite as nice as the week before. Yet we still went outside to play some games, made fruit and marshmallow kebabs coated in chocolate and then went back outside for some water games. The overcast clouds and slight chill in the air didn’t deter them at all, the Brownies were still more than enthusiastic to play with the paddling pool and water balloons!

This week, our last week still sits as a firm favourite with many of our girls…McDonalds! Our girls get dropped off at McDonalds, where they then have something to eat together, and after around an hour spent there we walk back to our usual meeting. I think the staff don’t always know what to do with themselves when they see seventeen excited Brownies in the queue.

And that’s it for this term! We open again in September after three weeks off, and then not long after that we’re heading off on Pack Holiday! Our theme is Despicable Me 2; I hadn’t seen the film before, but now I know we are doing it as a pack holiday theme I’m seeing the little Minions everywhere!

Volunteering and the CV

Due to the fact that I graduate this year, a lot of my time recently has been spent looking for and applying for jobs – and filling in a countless number of application forms! One thing that I have found during this time, is that whilst I haven’t had much previous employment, the things I have done through voluntary roles provide me with invaluable experience.

A time when you worked as a team? That one is ticked off by working within a leadership team at Brownies

A time you led a team? The time I completed my Camp and Holiday scheme covers that one quite nicely

A time when something you had planned went wrong? The crafts not being delivered in time on the aforementioned pack holiday works well with that one – as does the rescheduling of the Queen’s Guide weekend!

And there are countless other examples, communication skills, planning, organisation, compassion, problem solving.

If I can’t find an example through my internship, or a past job, I can almost certainly find one from my role with Girlguiding! And it looks fantastic on a personal statement too, to show your commitment and achievements such as the Queen’s Guide award can really give you the edge!

I make sure to always include Guiding on my CV – you never know where it could take you!

Talking about our Promise

This week at Brownies we did some more activities surrounding the Promise. We had two activities planned by our new Assistant Leader, the first of which required the girls to find sentences of the Promise we had hidden around the room and then, as a group, to organise them into the right order. It seemed at first as though a couple of our girls had forgotten we even had a new promise! Made evident by them saying “What comes next?” “It’s ‘to love my God’!” but of course that wasn’t on any of their pieces of paper.

The next activity is similar to one I’ve done in the past with my home Brownies, where you write one part of the promise on each of five petals and then glue them together with a central circle to make a flower. This time we added straws so they could hold them also. On the back of each petal, the girls had to write one thing they do to keep that part of their promise. They found it quite easy for parts such as ‘to help other people’. However they faced some difficulty especially with the part which reads “To be true to myself and develop my beliefs”; with quite a few of them asking us what it actually means. This was quite a tricky one to explain, especially to some of our youngest members who were struggling with the concept of ‘developing’ something. So first came the task of explaining the word ‘developing’, which seems easy enough but in practice is actually quite a tricky one to explain! We found that a lot of them reverted back to discussing beliefs in God – but of course that’s fine, and almost to be expected when they currently attend a church school.

In a way, I think the new promise is harder for the younger members to get their head around – it really takes some thinking about for them I think. But the activity we did was a good way of breaking it down for them, and definitely one I’ll use again.

 

Official Queen’s Guide Presentation

So on Tuesday this week I had my official Queen’s Guide presentation at the House of Lords in London. I posted about the things I did to gain it here, if anyone is interested in reading that too.

We were allowed to take one guest, so me and my Mum got the train down from Manchester in order to attend the 12pm ceremony, and then got the train back up afterwards, so it was a lot of travelling!

As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s quite a bit of security to get in the House of Lords, so we had to take our passports and arrive 15 minutes early to go through security.

After we’d gone through security we took the short walk over to the River Room (past the car parking spot of the Speaker of the House of Commons!) which we were told used to be the living room of the Speakers flat – certainly much posher than my living room!

Our awards were presented by Chief Guide Gill Slocombe and Baroness Armstrong who had kindly invited us to use the room in the House of Lords. After we had heard both of them speak and been presented with our awards, we were then free to mingle with the other guests and Queen’s Guide recipients. This was also the time for canapes and photographs with other recipients in our Region.

Before we knew it it was time to leave, however we did all get presented with one last token, a silver pen with the words ‘From the Chief Guide’ which was a lovely way to round off the award.

I’ve had the opportunity to do some many fantastic things through the Queen’s Guide, and whilst gaining the award is an honour in itself its also great to put  on CV’s and job applications; it’s a conversation starter! It’s also a great way to speak out about Girlguiding; we are modern and relevant through the sheer number of things we enable members to do, and of course we provide the perfect platform to do these things! I not only got the chance to do some great things through the Queen’s Guide award but I also gained and developed skills and had a great time too! I would recommend it to any members of Girlguiding who are eligible – it’s a challenge of course, but so worth it in the end!

More Big Brownie Birthday Activities!

We’ve been completing lots of challenges for the Big Brownie Birthday recently! Recently we completed another activity; making Chinese Dragon boats. We aimed to do this the week but it was unexpectedly delayed due to us not having the cardboard boxes we needed. I searched everywhere! But all the supermarkets told me that they could give me banana boxes but nothing bigger as they go straight to be recycled, but our Dragon Boats wouldn’t quite look the same if we made them with banana boxes! In the end I was lucky and a friend of a friend got hold of some as they work in a shop.

So we split the girls into two groups and they got to work on their boats. It’s not an exaggeration when I say I haven’t seen a messy sea of craft materials like that in a long while! But 55 minutes later, with 2 completed dragon boats and the mess finally cleared, we had 5 minute left to do some races. Really we need a bit longer in our meetings, at home I’m used to having 1 hour and 40 minutes, and even then we sometimes don’t finish what we’ve planned!

And despite the mess I think they all enjoyed themselves which is the main thing at the end of the day! And thankfully they took the boats home which meant I didn’t have to get them back on the bus so I could recycle them…..

Last week we had our planning meeting for the next term, so there are plenty more Big Brownie Birthday challenge nights to follow!

Girlguiding’s new Promise… A promise for all

 (The Brownie Promise Badge)

So after the Promise consultation I blogged about a couple of months ago, the new Girlguiding Promise has recently been revealed.

The Girlguiding promise changes from this:

I promise that I will do my best,
to love my God,
to serve the Queen and my Country,
To help other people, 
and to keep the (Brownie) Guide law

Or for Rainbows: “I promise that I will do my best, to love my God and to be kind and helpful”

To this:

I promise that I will do my best:
To be true to myself and develop my beliefs,
To serve the Queen and my community, 
To help other people 
and 
To keep the (Brownie) Guide Law.

Or for Rainbows:  “I promise that I will do my best, to think about my beliefs and to be kind and helpful.”

When put like that it seems a relatively minor change really – but what’s less important is the magnitude of the change, and of more importance is its meaning.

I’ll be honest – when I first heard that the Promise was potentially changing, I was a bit unsure. I, along with many others I’m sure, thought that it works perfectly well, so why change it? But then after the initial thoughts I considered what a change to the promise would actually mean. As I did this, and read the suggestions as I filled in the Promise consultation, I realised that actually, change can be good. I think sometimes society is a bit reactionary – change? why would we do such a thing? which probably made many people initially unsure of a change to something as important to Girlguiding as the Promise. However I’m sure that like myself many people delved into the idea further and reached an informed conclusion as to whether they were in favour or not.

Personally, after thinking it over I realised that taking the word God out of the promise was probably going to encourage a wider membership group to join/say the Promise. And this is exactly what is needed – Girlguiding is not, and never has been (as many people think) a religious organisation. And because of this, we do not want to discriminate against those who aren’t sure about their religious beliefs, for those who have none, or for those who simply don’t want to include them in their promise. The new line “To be true to myself and develop my beliefs” encompasses a wide spectrum, and it can be interpreted by each individual who makes their promise. These beliefs can be religious, or not, they can be about society, the individual, anything! But what I think the promise is saying is that you should be true to yourself, and if you hold a belief then you shouldn’t be ashamed of it, you should act accordingly. Which I think is a pretty good thing to suggest. Of course you don’t want to offend those who are religious, but this is not the intention. The way I see it, this is opening the Promise to a wider range of people and is not excluding those who don’t want to make a Promise about God. And I can’t see why widening the Promise to include everyone is a bad thing.

Removing the word God from the Promise is summed up very nicely here http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-girl-guides-have-nothing-to-do-with-religion-and-they-never-have-done-8665048.html by Gail Edmans.

The second change is simply to the word community. This again is a change that I like. I think it’s much easier to explain to our members, some of the 7 year olds I’ve met struggle to understand with the concept of serving the Queen and their country, I think it all sounds very adult like to them. Using the word community, in my opinion makes this part of the promise more accessible to our younger members above all others. Their community is all around them every day, it’s a lot easier for them to get to grips with being of service to the small community in which they live than with the country as a whole, which seems massive to many of the Girls.

So in short I think the change to the Promise is actually a good thing. There’s been a lot of controversy of people thinking this is “political correctness gone mad” and that this is a sign of the secularisation of this country. But people are failing to look past the stereotype of what they think Girlguiding is about, and really think about what changing the Promise means. Many people are against changing the Promise at all, but what they realise is that this isn’t actually the first time, and quite possibly won’t be the last. Staying modern and relevant to today’s girls is going to require changing alongside society. Something as important as the Promise has to be accessible to the widest possible range of members. Like anything, you cannot ever hope to please everybody. What you have to do is try to please as many people as you can, which I certainly hope is what the new Promise manages to do. I think it may take some people a while to get used to it, especially those who have been members of Girlguiding for a large number of years. But I think that Girlguiding has succeeded in making a Promise for all.

 All views my own. If you want to know more about the Promise, you can read the official Girlguiding FAQ’s here http://girlguiding.org.uk/about_us/key_information/promise_faqs.aspx

National Volunteers Week – why I’m a volunteer

The 1st – 3rd June 2013 is national volunteers week, which inspired this, my latest blog post on why I volunteer.

I’ve had quite a range of voluntary roles: primary school, pre-school, hospice receptionist. In fact the internships I’m applying for this summer are voluntary. But my longest standing voluntary role has been that with Girlguiding. If you’ve seen any of my other posts, you’ll probably know that I’ve been a leader with Brownies (aged 7-10) for around 6 years now, since I was 14. And if you didn’t know that, then I guess you do now!

So I guess that begs the question of why? Of why myself, and so many others give up our time (and sometimes lots of it!). Well I can’t speak for everyone, but there are a couple of reasons why I do it.

I guess the first of these is for myself – of course I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it. Knowing that you’re doing something for other people brings a great satisfaction. When being a leader with Brownies, you get girls in your unit for roughly 3 years. And during this time you watch them grow, change and flourish. I know that after we take girls on Brownie pack holiday they often come back to our meetings a different girl; filled with more confidence and openness. You can get girls who used to only spoke when spoken to and keep themselves to themselves offering conversation and socialising with other girls more than before. And I think knowing that you’re helping these girls flourish and grow into themselves is fantastic. Seeing girls do things they were once terrified of, like climbing to the top of a climbing tower, and coming back down beaming really is a fantastic feeling. It’s great to know that you’ve enabled these children to do something they might never have done otherwise. I find this with any long term volunteering with children, such as when I went into a reception class every morning for a couple of months in sixth form, you see them settle and start to be comfortable in their new environment.

And that’s not all I personally feel I get out of it. Girlguiding has given me so many opportunities – being interviewed by Radio Lancashire, a breadth of trainings to develop my skills and of course the invaluable confidence and leadership skills. Not to mention the sense of community and friendship you can be offered in any organisation, not just Girlguiding.

And the second reason is for other people! It’s similar to some of the points I’ve already mentioned really, knowing that you’re helping someone do something they wouldn’t otherwise have done, knowing that you can make a difference. This is especially when you’ve had a positive experience somewhere yourself – for example when a Brownie/Guide. For me personally, I want to give something back to enable other people to benefit from something I once did – I like to give back some incredible experiences to others. It’s really great to see people doing something they enjoy or benefit from.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I’m a volunteer!

Latest Happenings

So recently everything has been so busy! Amongst a flurry of revision and exams nothing very exciting has happened.

Last week we decided that with the nice weather we’ve been having, and in order to finish a badge, we’d go on a walk around the university campus to find Geocaches. But as is usually the case, we got the first day of bad weather and it absolutely poured down. Cue us handing over soggy children back to their parents….. But despite the bad weather the girls did enjoy themselves and I think it would be a great activity in nicer weather.

This week is our second trip out in as many weeks and we’re going to the Fire Station! Very handy for me as it’s only a 5 minute walk away from my house. Hopefully the Crew won’t get called out and cut our visit short, but even if they do, from past experience the girls will enjoy it all the same.

It’s also only 5 weeks until our next pack holiday; my first with these Brownies. I think every one runs theirs differently so it will be interesting to see. It’s also my first time catering for a pack holiday which is a little daunting! But I know that next time (October) I won’t need to as I’ll be working towards my Camp and Holiday scheme, which will be another achievement hopefully crossed off the list!

My thoughts on Student Volunteering

So this week I’ve been back to my home Brownie pack for the first time in just over 3 months. I’m not going to say it’s not strange to be back, because it is! It feels like you’ve never left, they’re still as excitable and hyperactive as ever, but then you look around the circle and think “that’s a face I don’t recognise….oh I don’t think I know this girls name” and you then remember that things have still been going on without you! But really it’s no big problem, this week we were doing Easter crafts and as they sat down to make their cards and sew their egg cosys I sat with the group who moved up from Rainbows recently to help them out with their sewing and they were quite happy to talk to me like they’d known me forever! And by the end of the night they were calling me by my name too – so while things seem strange at first actually you can just slot back in to the unit as before. It’s nice not to have any preconceptions about new members too, you haven’t been told that “Child X was always really noisy in Rainbows….Child Y is really bossy towards the others” so you get to know them by talking to them. One of the things I admire about some of the youngest is the way they’ll come into the unit and just fit in and get on with things, even though they’re little fish in a very big pond!

If I had to give advice to anyone who was volunteering and was a bit anxious about moving away to uni, I’d tell them not to worry. Being able to jump straight into something like Girlguiding when you’re away at uni is something familiar for you to do, and no matter where you go there’ll be something for you to do. And I personally enjoy coming back to visit my home Brownies when I’m on holidays too, you see changes that you might not otherwise have noticed, and it’s so fulfilling to see that there are still so many girls enthusiastic to keep going back every week.