Happy International Women’s Day!
I’ve not really acknowledged the day before. I’ve enjoyed Richard Herring’s annual “it’s November 19th” in response to thousands upon thousands of men whining “but when’s International Men’s Day??” (he’s now retired from doing it) and I’ve felt a quiet sort of pleasure in the fact that I’m a Girlguiding volunteer but other than that, I’ve kind of let it pass by unmarked.
Not today. Being a Girlguiding leader is quite a big thing for Women’s Day and feminism and working for change and today I want to talk just a little about why I do it and why you should too.
There are two primary reasons. The first is that my mother enrolled me into Rainbows when I was four or five and I kind of worked my way up to Brownie, Guide, Young Leader, Unit Helper and finally to actual qualified leader. I just never stepped off the ladder. It was never really a conscious decision to become a leader when I left uni. I’d planned to return to my Guides as a full leader and instead they asked if I’d take on the leader-less Rangers. The second is that I enjoy it. I don’t enjoy the accounts, I don’t enjoy the odd screaming tantrumming child whose mother I eventually have to have a quiet word with, I don’t enjoy turning up going “Oh, tonight’s activity isn’t going to last long enough and we don’t have enough materials for it and it’s all going to be terrible!”. But I enjoy the company of my Rangers, who are magnificent and imaginative and brilliant young women. I enjoy sitting down with my Brownies to do crafts or help them bake chocolate cookies or play parachute games. I actually do occasionally enjoy turning up with no plan for the night and improvising. It’s an important skill.
I really enjoy the opportunities that Girlguiding has given me. I harp on about it a bit but I’m an archery instructor! I’m a fencing coach! Did ten-year-old me ever imagine that was even possible? And yet here I am, through opportunities offered by Girlguiding, with two certificates that technically qualify me as a warrior. I get to keep a bag of swords in the back bedroom and I get to teach everyone from the seven-year-old with a broken elbow up to my favourite comedian off the telly how to shoot a target with a bow and arrow. Through Girlguiding I’ve also learnt properly how to use a map and compass and make my way unaided across a desolate landscape, how to right myself in a capsized canoe while wearing a spraydeck, how to abseil and how to make eggy bread. I’ve been to five winter camps and dozens of summer ones; I’ve spent weekends and weeks at events with Guides from all over the country and all over the world. I’m getting more out of this than my kids are!
And what are the kids getting out of this? They’re getting a girls-only space (and by the way, Girlguiding, the UK’s biggest charity for girls and young women, is very open about the fact that trans girls are just as welcome as cis girls and if they’re not afraid of “erasing of women” or whatever excuse it is for hatred this week, you shouldn’t be either) where they can try things, have adventures, learn about themselves and their world, lead the way and discover their own potential. Girlguiding has specific programme themes for learning about being well, being themselves, taking action, learning skills for their future. It has the Peer Education system where the older girls are trained to deliver sessions to the younger girls on mental wellbeing, body confidence, gender and health – sessions the younger girls relate to better than if it was taught by a boring old adult who doesn’t have the same life experiences as the kids, which also gives the Peer Educators experience of leading, of planning and something to put on their CV that marks them out from all the other 16-25s who only have their school exams to put on there. I wish there was a bigger take-up on Peer Education.
Girlguiding’s thing is informal education. Back in its early years, it was often the only education young women had past the age of about fourteen and Guide badges were as good as an actual qualification. I’ve read of women who became nurses off the back of having their Nursing badge, as well as other more STEM-type badges especially in wartime. That’s not really a thing anymore but our girls are still learning. What’s going on behind the scenes is incredibly delicately balanced. We have an educational framework, we have the Five Essentials, we have the six-part programme, we have the fundamentals of good guiding. It may look to you like we’re just doing some craft, doing some cooking and doing some outdoors stuff but we’re making sure all the good stuff is woven in to make it fun while also ensuring the girls are getting the very best and getting a proper varied informal education in absolutely everything. They get listened to, they get taken seriously, they get a chance to lead and to adventure and to work as a team and to develop their interests and their beliefs.
What I’d like to ask of you today is that you offer a few minutes of your time to Girlguiding. We’re desperately short of leaders and of course I understand that everyone’s busy and no one wants to commit to quite so much. But there are so many other ways you can volunteer. You can be a unit helper, who helps out at meetings but has no real responsibility. You can be an occasional helper, maybe a kind of emergency backup for when we suddenly find ourselves short of a leader one evening. Do you have a special skill or special interest? Can you come in and run a session on it? Can you come and give an entertaining talk? Are you a sports or outdoors coach or enthusiast? Can you do a taster session on cricket or yoga or sailing? Do you have a pet reptile whose care and feeding you can explain to ten-year-olds? Have you had a breathtaking adventure? Particularly right now when we’re stuck on Zoom, we’re desperate for people who can give our girls an hour on something we’ve never even imagined. There’s some people who make clay models of Brownies and Guides and they’re doing this night and day, just to entertain everyone’s girls. I’ve done a session myself and now have a mini-me in leader uniform. We’ve got a lady coming in to Guides tomorrow to teach them some campfire songs. Everyone has something they can offer.
Or perhaps you’re more a behind-the-scenes type person. I don’t know a single unit that wouldn’t bite your hand off if you offered to do their accounts for them. We have a network of volunteer shops – maybe you could manage one of them? It’s not an overly onerous job. Our local shop is run by a rota of local leaders and our manager keeps it stocked and checks the money in every week and buys the receipt books, but it’s a job you could take off the hands of someone who’s already spending her time running a unit. Individual units or districts or divisions would love an admin assistant who could make sense of the multitude of emails coming in from above and get it sent out in an organised way so that everyone hears about the stuff they need to hear about. Adult support – we need people to keep track of our leaders-in-training and organise mentor meetings and leadership surgeries, or even just someone to send out a “welcome to Girlguiding, we’re so pleased to have you!” in response to volunteer enquiries.
At my old Guides, we had a residential assistant on stand-by. She didn’t generally come to meetings but she was another adult to help keep things under control on camp, even if it was small things like “can you run out for more bread and matches while we’re doing this morning’s activity?” Transport is difficult and expensive: do you have a minibus licence? We can generally borrow minibuses from local schools fairly easily but precious few of our leaders under the age of 40 have a licence to drive one. It used to be included on standard licences and then somewhere around 1998, they decided to remove it. I looked into getting a minibus licence and between the training and the tests, it would cost around £800 so if you have it just sitting on your licence, we’d love to use it a couple of times a year.
Are you a man? We like men, within reason. You can’t be a leader or certain other roles higher up in the organisation but men are very welcome as unit helpers, occasional helpers, in support roles etc. The plain fact is that there are some skills men are still statistically more likely to have than women – can you come and teach a session on bike maintenance or changing a tyre or how to use DIY tools? Can you come and be an extra pair of hands at camp? There are certain rules and changes we have to make if there’s a man around but my dad used to be invaluable when it came to unloading the camp trailer and getting the mess tent up and we used to pay him in cheese and biscuits. I’ve taken him on night hikes as well when I haven’t had enough adults. He has a full CPC bus licence. I know plenty of husbands who make the “and here’s one I made earlier!” for craft nights, who prepare the materials, who do the unit shopping. I’m afraid our Adult Leadership Qualification is out of your reach but there are thousands of support roles for you.
Obviously, women, if you’d like to come and be a leader, it can make a huge difference. One new leader can take twenty girls off waiting lists or stop an existing unit from closing. You can get all the fun out of it that I do and you can also put some great stuff on your CV – team leader, team member, youth qualification, first aider, fire marshall, cookery, singing and art teacher, safety inspector, event planner, accountant, mentor, all things you can and will cover in the course of your two hours a week as Brown Owl. Have I talked about how I overcame my terror of being asked to be manager to a new person at work when I realised I was basically doing exactly what I already do with my Young Leaders at Guides? Are you one of the people who remembers me being virtually mute at school? You should see me now leading the singing at our District Thinking Day event. You give the girls so many opportunities but you also get so much personal and professional development almost as a side-effect.
So, in conclusion, if you want to support International Women’s Day today, here’s a way to actually do something more practical than tweeting. Yours in Guiding, Juliet.