President Margaret welcomes Barbara Hall, Media & PR Advisor for Girlguiding Hampshire East, with a guiding salute and left-hand-shake. They are standing in front of the new banner for the club, and Barbara mentioned how closely our aims are aligned: they educate the girls (through fun), often include projects related to health issues (such as supporting the Race for Life), raise money for a variety of charities, and are all about activities!
Starting with a quick poll of the room, Barbara was encouraged to see that at least half had been a brownie, guide or ranger. She also brought a gift for each of us, of a car sticker and pen!
Against a backdrop of photographs, representing various events over the last year, she regaled us with a little history and the up-to-date activities. It all started at the rally of about 11,000 boy scouts, at Crystal Palace in 1909, when Sir Baden-Powell was horrified to see 6 girls in their number, asking to become ‘girl scouts’! There are now almost 600,000 in the UK, with 6,500 in the county. These are a mix of Rainbows (5-7yrs), Brownies (7-10yrs) and Guides (10-14yrs), and their adult leaders. Rangers no longer exist, but a guide can stay on, in the senior section (14-25yrs) to be trained as a leader – a qualification equivalent to an NVQ level 2.
One of the fun activities to celebrate the centenary was an Anniversary Camp at Sandy Acres, with about 700 girls including foreign visitors, for a week last summer. There was archery and fencing, a disco and a visiting star from X-Factor. There was one photograph from the camp that Barbara picked out: “That’s Nabuko”, she said. “After the tsunami in Japan we sent an email to her to make sure they were OK”. The message came back that they were fine, but in need to water and basic supplies. So the local guides raised money for a Shelter Box from Rotary for them.
The centenary was also marked with a special ceremony, and club member Celia Veal had attended the Portsmouth event, at 20:10 on 20/10/2010, in Guildhall Square, to renew her promise and get a new badge.
It will be time to celebrate again soon, as the local county was divided into 3 (North, West and East Hampshire) 40 years ago, and will be holding a special “Ruby, Ruby, Ruby” event. They will also be continuing with regular activities, ranging from running the grotto in Fareham Shopping Centre (and raising about £4000 in the process), to staffing their shop, where you can buy uniforms, get information on guiding and access the internet (for the leaders to download ideas from the Girlguiding website).
We agreed that there are many similarities between our organisations, and would be useful to try to establish a common project that we could work on together, for fun and friendship.