Tag: girlguiding

I’ve been a Girlguiding leader since 2007 and I was a Young Leader and a Guide, Brownie and Rainbow before that. I’ve been involved since I was five years old and now I’m a qualified Brownie, Guide & Ranger leader, a county leadership mentor, an archery instructor, fencing coach, paddlesport assistant, member of the Trefoil Guild and in March 2024, I’m starting as Division Commissioner so I have a lot of hats!

Making my Promise as a Guide, outside in the summer. I'm wearing denim shorts, the blue Jeff Banks polo shirt with a saffron neckerchief and bare sash and there are various parents and siblings watching the ceremony. The photo is a scan of a 35mm film photo, so it's not great quality.
Making my Promise as a Guide

There’s a lot of great stuff about being a Girlguiding volunteer – community, teamwork, inspiring the girls and so on – but my favourite bit is that I get to have adventures and I get to introduce these kids to their first taste of adventure. I know my Rangers will still be talking about that time they went to winter camp when they’re my age. Some of the girls who visit the boathouse will go on to have a lifelong love of paddling. Maybe some of them will join an archery or fencing club on the strength of my taster session. And I’ve been on the receiving end of that. I take a tent and camp around Iceland and I know I wouldn’t do that if I hadn’t learned to camp when I was a Guide. Would I be on this kayaking leadership journey if we hadn’t done that one pool session when I was a Guide? How many adventures can I tick off as things I first tried because of Guides?

Me as a Brownie in a close-up photoshoot picture taken by my grandad. I'm wearing the 90s Jeff Banks uniform - a baseball cap, yellow sweatshirt, matching neckerchief and khaki-green sash on which you can see a little rainbow to show that I was a Rainbow.

I post a fair bit about Girlguiding, mostly about the adventures and the camps because those are the bits that are relevant here to a travel/outdoors/adventure blog but to give you a few highlights from Girlguiding themselves: we help all girls know they can do anything. We open up a world of possibilities to girls from 4 to 18 – one where they can do anything. Rainbows welcomes all girls from 4 to 7 years old for play, learning and tons of fun in a colourful, safe space. Brownies welcomes all girls from 7 to 10 years old for nonstop fun, learning and adventure. Guides is a relaxed, welcoming space where you can have fun, learn and be yourself with good friends from 10 to 14 years old, and Rangers is your space – where you get together with other girls from 14 to 18 to have fun, learn more, give back, hang out, and just be you. We’re over 300,000 girls from 4 to 18 who come together to laugh, learn, explore and have adventures. We’re over 70,000 volunteers who make guiding happen by giving our time, talents, enthusiasm and
care for girls.

A selfie in navy leader uniform & red, white & blue international neckerchief on the back steps of Our Chalet, one of the Guide homes around the world. It's traditional to take a group picture here and we just didn't. So I did it myself as a selfie.