Hi everyone, welcome to our first of many peer education blog posts! My name is Hannah, and I am one of the Region Peer Education Coordinators. I officially took on the role in October 2021 and was soon joined by Jade. You’ll hear from her in a future blog, but I think we make a cracking team, if I do say so myself.
Peer education struggled a bit during the pandemic. It was a really difficult time for lots of young people, with virtual exams (or no exams) and moving across the country to start university in lockdown. We also couldn’t hold any peer education trainings, as these are organised regionally and need to be face-to-face. However, we have just held our first basic training in a while, and we are all buzzing with excitement about peer ed moving forwards!
Peer educators are young members of Girlguiding aged 14-25 years old, who are trained to run sessions on a variety of topics for Brownies, Guides and Rangers. As peer educators are closer in age to the session participants, messages come across differently from when others deliver the same topics, and the girls certainly tell us they get a lot from this peer-led interaction. Current topics include mental health resilience, breaking gender stereotypes, and our new topic – Safe the World. This topic is all about your rights to being safe as a young person, and how you can look after yourself.
I’d never been to a peer education training weekend before and was interested to see what happens. All the peer educators-in-training arrived on Friday evening. We had dinner, then the girls had some free time to get to know each other before an early night – as the Saturday training was jam-packed! Bacon or egg baps for breakfast, the trainers started on the morning sessions. I did the catering for the weekend so got a birds’ eye view of what was going on from the kitchen which opened out onto the main room. There were lots of different sessions, with loads of hands-on practice of different skills you need to be a peer educator, like active listening, teamwork, communication, and dealing with the unexpected. The trainers are all current or former peer educators and made the sessions fun – there wasn’t much sitting around and chatting, instead, there were obstacle courses and challenges!
There was a bit of free time in the evening to get badges from the Guide centre we stayed at. We then had dinner and watched a movie to relax after a long day. Sunday was focused on the topic training, so learning all about the Safe the World resource and how to deliver it in units. I got to join in and pretend to be a Brownie to help the peer educators learn how to manage different scenarios in units, which was fun, and was really rewarding to see how the peer educators had all grown in confidence and skill levels across the weekend. We finished the weekend with 8 new peer educators for region – before this training, we have 16 peer educators delivering, so this is quite an increase.
We’ve learnt lots of lessons and are looking forwards to our next training (including topic training on Think Resilient), which will be held on the 25 – 27 November 2022 in Scout Park, London. Applications are open, and the application form can be found here:
If you are an existing peer educator and would like to attend on the Sunday for topic training, please contact your county coordinator to book on.
The beginning of June sees us not only celebrating Volunteers Week, but the amazing events planned for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. The Queen has a long association with Girlguiding and indeed is our patron. As part of the beacons celebration, seven beacons are to be lit across Anglia, with our region beacon taking place at Hautbois Activity Center. Over 300 people are set to attend a fabulous event culminating with our bonfire beacon and fireworks. Certainly, an event to remember, many of you will have or are planning to celebrate in your units, district, divisions, or counties. Please do send us your, photos we would love to see what you have been doing.
You will have seen we have advertised a number of volunteer vacancies. I’m pleased to share we have recruited to the Girlguiding Council. Elizabeth Fry continues for second term and we welcome Rosie Lovell from Hertfordshire and Charlotte Bennett from Buckinghamshire.
As volunteers, you are all truly amazing. Giving your time, sharing your skills and empowering our girls and young women, but have ever you thought about a new opportunity or adventure? We have a number of roles to join our region team to help us offer exciting, fun, opportunities and activities. There is always lots of support and as with all roles, its teamwork that makes a real difference. Many of the roles can be shared. Please do give some time to consider the role we have – your region values you and needs your help. #TogtherWeInspire
THANK YOU FOR ALL YOU DO, THE TIME YOU GIVE AND THE SKILLS YOU SHARE, YOU ARE ALL AMAZING AND VALUED MEMBERS OF GIRLGUIDING ANGLIA.
Take care, keep smiling,
Tracy
Another month rolls in and with all the wildlife and flora running wild, the imminent Jubilee celebrations, and the excitement of residentials and camps on our minds we can officially call it summer. This month’s reflections are all about fun and enjoyment. How can we make the preparation time more fun, as we squeeze time in around our usually busy lives?
actionforhappiness.org has its usual monthly calendar and in May one of the days suggests you ‘find a way to make what you do today meaningful’. How about adding in ‘find a way to make one of your volunteer tasks fun this week’. Could that be shifting your expectations and relaxing around how much you get done?
Oliver Burkeman, who has presented a webinar online this week ‘How to make good use of our time’ for ActionforHappiness made reference to his new book ‘Time Management for Mortals’ and suggests we accept there will always be things left on our ‘to do list’ and a more useful set of lists might be a ‘to be list’, a ‘done list’ and a ‘stop doing list’. Is it enjoyable to see your ‘done list’ or your ‘to do list’ with lots of ticks on it? Could you use an app to help you stay on top of your preparation? Check out this one from the 80s that asks you to ‘work smarter, not harder’ https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-technique with its bright tomato timer as its logo it already gives us the sense of something more fascinating than we might expect.
As volunteers sharing your volunteer tasks with someone else may make it more fun or we could see things from the perspective of one of your girls, for example, Rainbows imagining and developing their Superpowers or Brownies getting their hands covered in super soaps as they experiment to find soaps to get rid of grime, grease, and paint (from a UMA).
When I asked our team to come up with some sound bite words off the top of their heads for fun and enjoyment, they included the following: skipping ropes, tent building, campfires, badges, learning, and holidays! So it may be that you’ll be involved with some of those fabulous summer month trips to activity centres or campsites or be inventing new ways to experience outdoor UMAs in an urban setting. For our older girls, festivals certainly feature strongly; see below for a Girlguiding story from our group of 18 – 30 members, with memories of Festival fun and learning amongst them:
Have fun until we blog again next month!
Super Rainbows events boxes are now live!
Orders are now open for our super exciting Super Rainbows event boxes containing everything you need to run a fabulous super event in October. Each girl will get the resources they need to complete at least of one activity from each of the Super Rainbow themes (excluding maybe crayons and glue) – that’s five activities per girl just in the box! We will share more teasers on these activities across social media as products start to arrive!
The box will also contain a themed map, bingo game, beach ball, superhero masks for each of the girls, fluffy bugs, an event passport for each Rainbow filled with even more activities, themed stickers, plus a few added extras to make your events special! And we can’t forget the all important Super Rainbows badge! There will a badge for each girl included in the box, and if you would like to order additional badges for leaders or other people supporting the event you can do this separately. The event box cost is £5 per girl, and everything will arrive together in one box.
You can hold your events as you see fit during the month of October; as a full day event, during a single meeting or across multiple meetings, or even be arranged with other local units. We have worked hard alongside the volunteer task and finish group to ensure the boxes represent value for money, with additional Super Rainbows downloadable resources being made available to support your event for those who buy the event box. We do appreciate that some of this cost may need to be passed on to parents, which could be a difficult ask during current times, as a team we are happy to support with fundraising ideas and support where possible.
From your Super Rainbows team!
Order your boxes here
FAQs here
Find the Super Rainbows Facebook group here