Bumblebee Paddles

Bumblebee Paddles was meant to be about paddling but it’s also going to have to be about Bumblebee – this particular identity, this blog, it’s about me as a Girlguiding volunteer. It’s about my kayaking journey, sure, but it’s also about the boathouse and the girls and what we do there – as volunteers.

It’s Monday as I write this but it won’t be published until Thursday so I don’t know for sure what’s going to unfold over the week but I bet there’ll be a lot of social media posts from Girlguiding, from London HQ all the way through region down to county about how much they appreciate their volunteers and I suspect many of us have feelings about that.

Let’s be clear first. Every time you go to a Brownie meeting (or Rainbows, Guides or Rangers), the people in that building running that meeting are volunteers. We turn up every week and run the meetings. We do the admin, the planning, take them on adventures outside the meeting place, take them to camps, go to events and we don’t get paid for any of that. We have commissioners at district, division, county and region level and none of them are paid. I know at region level there are people who are paid to work there and I think there might be one or two at county level but on the whole, every adult from the helper at your local Brownie unit up to the Chief Guide herself is an unpaid volunteer.

We don’t get paid at the boathouse either. County used to cover insurance on the place but it doesn’t know. We’re entirely self-funded, self-managed and self-run. We take evenings out of our lives throughout the summer to provide these watersports sessions for locals girls – and let me be quite clear; the boathouse is one of my favourite things about Girlguiding and if I quit Brownies and Rangers tomorrow, I’d still want to go to the boathouse, but we’re volunteers and because we have lives outside Girlguiding, we’ve had to scale back the boathouse operations a little this year.

Now, Girlguiding do nice things for their volunteers. There will be thank you emails from every level this week. As I said, there will be social media posts coming out of our ears, heaping praise on us. The phrase “volunteers don’t get paid, not because they’re worthless but because they’re priceless” will be used. We get sent shiny badges to commemorate significant years of service. Girlguiding have recently expanded their series of Adventure badges to include a set for volunteers, which I am very excited about. There’s a national Celebrate event held in London to celebrate the best and brightest and my region did a special regional celebration event last year with pretty badges.

But what do we actually want from Girlguiding? It’s not actually pretty badges and fawning posts. We want to slash the admin – do you have any idea what it takes to simply run a Brownie meeting? At least one adult who either holds or is working on the adult leadership qualification or leader development programme, at least one other adult, at least one first aid qualification, DBS (police background checks) all round, safeguarding training, a unit meeting place risk assessment, an activity risk assessment, all girls logged on GO and all programme activities logged on GO. If you want to go down to the local playground, that requires another risk assessment, consent forms for all girls, a home contact form left with another registered volunteer and you have to notify your local commissioner. Of course health and safety is a thing and you can’t be blase about the wellbeing of your girls but for me, a solo Ranger leader, that amount of paperwork is really offputting. On the other hand, I’m one of the rare leaders who’s ok with the difficulties of logging everything on GO but I know there are plenty who’ve given it up and do it on paper or who store everything up and log it once a term or once a year. We just want Guiding to be less difficult, we don’t want Leicester Square parties in formal uniform to celebrate us.

(I’m not going to go down the tangent route of “who gets celebrated at these things?” but it’s almost never the ordinary leader who’s been turning up every week and giving the girls an incredible experience for her entire adult life…)

Let’s just be clear – for all the posts we’re going to see this week, Girlguiding doesn’t actually care about a single one of us. Just like if you got hit by a bus, your job would replace you as quickly as it took to place the ad and interview the candidates, Girlguiding wouldn’t even blink if any of us vanished. Not at HQ level and quite likely not even at local level, as I know from personal experience.

While I’m complaining about the volunteer experience and how little Girlguiding actually appreciates the average volunteer, let’s list some of the positives because I’ve been involved since I was five years old and I’m hitting 18 years as an adult leader over the summer, and I wouldn’t be here if there weren’t some positives.

I get to do a lot of fun stuff. For a start, I wouldn’t be working my way slowly and meanderingly towards a kayaking qualification without the boathouse. I got my archery and fencing qualifications through Girlguiding and I run beginner sessions across the county in both. I get to go to ludicrous things like winter survival camp and the Big Gig and massive region activity days where I spend the day singing around the campfire. I get to tip food colouring and bicarb into jars of vinegar. I get to play Ladders. I get to make coconut bowls outside in the sunshine and argue about equality and make friendship bracelets. I get to toast marshmallows over fires and tealights. I get to go to the waterpark in the summer that I probably couldn’t do without children of my own. I get to go to watersports days where we just have fun in the sun. I get to hear about my Brownies’ football matches and birthday parties and my Rangers’ jobs and exams. I get appalling photos taken of me with even worse Snapchat filters. I teach kids to cut tomatoes with the knife held sharp side down and to put up tents and to look before they do a cartwheel in a crowded room. I treat injuries with wet paper towels and extra biscuits and add handling dried spaghetti to the risk assessment.

Plus, there’s so much I get to do because I either tried it for the first time at Guides or became an expert in through Guiding. I get to go camping in Iceland because I learned how to camp as a Guide, for example. Ultimately, before I really knew the boathouse even existed, I tried kayaking because I’d done it as a Guide and remembered not being terrible at it. My first wall climbing session was at Guides. My first outdoor cliff climbing session was with my Rangers. I can take myself hiking on Dartmoor with a paper map and compass with no fear whatsoever because Girlguiding trained me to be absolutely confident in my navigation abilities. I made ice cream for my housemates during my first year at uni because I’d done it at Guides (ok, it didn’t scale from a small single-serve portion to ice cream for five). I could do my part in cooking breakfast on our uni caving trips because I’d mastered the fry-up on Guide camp. I have so many life skills I’ve gained either from my own Guiding days or as a leader. I wrote our work fire risk assessment based on risk assessments and fire experience from Guiding. I was the only person at my previous job with a current first aid qualification (and it’s only Girlguiding’s four-hour absolute basic phone-the-ambulance-phone-the-parents First Response!). I was the person who sat in the road with an eleven-year-old who got hit by a car, while everyone from work looked at me as they drove past and went “Ooh, we’ll have to ask what happened tomorrow!”. I’ve learned that I can probably put my hand to pretty much anything. I’m not necessarily going to be brilliant at it but I can have a go at most things. And “having a go” is better than just not doing things.

So there are a lot of positives to being a Girlguiding volunteer. But as my oldest Ranger said just this week, “all we want is for the system to work!” as she struggled to log in and show me the problems she’s having getting started on her adult Leader Development Programme. We want the system to work, from recruitment to running activities.