Become a volunteerI am 21 years old and I started my guiding journey when I was 7! I went through Brownies, Guides and Rangers and started helping at the local Rainbows and Brownies when I was 12 as a Guide helper. Sadly those units closed down so I moved to a brownie unit in Shrewsbury when I was 13 (and I’m still there now as a leader!!).
As soon as I turned 14 and old enough I did my young leaders award, which I completed in 6 months! I then continued on my Guiding journey, I went on to complete my leadership in Brownies, Guides and rainbows.
In this time I completed my Baden Powell award and I wanted more, I completed my Guides camp permit, but I still wanted to continue so I completed my Chief Guides award, but I still wanted more and so I got talking to Meg about completing my queen’s guide award and never dreamt I would ever complete it but here I am… I started my queen’s guide award in October 2016 and finished it in 2019; it took lots of hard work and determination to complete alongside doing a full-time job and volunteering at 4 units for the majority of my time.
During my time I have made so many friendships that I will cherish and I have had so many exciting adventures along the way. As well as opening up a rainbow group as soon as I turned 18 (with the help from Jo). I have since then helped at a variety of different units, I have helped with Shropshire Baden Powell weekends, West Mercia Baden Powell weekends, I have been Shropshire counties social media advisor since May 2018 and I have also been away as an extra leader with so many different units I can’t count.
What I achieved
Service in Guiding
One of the first parts of my Queens guide to be completed was my service to guiding element 1 as this was to do with volunteering at a unit, well I already volunteered at one and was in the process of setting up a rainbow group. I volunteered with 16th Shrewsbury Brownies and helped to plan and run a sleepover for my 20hour project. Not long after that, I finished setting up the rainbow group with amazing support from Jo. It was amazing to have achieved something so early on into the award.
Another part of the service to guiding was to take on a role at a residential, for this I took on the role of being cater for our 3 night Alice in wonderland themed brownie pack holiday, now this was very exciting as I love pack holidays and I love cooking and food, so of course being Alice in wonderland themed we had to have a mad hatters tea party, I never knew it could quite take so long to make that amount of food, but I did have some fantastic brownie helpers!
For the final part of my service to guiding I helped plan a county brownie camp, this camp ran over may bank holiday.
As a leader helping to organise this event I was on the activities team. For this, I Organised an array of activities for the girls to take part in when they weren’t doing the onsite activities. The planning for this event took place for 7 months with meetings we were to attend and share our views, thoughts and what we had planned up to the point up to the event in May 2018.
There were only 2 of us on the activities team and so this took a lot of time for me to organise, I planned lots of small activities, games, songs, and fun things for them to do when they were not taking part in the onsite activities provided by kibblestone. Apart from being on the activities team I also took on the responsibility of doing the photography and PR side of the event posting updates on all the different social media sites.
This element of the Award I probably found the hardest and though many meetings we were able to see how it as an event evolved and how it turned into the amazing camp it was. We had minutes taken and this showed the progress of the event from the dates, to the name of the event, to what food and activities we were having. By the last few meetings we got to sleeping arrangements, final food and dietary requirements as well as the set programme of activities I and Michelle (other activity team member) had decided. My contribution allowed the programme to take shape and to form into a busy non-stop event!
I feel this whole experience was a big challenge to me as I have never been on a team where I needed to organise something for all the participants and communicate with the other organisers whom of which none I had met before. The challenge took 7 months of commitment to meetings and organising, as alongside all the meetings I had to plan and get all my own things into place ready for the camp itself. I feel this really pushed my boundaries but now I feel more confident in myself and feel I could do it again if another event comes up.
The Outdoor Challenge
As a part of the Queen’s guide award, you have to do exploration or expedition. I wasn’t really one for the walking and hiking side of things so I chose to do an exploration. However before we could do the exploration part I had to have either my senior permit or my Going away with license, so I chose to do my senior permit because it was a nice excuse to get away on a weekend with my ranger friends and have a chilled out camp. So I decided to do my Senior Section Permit at Beaudesert. My main memory of this is the first night it took us so long to set up with my assessor coming to visit and us all getting their quite late due to work/college, we also had a spare budget that we decided to go and buy a pizza instead of cooking! Whilst we were there we followed a programme of activities but on Saturday we joined in an activity day run by Beaudesert. This activity day was mainly aimed at the younger children aged around 7 + but we had great fun on the go-carts, doing archery and the traverse wall which was a good laugh as none of us could do this very well. However, we won the competition day for our age category and got a free night camping out of it as a prize so all in all it was a great weekend with lots of laughs, I passed my permit and we got a free night camping to use within a year!
Once I had completed my senior permit I started to think about my exploration, the hard part of this was finding a group of people to do it with, so I joined a Facebook page where other people were doing their award too. One girl had posted she needed extra people and so together that’s how our group formed, we started as a rather big group but as we decided on dates and location it narrowed us down to 4. None of us 4 had ever met each other before or been in contact before other than on Facebook. We set up a group chat and we began finding things out about each other, about our award and how we were getting on, we exchanged membership numbers, we ensured we were all ready to go and had done any training needed, ensuring one of us was first aid trained, one of us had safeguarding training etc…
The challenge of this was ensuring it was safe to do this via social media, one way we could ensure it was safe to be to ensure that all of us were DBS checked (being over 18- which we were), also to be a member of the Facebook page we were on, you had to prove you were a member of Girlguiding with your membership number to enable you to join.
Once we sorted all of that out we had to decide on an aim and theme of the exploration, so we decided our aim and theme was to do an A-Z of Liverpool’s museums finding different things around the museums beginning with each letter of the alphabet. Next, we had to decide who was going to take on each role, so we had to decide on finance/accounts, first aid, etc. I took on the role of finance and accounts as I enjoyed being able to book things and find different places to stay, so before we went I booked us into the British music experience, and also a breakout room at the end to celebrate! We then all worked out train times etc… to ensure we all arrived at the same time and we met up in the train station for the first time other than talking via Facebook. Once we met we instantly all got on and we went and found our hostel. Whilst in Liverpool we made endless memories, we got lost, we had fun, we ate (lots!!), we visited museums, we visited the docks and we broke out of the escape room! The whole experience was something I would never have dreamt of doing but I thoroughly enjoyed it and still treasure the memories I made.
Personal Skills
For my personal skill, I chose something that I enjoyed but wasn’t very confident in especially presentation-wise so I choose to do baking a variety of sweet treats and decorate them. This challenge is meant to be enjoyable so choose something you will enjoy doing or something you are interested in. I worked out I needed to do 5 hours per month for 12 months to get enough hours to complete the challenge. I started in October 2016 and I finished in October 2017 doing a total of 66.5 hours. The part I found the most difficult was the decorating part, following new recipes was okay but ensuring timing was right was important and that was sometimes challenging. Throughout my skill, I choose to record my progress in a scrapbook through photos and comments and I recorded the timing in here too. I found this bit very enjoyable and I still spend a lot of my time practising different bakes.
Community Action
When choosing a research project it is important to choose something you’re interested in, something you want to know more about and something you are going to enjoy looking into throughout the 12 months. I chose to look at hospital care for children and their families over the world, looking at the most funded, most deprived and their statistics. This is something that means a lot to me as I was cared for by Birmingham children’s hospital when I was under 18 and they provided amazing care to me as well as a lot of other children within my family and friends. I thought I would focus on them and I based my practical part of my project on raising money for their amazing charity. I did this for lent last year (2019) and gave up chocolate for the whole 40 days, as I completed this I raised £200.
Alongside doing this fundraiser I was researching into the different care and I did a PowerPoint presentation and then presented it to my friend and some members of Girlguiding. The stuff I learnt throughout this was amazing, stuff I had never thought of.
Once I finished this part I continued my fundraising and so instead of presents for my 21st birthday I asked for donations to Birmingham children’s hospital and I raised £920 taking my total to £1120.
So my advice to you is choose something you’re interested in, take your time to look into it, don’t rush and enjoy finding out the information about your chosen topic.
Residential
This is by far the highlight of my whole award! For this I volunteered as a member of the service team at Girlguiding midlands cosmic camp 2017, I helped to carry out the weekend, I did VIP tours to the guests, I litter picked I helped with the catering (including getting up at 5 am to prepare breakfast for 150+ Brownies and their leaders. I cleaned, I walked miles, I slept (just about) and best of all I made the best friendships that I am so thankful for still to this day! One of the most rewarding parts of this camp was to see the Brownies really be themselves, to see them thrive and to see them enjoy being girls in a safe space they feel they can really be themselves and not worry about their surrounding, their smiles and their adventures were so magical! Following this camp, I have continued to attend Girlguiding midlands camps as a service team and plan to continue.
This part can feel slightly daunting as you have to go not knowing anybody or only knowing one person and that can seem scary but we were very lucky that we had a pre-camp service team meet up to all meet each other and then we all made friends instantly and arranged another meet up before the actual camp. During the camp, we bonded and one of my best friends to this day is somebody who I met through this camp and that will last with me forever!
My advice to you
Take every opportunity given to you, take it in your stride and try your best, sometimes it may feel like you are not getting anywhere, you may feel lost, frustrated or confused, but that’s okay, just like if you were in a maze, it’s not meant to be easy, it should be a challenge but at the end, you find your way out and you will feel a massive amount of pride. Be thankful, if somebody offers you their support, take it with an open mind, allow them to offer you advice, constructive criticism and praise, this will keep you going and allow you to realise you are getting somewhere and you have got people behind you the whole time for you to fall back on.
If you know somebody who has completed their award talk to them, ask them questions, we have all been there and none of us minds how much you ask as we all asked the same questions, no question is too silly and sometimes parts of the award can seem mind-boggling but getting somebody else’s view on it can open up your mind and help you to understand what you are being asked to do.
Most of all the main part of this award is to enjoy it, take your time to have fun, meet new people, make memories and take lots of photos. I am so thankful for Girlguiding for giving me this opportunity and no matter how many times I wanted to give up, I reminded myself to keep going and remind myself how far I had come! If you decide to do this award, good luck and have fun!
