Get ready, get set…

Nearly ready for the start of the new Guiding year!

We’ve had our planning afternoon (much cake was consumed), and have decided that the Juniors will work on their “Eyes” badge this term, while the Seniors (and newly revived Upper Seniors!) work on their “World Guiding” badge. The girls do seem to enjoy it when they’re working on separate badges, and we think that we’ll be able to integrate the two badges reasonably well, with two nights that include wide-game-ish activities focused on both WAGGGS and observation skills!

So the letters to the families are written, the programs are decorated brightly (I do love a bit of clip art and fancy fonts!), and today they’ll be printed and posted, ahead of next week’s first night back!

Exciting times ahead!

Hope you’re all also geared up for the new Guiding year and full of fabulous plans!

And so we begin again…

Mid January, and my mind turns to planning the guiding year ahead, although we’re still a few weeks from the term beginning!

This year my Guiding “New Years Resolutions” are:

* To figure a way to combine my new family responsibilities with Guiding in a way that ensures I don’t go crazy. (For those of you closely following the wee blog: I now have a Tiny Future Guide in the family!)

* To help my unit have at least one camp in the year – whether that is fully participating or just helping out for a day will depend on the above, but I’m sure I can manage something!

* Get better at asking for help from our parent group – I hate to make people feel obliged to help out with something that is, for me, a fabulous hobby, but for them may well just be “a thing their kid does on Wednesdays”. But I need to remember that a lot of people *love* to be asked to help, and that often they just don’t know how to offer. So more thinking of discrete requests, and being sure to take people up on their offers of assistance, rather than my default response of “oh thank you but we’ll be okay!”

* Improve transition from Seniors to Rangers, and figure out a way to make Rangers a sustainable group.

* Do some recruitment targeted at younger girls, as we’re likely to have quite a few gaps in the Juniors this year… luckily, that is (usually) the age easiest to grow.

* Help RangersLeader get her qualifications signed off.

* Stay on top of the paperwork!! And actually claim my expenses!!

So, hopefully it will be a good year, and I’m looking forward to having Planning And Cake with my excellent co-leaders shortly to get this show on the road!

Keeping up the quals

Long day today, with training from 9-5 (literally).

Mostly it was an okay day – I did enjoy the sessions on preparing to gain camping qualifications, and on using the new(ish) handbooks – but the sessions on risk management and cyber safety combined to make me incredibly frustrated, and not at all keen on being a leader.

The cyber safety session was firstly a good few years out of date, and entirely too focused on “scary bad internet people”. As someone who is reasonably comfortable with using the internet (hence, blogging!), the session just annoyed me, but for those who were not so comfortable with online environments, it would have just freaked them out. Honestly, the way the session going, you’d question why on earth girl guides has an online presence at all! Just silly, really.

But the risk assessment session really irked me. So *apparently*, not only do we need a standing hall risk assessment (that I can *sort of* understand), we also need one for every time we do *anything* out of the hall. Not just “think through the risks and be sensible”, but “write it down (pages of it!), record it, keep it for freaking ever”.

Well, if that’s not a way to discourage leaders, I don’t know what is!

I know from my readings elsewhere that Guiding in the UK is super keen on risk assessments, but until today, I never realised Australia had also gone down this (really annoying) pathway.

Well, we shall see. I’m not at all against sensible procedures and processes at all, but I do resent additional paperwork to do what we have always done… and given the questions from around the hall at the training today, I’m not the only one. So grr!!

However, lets end on a positive note: I think I could quite easily work towards my indoor camping qualification, and that would be a good thing for the unit 🙂