Girl Guides to sell off 5 activity centres.

[Thelnebriati]

''18 May 2023
Girlguiding’s board of trustees...has made an important decision about the activity centres Girlguiding owns. This is because of the investment needed, and the reduced number of members using them in the past decade.
They’ve made the recommendation to sell the 5 activity centres - Blackland Farm, Foxlease, Glenbrook, Waddow Hall and Ynysgain.''

https://www.girlguiding.org.uk/information-for-volunteers/updates-for-our-members/activity-centre-announcement/

@Makinglists there is already a process by which single sex Scout troops can exist (for example the Muslim Scout Network (name might be slightly wrong there) use it). The boy/girl troops have to be run in parallel with the same opportunities given to both.

It always amazes me how the women that run these things cannot think the consequences through to the end of the sentence. Being all female was literally the point of their existence, was the secret smuggling in of men and boys really what they joined for?

Also with the activities various guide groups do... I think that really depends on facilities they have. Our relatively small Scout group (60 children 6-13 years) owns its own hut, field, and small woodland. We can do fires, wide games, pioneering, target sports, indoor activities, camp etc without leaving our own property. Compared with a Guide or Scout troop hiring a city centre community room... its a different world.

The Guides main problem is their programme.

All the politics aside - if they ran a good programme parents would chose it for their girls and the girls would want to go.

Our Scout group is bursting with a huge waiting list and so are all the other groups in town because we run the kind of programme children and young people and their parents want.

The scout activity centres have all bounced back since Covid and are flourishing.

It wasn’t the volunteers in local groups who did this though. It was likely a handful of zealots who got themselves into positions of power and then invited Amy can’t remember the second name whose dad held a 10 year old girl in his attic both were involved with the Green Party and Liberal Democrat. Both very active in pushing the gender identity agenda. Wouldn’t surprise me if they or their supporters had a hand in designing the new programme too.

This.

We had (still have) thriving Rainbow, Brownie and Guide groups where I live in S London but they are busy nail painting, cup cake making and hair plaiting. They don’t do anything that would require an ‘activity centre’. When they did do ‘camps’ they went to out of season Butlins and had dancing comps. They wouldn’t take them to any outdoor stuff or camping.

All the girls that want to go on expeditions, pioneer skill camps, bushcraft camps, abseiling etc have joined scouts.

For which there is a huge waiting list so many boys who have come up through Cubs can’t get in.

It really is only special circumstances and not general provision

a	there are cultural or religious requirements for single sex working 
b	scouting is offered in a single sex institution (for example a school, or young offenders institute) through a closed Group or Unit 
c	a specialist single sex provision is required to meet a clearly identified educational need (for example scouting for young mothers)

My daughter went to a regional Brownie camp - she was very excited to go and it was at a Scout Centre with loads of exciting outside activities that made her eyes shine. She came back disappointed as they spent the whole day in a large Marquee doing crafts. So she left and joined Cubs.

That isn’t why it started though, it started because girls wanted to do things the boys were doing - hiking, camping, bushcraft etc - but they weren’t allowed in Scouts.

My DC are in guides and brownies. The guide unit does glamping and goes to glamping places locally, not the centers that were to be closed. There are many other places to go and it might not be financially wise to maintain their own centers.

Also, I agree there many other female majority activities nowadays to compete with guiding. In addition to the obvious dance and gymnastics, I see a huge increase in girls football team too. My girls were never interested in joining scouts. They wanted to be in a group with girls only.

I'm a scout leader and we've used the local guiding site many times for camps and activities. We're going later this term to do climbing. We will be gutted to see it close.

I know nothing about badges for guides but Scouts do have a skills badge that involves learning to iron, use a washing machine, sew etc. So it's not all fires and knives!

I never wanted to join brownies when I was a young girl as I didn't want to do the sewing, cleaning cooking things. I'm guessing I heard other girls in my class talk about what they did! I wanted to join scouts, but no girls allowed. I didn't know venture scouts allowed girls, and had probably gone off the idea by then.

I know locally there was a trans girl that joined rainbows, I have no idea whether the child is still there, or whether the other parents were told a boy had joined.

This was how my Dd's felt too. So much colouring, weaving, jewellery making ..... Everything done on tables in a small hall. They were so so bored and disappointed.

They moved over to cubs/scouts and have done all the things you'd think they would - fires, camps, climbing, canoeing, rafts, knits, archery etc etc. Really amazing activities and experiences that they have learned so much from.

This.

Plus getting permits to do anything exciting in guiding is a total farce.

It's not easy in Scouting but it doable.

It's to do with red tape across the board that's crippled the organisation.

Then the trans lunacy and COVID have added another nail in the coffin.

I think in 10 years guiding will largely be gone in the UK.

This was how my Dd's felt too. So much colouring, weaving, jewellery making. Everything done on tables in a small hall. They were so so bored and disappointed.

That would have bored the crap out of me, and I wasn't even a particularly sporty or adventurous child. How sad. As I posted upthread, I went to Guides in a godforsaken prefab hut, in the middle of a rundown estate with no outdoor space, but we still did a range of activities that kept us active.

I am a Rainbow leader overseas (so only until 1 September), the programme is what the leaders make of it, it doesn't have to be prescriptive. It's currently 40 degrees here so we aren't outdoors but we are still making the programme as fun and exciting as possible. In the cooler months we are outside, we haven't camped for years but we had plans for next year. We do do craft as the girls ask for it but try and only do this once a month. We adapt the programme to suit the country we are in, we have long waiting lists but sadly HQ has decided Guiding is only for girls in the UK. My daughter is 14 and started as a Rainbow 9 years ago, she is absolutely gutted this part of her life has been taken away from her. A lot of us will move to Scouts now.

Interesting I believe they still have their central London “boutique hotel”. Not sure how that benefits the girls, but appears to be a priority to be kept. I think it’s clear where their priorities lie, and it’s not with girls and women.
@Eggybrains

Decades ago, my GG company organised a stay at GGing's 'Our Chalet' in Adelboden, Switzerland. Most people there were GGs from various European countries, but there was also a pair of 50-ish English women on their own.

In an unguarded moment, one of these women said they weren't interested in GGing but it gave them the opportunity for some lovely holidays.

Reading some of the responses here it occurs to me that Guiding doesn't seem to have an agreed unique selling point- is it a single sex version of scouts, is it a traditional organisation teaching traditionally female life skills like cooking and laundry, or is it an organisation for 'feminine' activities like nail painting and jewellery making?
And if it's the last, and girls who like camping, fires etc can join a mixed sex scouts, I can see why some people wonder why a boy who likes nail painting can't join guides (quite separate from the trans issue).
Bit like Woodcraft Folk, used to be very popular with parents who wanted a co-ed setting for their kids, and has since declined as Scouts have opened up to girls as well- not just because girls can join Scouts I don't think, but having more girls and female leaders probably means Scouts is more welcoming for boys who wouldn't have fitted in when it was all-male.

Surely GG HQ could exist on an industrial park anywhere in the UK. It doesn't need to be in London - is it still in Buckingham Palace Road?

LOL, I tried to attach a screenshot from their statement but I got this instead...

Ha, the ghosts of the Baden-Powells are speaking through your search engine 👻

I'm not sure it's been great for scouts, either. Especially at the younger ages, you can get the girls dominating the leadership roles, or the boys being more immature and foiling the things the girls would like to do. The developmental arc in those years is somewhat divided. Plus there are a lot of boys who don't have much in the way of male role models and could really use them, but many scouting leaders now are women.

Paperwork for activities now is crazy. It's a huge burden and many things groups used to do are no longer allowed or you need to jump through so many hoops, there isn't the time or people to do it.

Meanwhile beavers do fire. And kayaking. And climbing.

Cos scouts arent mollycoddling nutcases.

Demicolon that's a really interesting point about boys. My only experience is my sons scout unit which after Beavers has mainly men as leaders. Lots to think about - but I think about!

Out local Brownies and Guides unit does those too...

I used to work at Buckingham Palace Rd.
Back in those days the only issues were explaining why boys couldn't join.
There was a big campaign late 90s about gg being experts in young girls, giving girls adult role models and a lot of external research quoted about why in mixed sex youth activities girls are not well served.
How astonishing that this was binned.
The loss of the activity centres is really sad.
Re the hq, I was always told that the site belongs to the members - they apparently funded it brick by brick.