Someone asked recently for more Girlguiding content. It fits in as much as this is a travel & adventure blog and I do play up the adventure side for you. But what I want to do today is get across just how much time I put into this stupid organisation. When we’re trying to recruit, we often say things like “it’s only an hour and a half a week!” and sometimes that’s enough to fool someone into volunteering. But we all know it’s a lot more than that. So let’s have a look at how much of my life I’ve given to Girlguiding this school year.
I haven’t been logging this so I can’t be too precise. I’m also undervaluing it hugely – by the time I’ve walked to Rangers or driven to Brownies, arrived early enough to get ready and stayed afterwards to clear up (or to gossip), a meeting of an hour and a half takes three or even three and a half hours out of my day, but I’m only including the hours spent at the meetings here. I’m not including planning, preparation, shopping, admin, swearing at the printer or stressing over the email I should have sent a week ago so it’s now awkward.
Rangers
Autumn term: 13 meetings (19.5 hours)
Spring term: 11 meetings (16.5 hours)
Summer term: 8 meetings (12 hours) – there were a lot of bank holidays
Outside meetings:
- Division meeting, October (~2 hours)
- Remembrance Parade, November (~3 hours)
- Division meeting, November (~2 hours)
- Moana 2 screening, December (~2 hours)
- Division meeting, January (~2 hours)
- Thinking Day, February (~5 hours)
- Legoland trip, March (~13 hours)
- Easter Fayre, April (~4 hours)
- Circus, June (~3 hours)
- County watersports day (~9 hours)
- Total: ~45 hours
That brings Rangers, over one school year, to a grand total of 93 hours over 46 weeks, which is just over 2 hours a week. Well, that’s not bad, actually.
Brownies
Autumn term: 14 meetings (21 hours)
Spring term: 11 meetings (16.5 hours)
Summer term: 10 meetings (15 hour6s)
Outside meetings:
- Planning meeting, September (~2 hours)
- Zoo trip, September (~7 hours)
- Carnival, September (~3 hours)
- Remembrance Parade, November (~2 hours)
- District meeting, January (~2 hours)
- Panto, February (~3 hours)
- Planning meeting, February (~2 hours)
- Sleepover planning meeting, March (~2 hours)
- Sleeping planning meeting, April (~2 hours)
- District meeting, April (~2 hours)
- Sleepover planning meeting, May (~2 hours)
- Sleepover parents’ meeting (~1/2 hour)
- Sleepover, June (~29 hours)
- Circus, June (~3 hours)
- District meeting, July (~2 hours)
- Total: ~63.5 hours
Grand total: 116 hours over 46 weeks, which is about 2.5 hours a week. Conclusion: if you’re just doing regular meetings and a few interesting things outside the meeting place, you’re looking at about two hours a week averaged out. If you add in a weekend residential, that pushes it up to about 2.5 and that’s actually not too far off the “just an hour and a half a week” line – not so much so that if you told a potential volunteer about the true time commitment, they’d run a mile.
But Rangers and Brownies isn’t all I do.
Boathouse:
1 planning meeting, January, of about 2 hours
1 pool session, of about 2 hours
2 boat club sessions, of about 2.5 hours each = 5 hours
4 unit sessions of about 2.5 hours each = 10 hours
2 shore evenings of about 2.5 hours each = 5 hours
That makes about 24 hours of boathouse. Of course, I missed six boat club sessions because they clash with Brownies, two unit sessions and and a shore session because they clash with Rangers, so that’s 9 lots of 2.5 hours, which is 22.5 hours in total, plus I missed the morning when we opened up and sorted out the boathouse, which would have been at least another two, so if I’d made it to everything, that would have been 48.5 hours of boathouse. However, I think everyone except our manager has missed a few. Our instructor has pretty much only been to boat club and the unit sessions for the two units she personally runs and the others come and go as well depending on their other commitments.
Mentoring
A relatively light one, but I’ve had a mentee who’s needed the three check-ins plus the final check-in that neither of us knew was coming. Each of them was about 2.5 hours, so about 10 hours in total. This is something to definitely drop as soon as possible. I’ve been a mentor for probably five or even six years at this point and this is my only full mentee – I finished off someone who very suddenly had a deadline of “next month” dropped on her when we thought she had another six months but that was kind of unofficial. Of course we need mentors but maybe we need mentors who don’t internally cry at the idea of giving their only free evening that fortnight to Girlguiding again.
Trefoil
Are we going to count this? It’s Guiding for adults, it’s something I do for fun, with zero responsibility but nonetheless. So, Trefoil Guild is “Guiding for adults”, or more accurately “WI for ex-Guide leaders”. It’s like being a Guide again rather than being a leader, except that “the young ones” organised our Thinking Day evening (most members are 70+ and there are three of us who are under 45, so we are but small children to them).
We had 9 meetings between September and July – I missed the December one because it was a Christmas meal during working hours and October got cancelled because of the weather. We’ll also have a meeting in August but that’s during the summer holidays so I’m not counting it here. 9 meetings of 2 hours each is 18 hours of Trefoil.
Miscellaneous others
Of course there’s more than just Rangers, Brownies, Trefoil and boathouse!
- There was a Zoom mentors meeting in October that I’m reasonably sure I went to, which would have been at least an hour. Should I count this in mentoring? Of course I should but I’m not going to – it’s not actively working with my mentee.
- Region Pax Lodge trip in October – 59 hours including the train journeys to London and back. Other than hanging out with some local leaders in the evening and a Pinning Ceremony and group photo on Saturday morning, that was pretty much just using Pax Lodge as a cheap weekend in London but nonetheless, it was a Region trip and I got a badge for it.
- County training day in November – Young Leaders and Using Social Media, which would have been around six hours. The training was fairly minimal but I like to show my face at what amounts to a social event. Now that it’s dawning on me how much time I spend with Girlguiding, I might give it a miss this year.
- There was another mentors meeting in March but I skipped it in favour of a watercolour class – go me!
- INTOPS, adult selection – that one’s entirely on me but nonetheless, it was around 29 hours out of my life for something Guiding-related. I’m still in two minds about trying again next year but at the moment, inclining towards not.
- County leaders watersports day: about four hours on that one. Now, I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. I got a morning of kayaking and paddleboarding for an excellent price and some company!
- Helping show how the archery range works: about an hour and a half. I haven’t actually run any archery or any fencing this year, as far as I can remember. If I’d done this last year, I’d have had two or three or even four archery sessions to include. I did have one right at the end of August, which lasted at least four hours that was supposed to be just an introduction to how the range worked, which technically fitted in last year’s school year but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to include it here since it happened after the school year ended.
- Camp (with someone else’s Guides): about 45 or 46 hours, I reckon. A whole weekend I had no real need to be at! Had it not poured with rain, I could have really enjoyed that weekend.
So that comes to 145.5 hours at a conservative guess.
Let’s add this all up
Rangers: 93 hours
Brownies: 116 hours
Boathouse: 24 hours
Mentoring: 10 hours
Trefoil: 18 hours
Miscellaneous: 145.5 hours
Grand total: 406.5 hours, or nearly 17 days over the last year.
That’s averaging nearly nine hours a week. Now, I know I do a lot and that does include a weekend in London and INTOPS and a camp I didn’t need to go to but even just Brownies and Rangers comes to four and a half hours a week without travel, preparation, tidying up, admin etc. Ok, the vast majority of leaders don’t run two units so that’s not entirely typical. As I said earlier, two to two and a half hours a week seems about right, depending on whether you do a residential or not. I think that’s not a terrifying amount to offer a new volunteer.
How much can I cut down?
I knew I needed to cut down. I said at the beginning of this year that I was going to say no more and all I’ve succeeded in saying no to is a single mentor meeting. Actually, that’s not true. I didn’t do the Monopoly challenge or… oh, the big PGL trip coming up in September! I’m sure there have been another one or two county events I didn’t bother with and I haven’t done any Region events except Pax Lodge.
If I could, it would be Rangers that goes, no hesitation. I’m a solo leader and after eighteen years of going solo, I’ve had enough. For the first time, I’ve seen what it’s like to be part of a well-oiled team at Brownies and I love it. Besides, you’re doing all the work you’d do for twenty girls for just six, of whom you’re probably not going to have more than four 9/10 weeks and they’d rather just be on their phones than do whatever you’d planned anyway.
As I said earlier, I think it’s time to say bye to the mentoring. I feel a bit guilty about it because we are short on mentors and you can’t generate new leaders without mentors to see them through the process but I don’t think it has to be me. The boathouse is absolutely staying. I love the boathouse. I’m going to skip the training day next year (well, this year, it’s usually around November but it’ll be next Guiding year) because that’s pretty much a whole day that 98% of volunteers skip and I’m going to become one of them. But if there’s an adventure, I’m probably in. That’s why I go to camp and to watersports days and volunteer to sing at a campfire at a large-scale event for 8 hours nonstop (that was last year). Skip the boring and hard stuff and jump on the fun stuff, that’s the way to do it.
So… in conclusion, Girlguiding can really eat up your free time. But if you’re looking to volunteer, a realistic timescale is about two hours a week averaged out over a school year, which isn’t all that far off the claim of “just an hour and a half week” (plus travel time, tidying up and preparing…)
I Am A Polar Bear 