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/

That really is quite astonishing. Sounds like they had developed a compelling USP and then ditched it- why I wonder?
I know the temptation is to blame TRAs but it also sounds like the leadership became a bit rudderless and lost a sense of purpose perhaps?

TRAs have been pretty ruthless in targeting women’s and girls organisations.

I think that spot on. Rudderless. Which left them vulnerable to the TRA movement. The former led to the latter not the other way around.

Certainly fits with what I know from the last ten years - which includes a whole pile of criticism before the trans thing bubbled over.

My son is an Air Cadet which is truly co-ed. The activities are amazing and relatively cheap with a free uniform. They offer DoE (also at a reduced cost) and it's really popular at my son's school. I was a Guide and loved it but I suspect if I was a teen now I'd be an Air Cadet.

I think Scouts have Air Scouts and Sea Scouts groups as well? Not sure if Guides offer something similar.
I think it's a real shame if Guides were to decline, there's a Brownie group at my Church and they seem very popular and like they do good.
However, I guess the market for both kids time and volunteers is competitive and an organisation that doesn't know what it is or who it's for is at a significant disadvantage I'd have thought.

That was the main reason my kids didn't get on with Guiding. I wanted them to - I got so much out of it as a child and teenager, but the local group didn't want to deal with DD1 who wasn't a child who wanted to sit and colour in and do beauty nights and the programme has just completely lost its way and almost seems regressive BACK into stereotypes (and that's before we get into the Woke stuff).

So both of mine are involved in Scouting - and have moved up the age ranges there.

I have up being GG leader after about 2 years of the "new" programme...it took away the responsibility and choices from the girls. They used to do Go For Its, which they chose together as a patrol, organised themselves and ran the activities themselves. Helped them learn the importance of cooperation, working toward a common goal, commitment (ie. If you were bringing the string for the kite making and you didn't go that week, our girls made sure they passed into a friend in school etc), resourcefulness etc

Now it's all a bit prescribed and fucking boring.

@llareggub I'm a Girlguider with 20+ years under my belt. DD was an Air Cadet (had a blast) and is now a Civilian Instructor with them. I am sorely tempted to Jump Ship to an organisation that (for all it's bureaucratic, military faults) appears to be transparent and genuinely co-ed, with equal opportunity activities that aren't like sitting through a bloody PSHCE lesson.

I came to say that Sea Cadets is also a brilliant organisation as an alternative to guides - cheap to join, lots of women and girls in leadership roles and amazing experiences. Admittedly mixed sex.

Just a shame that GG are allowing boys in (well boys who are pretending they are girls) and denying some children access to perhaps one of the few girls only organisations that they could attend!

... whilst simultaneously asking girls that think they are boys to leave 😬

@00100001 and closing off opportunities to girls where single sex extra curricular activities are the only ones they are allowed to do. Don't want to get into religion vs rights and all that but it's a fact that GG is/was the only option open to girls from some communities

i appreciate it’s run by volunteers and I wasn’t holding up my hands to help but i felt no sadness when DC left. They’d tried cubs briefly and only left because they were the only girls but while they were there they were sea sailing and all sorts of active things. At Brownies and guides they had to stick their sparklers in a carrot in case they burned their hands and made a shopping list under budget for a trip to a supermarket as a meal plan (they didn’t have to actually buy or cook the food). The latter is fine but as part of a range of activities. The only time they went to an outdoor centre, they had a tea party indoors. It was bizarre.

What is the point of making a shopping list and not even buying the stuff? How fucking dull.

We used to get our Guides to plan a meal with dessert that can be cooked with just a microwave or kettle/one pan/under £3/just tins or a combination of the above. Some sort of challenge.

Then they would shop for it and either cook and eat it, or that would be a camp meal, or donate the items to a food bank depending on what we were trying to achieve.

Because gender identity has been a thing since the 90s at least. They have played the long game (and are winning) they have slowly put people in place who are sympathetic to the cause or useful idiots if you like.

This is not some new thing that came along 5 or 6 years ago. It's been brewing for over 20 years now. And few people saw, and if those people spoke they were called names, no one listened. And now look where we are.
Girl guides will be gone or be a shadow of itself.
Think about who benefits if girls are brought up from day one to never have a single sex space , not even guides, not a toilet, not a changing room. Who benefits if girls dont even realise they can have a space?

The Guides board was infiltrated and then they changed the T&C's to be gender not sex.
I think the old board was played and had no idea what was going on, wanted to 'be inclusive'.
They should have stood their ground.

I suspect the same exact thing happened in many organisations for women and girls unfortunately.

“Think about who benefits if girls are brought up from day one to never have a single sex space , not even guides, not a toilet, not a changing room. Who benefits if girls dont even realise they can have a space?”
OMG you’re right. Girls growing up now are being fed this gender ideology nonsense from school and will have no concept of female-only spaces. And who benefits. Exactly. It’s terrifying.

When we lived abroad a few years ago my daughter was a Daisy at a US Girl Scouts Overseas group. She's now a Brownie in the UK and the difference in Guiding is striking. At Girl Scouts she did badges in Robotics and entrepreneurship, went on overnight camps, played tons of games, while the older girls were doing courses on leadership - US Girl Scouts are a top supplier of college scholarships etc. At Brownies she mainly does arts & crafts and dancing, which she loves, don't get me wrong.

Girl Scouts is thriving and modern, with an emphasis on STEM and skills (US Boy Scouts isn't doing well, plagued by scandal and abuse), Girl Guiding feels very old fashioned in comparison. There's probably a cash aspect, Girl Scout troops are very much encouraged to raise money for themselves, and to figure out ways of raising money - famously through their cookie sales - to an extent that would feel strange to a UK group.

It’s a real shame. I enjoyed guiding as a teen, though it would rather have joined the cubs and scouts but it wasn’t an option then.

I have really fond memories of camp, in patrol tents and on a hillside, frozen canvas in May and losing plastic knives in the Nutella. Wide games involving a cracked egg in a sandwich bag, and many hours round the campfire.

Some of the badges were wussy, but actually I was also a bit of a wuss so it did bring me out of my comfort zone. We had such and excellent guider, properly old school, and I do wonder about her and her husband. They would be extremely old now.

I don’t think I would allow my girls (if I had any) to be in the guiding movement today, but my boys are in the scouting movement in a fab group and with lots of girls too. It’s fantastic to types of learning they wouldn’t get in school.

I don't know that this is totally true.

They have fared better, but it is not what it used to be, and it is still going the way of more and more paperwork, and that means things have to be set in stone well ahead. If groups are struggling to find leaders, this makes it much worse because it takes up so much leader time.

A lot if about liability and insurance coverage, and it's affecting a lot of kids activities.

Speaking as an ex- leader it was not the paperwork around activities (forms, risk assessment etc) it was the detailed tick boxing round the current programme in GO. It was tedious and to be honest drained the joy out of doing anything. I have no desire to go back to that.

Reading some of the current Facebook discussions by leaders it feels like the organisation is splitting in two - those at HQ who 'lead' and those on the ground that 'do'. The role of leadership is to take your team with you - something has seriously gone wrong to create this divide. Team working is a key aspect of guiding - well this seems to be a great example of how not to do it.

Both scouts and guides were utterly shit in terms of including my children with allergies or keeping them safe. Their allergies are pretty standard as well. Neither movement has moved with the times. My children have found other hobbies and groups that weren't constantly doing activities revolving around food.

That's really bad, we have forms for things like allergies that we sit down with parents and go through. These will be shared with all the leaders in the unit so that they are aware and activities are planned around. We have a number of girls with different issues at the moment and are always adapting activities to make sure we are including them as much as is possible

My son is allergic to eggs. (Anaphylactic). His scout leader thought I was unreasonable for being cross when they planned an activity that involved the scouts throwing raw egg. Apparently my son should "be more resilient"