A couple of weeks ago I ran into Esme (Creator Collective aka official content creator for Girlguiding; Brownie leader; Our Chalet volunteer; future Chief Guide probably) at Girlguiding HQ while buying Ranger badges. She’s one of a very small number of people I know in real life who also knows about my secret online life and discovering she actually reads my blog made me realise I haven’t written much about Girlguiding lately. So this is for you, Esme.
Girlguiding, as the UK’s member organisation of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (hereafter WAGGGS) leaves a little to be desired – the unilateral selling off of the Training & Activity Centres and the closing of British Guides Overseas within a fortnight of each other back in 2023; the recent announcement about young trans members (although that at least was done unwillingly from a corner with no other way out and has been met almost universally with pro-trans support both from within Girlguiding and outside, which genuinely and delightfully astounds me in this day and age) and the relatively minor issue that despite “care for the individual” being one of the Five Essentials, the organisation as a whole really doesn’t care for any individual below at least county commissioner level. However, WAGGGS comprises nearly eleven million members in 153 countries and that feels like something worth being part of.
Yesterday was World Thinking Day – the 100th Thinking Day, in fact, and marked by Girlguiding with a shiny gold-edged badge but otherwise surprisingly little fanfare. Thinking Day is our birthday, our special holiday, a day celebrated by Girl Guides and Girl Scouts all around the world and we tend to do international-themed activities because what we’re thinking about specifically is our Guiding & Scouting sisters. I think the Scouts call it Founder’s Day and it seems largely ceremonial – there doesn’t seem to be any badge or any vaguely official activity pack so it looks like the Guides make much more noise about it all than the Scouts do. But Happy Founder’s Day to any Scouts out there, I guess?
Thinking Day is celebrated on February 22nd because it’s the birthday of our aforementioned (so-called) founder, Lord Robert Baden-Powell. If you’d asked him about Guides, he’d have said “They started themselves” because for all the good he did with Scouts, he was a man of his time and didn’t consider the sort of things they did suitable for girls. When he realised the Girl Scouts who’d come up to him at the Crystal Palace Rally to ask him for “something for the girls” in 1909 were serious, he handed them over to his sister Agnes and later, his wife Olave became not just head of Guides but the World Chief Guide. I think he was proud of us in the end but I don’t think he had a whole lot of direct involvement with the Guides. Anyway, February 22nd was also Olave’s birthday. The two met on a cruise and bonded over, among other things, their shared birthday. Probably best not to look into the very not-shared years of them, though. It therefore seemed like a good day to adopt as our birthday and Thinking Day.
Because I have multiple Guiding roles, I tend to celebrate Thinking Day multiple times but I reckon I beat my own record this year with six different celebrations and three badges. In an ideal world, there would have been a big event – something at a proper division level (my Ranger division consists of four units and we can get maybe 60-80 girls together – it’s smaller than my Brownie district, so division events there don’t count) or even county. I’m sure I remember someone mentioning the planning of a county event but it doesn’t appear to have ever made it out of the group chat – or county exec, as they call it. So no big event to celebrate 100 years in style but I made up for it with six separate smaller events.
Not my Brownies
I do Brownies and Rangers in different divisions but the Brownies in my Ranger division are currently a bit short on leaders, so I’m lending a hand for two weeks that became three, one of which was their Thinking Day meeting.
The plan was to do the new World Centres-themed Unit Meeting Activity – Girlguiding released new Thinking Day UMAs recently for all sections. It felt a bit thin for a meeting – play games from the four non-UK World Centres and see how familiar they feel. But combined with the usual trappings of a Brownie meeting (they have Six corners and walk into a circle and sing the Brownie Song!), an explanation of Thinking Day, with the action story from Girlguiding South West (I like the theory of this but every time I read it out, I remember that Lady Baden-Powell did not write a handbook for the Girl Scouts – they hadn’t even met, let alone married by the time of the Crystal Palace Rally!) and a little explanation of what the World Centres are, plus a “this game is from this world centre and it’s called…”, it actually took up most of the meeting. There was a Mexican version of Musical Chairs, there was a kind of seated volleyball from India, a variation on Duck Duck Goose from Switzerland and a kind of pick-up sticks with bowls of beads from Kusufiri and I can’t remember if they clarified which part of Africa that game was from. I’m quite used to 60-minute UMAs not taking 60 minutes but we filled the meeting very thoroughly.
I’m not entirely sure most of the Brownies really understood or appreciated what we were trying to do ie teach them about World Centres and Brownies around the world but a new Brownie stood up and gave us a very concise explanation of Thinking Day from a year ago when she was a Rainbow that says loud and clear that our local Rainbows are getting a very good grounding in their Guiding history. I wore my Pax Lodge neckerchief because I don’t often have a reason to wear a neckerchief – none of our local units wear them as part of their regular uniform and I have a little bit of a collection. Just feels that bit more of a special occasion and in particular to pick an international variant of neckerchief.
Trefoil
I’m a member of the Trefoil Guild, Girlguiding’s 18+ sister organisation (legally separate but effectively just a continuation) and we always celebrate Thinking Day at our February meeting. Because Trefoil is a non-uniformed organisation with a uniform, I normally wear a red t-shirt with my blue Trefoil jacket but for Thinking Day, I like to dress for the occasion: my bright orange Our Chalet t-shirt (got five minutes down the road and realised I meant to put on my grey Pax Lodge t-shirt) with my Our Chalet hoodie and my international neckerchief with my two World Centre pins on it.
The secretary and treasurer had organised this one, using the Girlguiding South West (hereafter just called “Region”) activity pack. We had our usual formal part of the meeting and then we were let loose to go round the four tables. Despite me describing Trefoil as 18+, its core demographic is the over-65s – less “guiding for adults” and more “WI for retired Guiders” – and at my particular Guild, there are three of us around our early 40s (I was early 30s when I first joined!) who tend to stick together. We’d settled down at the Lebanon table, which was mosaics, shiny metallic foam self-sticking tiles which really showed up that a lot of us are not terribly creative and panic a bit when required to make some kind of pretty picture. One of the older ladies came round with her picture and asked us in a slightly despairing tone of voice if we could figure out what hers was. I looked at it without a great deal of recognition and said “Hedgehog” quite laconically and was almost impressed when it turned out it was a hedgehog – not as impressed as her that it was recognised!
There were strips of paper to be woven into friendship knots. I thought that might be easy enough because I tie them in a lot of neckerchiefs, although still never without the instructions that are saved as a favourite image on my phone. However, neckerchiefs only have two ends and two strips of paper have four, so it was like a completely different task. That table also had a box of wool and some friendship bracelet wheels so I cut myself seven colourful strips of wool and spend most of the rest of the evening weaving them back and forth, back and forth, and produced a bracelet long enough to wear by the end. Those two came from the Friendship part of the Region pack – it’s 140 pages long and when we looked at it in our Brownie planning meeting, we didn’t get beyond the international-themed activities.
Elsewhere, there were paper plate llamas (Peru) and cupcake case cornflowers (Estonia) but I was busy with my friendship bracelet and listening to the conversation of all the people who dropped by our table to make mosaics or just chat. We had an 80th birthday and someone had made a cake, so we were upgraded from our usual tea/coffee and biscuits. Well done for the nicely-timed birthday!
Finally, we did the quickest little Thinking Day ceremony, with a reading, a map of the world, candles to represent different countries, a collection of “shiny pennies”, a round of Go Well and Safely (with argument over whether it’s “The Lord be ever with you” or “May peace be ever with you” and corresponding discussion of whether one version is incorrect or just different) and finishing up with Taps which was nearly Brownie Bells because our Chair is also our Brown Owl.
Brownies
The activities in it represent various countries and territories around the world and rather than pick what was most educational or important for the Brownies, we went for a mix of “what will they enjoy?” and “What does Little Owl think is easiest to run?. We ended up, on week 1, with strawberry lemonade from the British Overseas Territories section and Vanilla & Chocolate armpit fudge (aka squished up mix of butter, icing sugar and cocoa powder in a zip lock bag) from Madagascar. Do either of those places make those things? Almost certainly not! And did any of the Brownies spend any time while making these delicacies think about Guides in those places? No!
For week 2, I read out the (altered, more accurate but not as cynical as the paragraphs above) story from Region again, with actions, in an attempt to make the Brownies recognise that there’s a deeper meaning behind these activities than just making things to eat. Then Little Owl made toilet roll pen pot holders to represent Mauritius’s famous love of upcycling and papel picado jars from Mexico, except rather than cut intricate designs, we drew on them with glass pens. I’d have loved to do actual paper cutting but it’s not practical with 20-something 7- to 10-year olds. Still not sure they really got it but we finished up with a candlelight ceremony and a map and a reading.
Pax Lodge
Since I first went in 2017, I’ve tried to get to Pax Lodge, WAGGGS’ World Centre in London, as often as I can to celebrate Thinking Day with the international staff & volunteer teams and whoever else happens to turn up. In 2017, there was a Norwegian group staying but since then it’s tended to be just local Brownie packs. We do activities from the WAGGGS pack, earn the WAGGGS badge (badge number two!) and there’s a Pinning Ceremony, where you get presented with the exclusive Pax Lodge pin, which cannot be bought anywhere except Pax Lodge and which you swear you will keep and not give away. I’ve been to Pax Lodge several times now and despite my protests, I already have two Pax Lodge pins.
The WAGGGS theme this year is Our Friendship. Now, to be brutally honest, we rarely use the WAGGGS pack in my divisions because it’s not generally all that inspiring but of course we use it at a WAGGGS World Centre, where the presence of international volunteers and new friends gives it just a bit more meaning than in your own unit. I decided to wear my Trefoil Guild neckerchief for this – they just look a bit more “Guidey” for special occasions and I find a lot of leaders are astonished to find someone my age in Trefoil so I like to promote it a bit.
Usually there are only a couple of dozen of us at each session but this weekend, Pax Lodge welcomed nearly 500 visitors, which means an average of well over 100 people for each of the four sessions. We split into four or five groups, I think, although mine was called first and I never properly saw how the rest were divided up. We were the adults: that meant me on my own, the Buckinghamshire pair, the three Ranger leaders, the Irish group, the Japanese mother and daughter, the Argentinian and Slovakian visitors – and the leaders of the Brownie and Guide units who were separated from their girls for the session, which was some twenty or thirty of us altogether. We were mostly in the World Bureau next door to Pax Lodge itself, where I’ve never been, although we did one activity in the dining room and one in the lobby. They were mostly friendship-themed and for each one, we received a bead to thread on an elastic which we tied into a bracelet at the end and swapped.
Much as I enjoy going to Pax Lodge for Thinking Day, I’m usually disappointed by how non-international it is, except the volunteers (this year, from South Africa, India, Lesotho, New Zealand, Canada, the US, Sweden and Argentina) but we did have people among us who came from other countries so that was nice, to actually meet our sisters from around the world instead of just thinking about them. We found ourselves frequently breaking into small groups as we went through the activities, depending on which chair you plonked yourself in or at which table or who you were standing near, so I met a lot more people than I normally would – I’m usually the only adult there without my own group of girls, and that makes it harder to buddy up with people, because they’re all usually occupied with their own unit.
And then, yes, we made a massive circle around the flagpole and we all got Pinned and presented with the WAGGGS WTD 2026 badge and then it was time to run to the Tube before the rain really started hammering down.
Kusafiri
Now, this is fun! Kusafiri is the newest World Centre, recently celebrated its 15th birthday and it’s in Africa. Yes, I know, Africa’s a big place and that’s very non-specific! You see, Kusafiri is the only World Centre that doesn’t have a fixed building and it moves around for events. I know it’s done events in Madagascar and Tanzania and I’ve probably missed several but since 2023, it’s been in Ghana and seems to have its own building with its name over the top. It was apparently decided at the 2023 World Conference that it would stay in Ghana until 2026 and I would personally think it’s a bit of a waste to throw all that away for the sake of it remaining a wandering, ephemeral World Centre.
Anyway, this was obviously not an in-person event – getting to Ghana is a fairly big and expensive undertaking and you’d be getting months’ worth of content if I’d actually been there. No, this was online and because it was a Kusafiri event, I figured going to a World Centre in another country, even virtually, merited the international neckerchief.
To be honest, it wasn’t great. There was too much “can you hear me??” and too many technical hitches and too much time spent waiting to see who was going to talk next. But it was nice to connect with Kusafiri and see a big loud group sitting in a big room in Ghana, all laughing. There were only 27 participants as Zoom screens (given that there were 500 at Pax Lodge, I expected their Zoom account to be maxed out with virtual participants. Some had multiple people – obviously Kusafiri itself won that one but there were definitely a couple of trios and at least two American Girl Scout troops so it was more than 27 individuals but still. Instead of activities, it had some speakers and everyone on Zoom introduced themselves in the chat which was then read out, presumably as a compromise between letting everyone get involved and not having to manage the chaos of 27 different screens all trying to talk at once. Glad I went but not up there with the greatest if WTD 100 celebrations.
Rangers
My Ranger event was actually a division event and I have very little to say about it because it hasn’t actually happened yet! It’s this evening, starting two hours after this post goes live. The original plan was that it might be on Sunday, on Thinking Day itself, that we’d do a half-day event in a local hall where every unit organised or helped run an activity or two, a bit of a party – that’s what we usually do but this year no one had the capacity to plan something like that. We’re a bit short on leaders this term (which is why I’ve just spent three weeks as a temporary Brownie leader), those of us who are still around are running a bit short on spoons and honestly, we didn’t start thinking about it early enough. So we decided, as three of the four sections meet in the same place on the same evening and the fourth is just down the road, we’d bring them up to our hall and we’d all do a thing together.
Each unit is organising something Thinking Day-related to last ten to fifteen minutes, we’re having some food and some (indoor) campfire singing (which I’m supposed to be leading but we’ll see whether my voice is up to it) and we’ll finish up with a little ceremony that features each section in turn renewing their Promise. To this end, I know that the Rangers (me!) are contributing a web of connections between all the people present, which is something we did at Pax Lodge. My original plan had been a kind of friendship bingo card/scavenger hunt but the idea of printing 80-something copies and supplying 80-something pens and pencils seemed a bit daunting. Everything else is a mystery. I have no idea what the Rainbows, Brownies and Guides have got planned. I’ll update this later to fill that in.
Part of the plan is “each unit buys their own Thinking Day badges” and so I bought my Rangers the UK’s shiny gold-edged 100 Years of Thinking Day badges. Actually, I bought my own months ago in case I didn’t think of it nearer the time and decided to match them to me but that makes badge number three. Not-my-Brownies are also getting the Region badge but they’re all having them presented today rather than at their unit celebrations which is now a fortnight ago – Thinking Day itself is over half term so anyone wanting to do anything in their unit before the division event had to do it before half term. Six celebrations for me and spread over more than two and a half weeks! Less Thinking Day and more Thinking Month. But it’s no bad thing to spend two and a half weeks thinking about the rest of the world and in the meantime, I’ve generated a certain amount of stuff to wear tonight, like the Trefoil friendship bracelet and the bead tag from Pax Lodge.
I’ve got a “what does a term look like at Brownies?” post planned but I just got back from Finland last week, so expect some ice and snow before we get back to the village hall.
I Am A Polar Bear 