I started this blog to chronicle my paddling adventures, leading up to becoming an instructor at our Girlguiding boathouse and so I want to veer slightly off the subject of paddling and onto adventures and Girlguiding.
The Scouts were founded 116 years ago and on the surface, little has changed in that time. They still wear the beige shirts with the badges all over them, they still do adventurous and outdoors things and the public perception is mostly what I think BP envisioned.
Girlguiding, on the other hand, a mere 114 years old (well, we celebrated our Centenary in 2010 despite the “We’re the Girl Scouts!” moment happening in 1909), has gone through so many iterations that no one really knows who we are. The Guides and Rangers are each on their fourth uniform in my Guiding career, the programme and badges for every section have changed three times and Girlguiding doesn’t really have a clear sense of what it is or what it does, other than being generally and nebulously good for girls and young women.
Are we training up good little housewives, as in everyone’s 50s-inspired vision of the moment? Are we a load of rebels like the original Girl Scouts who turned up at Crystal Palace in 1909 to scandalise BP and the media? Are we a load of snowflakes learning about our feelings? Are we a feminist organisation? A political force? Are we a bit of all of them? Or are we something else altogether? I don’t know. Girlguiding doesn’t know. The public certainly doesn’t know. We know what the Scouts are and what they stand for. What about us?
I think one thing Girlguiding is trying to push at the moment is having adventures. If you go to the shop and sort it by “new in”, you’ll find outdoor clothing like hats and socks and jumpers with outdoorsy slogans, there’s the whole adventure badge range (5 types of adventure for 4 sections = 20 badges in total), the new green-edged interesting-shaped outdoor badges, the “I survived my first camp as a [section]” collection and my favourite, the “Adventure Leader” badge. Oh, I have earned that one! Kayak instructor (helper!), archery instructor, fencing coach, taker of Rangers to Sparkle & Ice – I am the adventure leader!
If you go to HQ in London, there’s currently a kayak hanging over the stairs in the window. If you look at the official website, under What We Do -> Our Badges & Opportunites, three of the six options there are categories of adventure. Hidden somewhere in the depths of the website, there’s an adventure map, colour-coded by region.
The message is very much – at the moment – Girlguiding want to encourage adventures.
I’m going to try to not go off at too much of a tangent here, but this feels very much at odds with the unilateral decision in the middle of last year to sell off our Training and Adventure Centres. Ok, fine, we weren’t using them enough, they were losing money and they were too expensive to put in overdue maintenance on. But a lot of people feel that maybe if they’d told us that instead of just announcing “they’re money drains and we’re selling them right now“, maybe we’d have realised there was a problem and started using them more. Maybe there were dozens of options other than dropping the bombshell out of the blue. It doesn’t feel like encouraging girls to have adventures by selling off the places where those adventures could be had.
My local TAC was Foxlease. In the last couple of weeks, Girlguiding have finally announced that they’re going to let Foxie’s Future, a Community Interest Organisation composed mostly of Girlguiding volunteers, buy Foxlease. They’ve raised the money, put together a plan, raised more money, bid over the asking price and were initially knocked back. I’ve said it a thousand times: Girlguiding lost a lot of goodwill over the TAC furore, especially coming less than three weeks after the unilateral announcement that BGO, British Girlguiding Overseas, was being shut down. Selling to Foxie’s Future would have scraped back just a couple of ounces of that goodwill. Anyway, they’ve finally decided that’s what’s going to happen and hopefully by this time next year, we might have Foxlease starting to reopen, albeit under its new name (for legal reasons, apparently, we can’t use Foxlease, even though the people who bought Blackland Farm are still calling it Blackland Farm?).
Foxlease closed at the end of 2023. Girlguiding were blithely singing about how many adventure and activity centres there are around the country and how girls can continue to have their adventures but at a more local level. Well, we have two activity centres within reasonably easy reach. One of them is run by the Scouts and a commercial provider and is almost impossible to get hold of, and has no indoor accommodation anyway. The other very suddenly closed under a very heavy veil of mystery just as we were planning a division weekend there – no announcement, staff aren’t even allowed to know why, “all the way to the top”, that sort of thing. Suddenly we’d gone from having two and a half interesting activity centres within reach to having none. If you zoom in on the map, and if I told you exactly where I am, you’ll see that we’re right in the middle of quite a big bald spot. With the loss of Foxlease, suddenly our adventures are pretty much curtailed.
We do have a county campsite – actually, it’s not, it belongs to two divisions but we treat it like it belongs to the county. We have the boathouse. I’ve probably taught more fencing and archery sessions since Foxlease closed than I ever did before, I’ve done two seasons at the boathouse since then, I’ve been to region weekends and county events – my own personal adventure count does seem to have racked up. But none of it is coming from CHQ, Girlguiding headquarters.
I suppose that’s what I want to talk about here. Despite being a 100+ year old organisation, proud of its large membership and varied initiatives, almost everything we actually do in Girlguiding is done at a local level. It’s a ritual to complain about anything that comes from CHQ. We hate the new programme, we hate the new uniform, we hate the new branding, we hate the decisions. But within our unit or our division, we go here and do an activity day, we go there and have an adventure, we go to the boathouse, we take the unit outside for the entire summer term, we veer away from the programme for more than the proscribed 40% and into things the girls enjoy or experiences that are good for them.
(On an unrelated note, I listed all my Girlguiding roles for my boss the other day, including “in the summer term, I’m often out three or four nights a week plus every third or fourth weekend” and he said “I bet they’re glad they have you. Are they grateful?”. Well… no, they’re not. Certainly not the overarching organisation. CHQ doesn’t care. CHQ doesn’t know I exist. At a local level, it’s a little different, but still. No one apart from me sees my big picture. My Brownie district sees me at Brownies. My Ranger division sees me at Rangers. The boathouse people and random leaders in that area see me at the boathouse. A few other leaders see me at archery and fencing. Trefoil sees me at Trefoil. No one sees everything and therefore no one really realises how much I do. I’m very much not alone in this. The only people with multiple roles getting seen and recognised are the people who are doing those multiple roles exclusively within a very small area where all their peers see everything, or the people who’ve risen within the hierarchy to be visible beyond their immediate area.)
So Girlguiding want you to have adventures but don’t actually provide the infrastructure for you to do that. No TACs. Just “use local places!”. There isn’t an ounce of Girlguiding input in our boathouse, for example. It’s not on GO, our online membership system. It’s not funded by Girlguiding, region, county or even the divisions it belongs to. We occasionally use the county Facebook group to ask for boat club girls for the next season but that’s about the extent of actual Girlguiding involvement. It’s entire self-supporting with no input from anyone other than six individuals who like the water. In these days of “thou shalt have adventures (you’ll have to DIY them though)”, it would make a lot of sense to make a lot more noise about it. Not just us – I’m doing my best with the blog and the matching Instagram – but county should be shouting about having this facility, where we can offer ~150 girls the opportunity to try out watersports every season. Grassroots adventure! Look what we’ve got!
And that’s partly why I’ write this blog and why I have the Instagram account to go with I’m doing this, to make a bit of noise. To celebrate the adventures we can give girls, despite Girlguiding themselves making it harder at every turn. I’m also doing it because I have a compulsion to write which I’ve given up trying to fight but it’s mostly for the sake of “Look! Looook! Look at the boathouse! Look at me! Look at our adventures!”
And so that is Girlguiding’s weird paradoxical attitude to adventure. It’s one of their most important things but they won’t actually help you achieve it.
Bumblebee Paddles 