Fees for rainbows/brownies

[Jayjay1985]

My daughter goes to rainbows which costs us £15 per month - including through summer. They broke up for summer in mid June until the start of September. Just trying to get a sense of these fees/subs are in line with elsewhere and if others pay monthly too. Thanks!

We pay termly for Cubs, all fees incl, and it's £40 per term.

Rainbow and Brownie leader here. We charge £20 per term then the cost of annual subscription (it hasnt been called census or capitation for many years in Guiding) as a separate charge once a year (£45 last year). So a total of £105 per girl per year. No extra charges except for trips or events. Our hall charges £50 a term to each group.

We will probably increase the fees a little next year - maybe to £22 or £25 a term? We run a very tight budget and it would be nice to have some spare cash for some "treat" activities every so often, but we balance that with being an inner London unit and we are keen to be accessible to our whole community and so stay as cheap as possible.

The fees at my Scout group don't actually cover running costs... we top it up from hiring out our premises, fundraising and Gift Aid.

The accounts ate fascinating... the badge one always looks horrific until you remember its for over 100 children! But its at least 75p a badge now.

When I ran Brownies we worked on the basis that the annual national subscription/census payment took around a third of the subs over the year leaving two thirds for everything else including hall hire. The annual subscription covers insurance and organisational central costs.
Some units charged less and did lots of fundraising to contribute towards running costs, especially if in an area where it was felt girls couldn't access Guiding if subs were higher, but fundraising takes more time for volunteer leaders.
We fundraised for one off costs like camping equipment or to subsidise special trips to make them more affordable.
Units all pay the same annual subscription but the total amount charged as unit subs will depend on other overheads (hall costs), activity budgets in that unit, and how much additional time the leaders are able to give in addition to the time they spend running the unit, training, planning activities etc, to do fundraising to balance the books.