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Our places to do list...

To support our scout groups and explorer scout units to ensure they are amazing places that people want to be part of, we will:

  1. Ensure that our collective history and heritage is secure whilst looking to the future and doing what’s right for scouting to develop and ensure its continued success, growth and development for future generations.

  2. Explore ways to support the delivery of scouting in new and innovative ways.

  3. Where appropriate, help our existing groups to ensure they have beavers, cubs and scouts (we call this the full family of scouting).

  4. Where necessary, work with local community groups to set up new groups/Units and sections

  5. Encourage groups to take part in a group or unit health check workshop with our county development service to help them produce, monitor and update their own group development plan

  6. When a group’s youth membership is consistently low, or the leadership team is too small to sustain the sections programmes our development service in partnership with the district commissioner will subjectively review the provision of scouting with the group to discuss and plan for the future, to ensure the growth of membership (both young people and adults), and the provision of a sustainable, vibrant, modern, successful scout group

  7. Provide support to enable greater family involvement in scouting at group level: “supporting” is as important as “leading”

  8. Support our district commissioners, group scout leaders, district explorer scout commissioners and district scout network commissioners to help them focus on growth

  9. Ensure that all our growth and recruitment resources are promoted to our adults at all levels and are used to their fullest potential

 

To ensure that scouting across South London is growing and therefore enjoyed by more young people we will:

  1. Provide ideas to help improve the retention young people in key age groups and between sections

  2. Reduce joining and waiting lists by opening new sections, groups and units as necessary and raise aspirations in existing sections

  3. Support every section of every group and unit across the county to achieve our ‘Just one more’ target. This is to declare at least one more youth member per section then they did the previous year on the 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 annual censuses

  4. Work with districts to investigate the idea of developing a district level waiting list system

  5. Identify every section’s membership capacity to help us place young people in their nearest group when they enquire to join (e.g. census details 16 beavers can accommodate 24)

  6. Encourage explorer units to arrange scout evening events with local groups to help build bridges

  7. Take the challenge and aim to achieve the learning outside the classroom quality badge www.lotcqualitybadge.org.uk for your group

 

To enable our scout groups to have proactive executive committees, we will:

  1. Run the association’s executive committee training modules in the form or regular induction and support days for executive committee members

  2. Look into provide the association’s executive committee training modules as videos that can be viewed along with access to relevant resources on the county website

  3. Update our online executive committee tool kit to ensure it provides the best possible guidance and support to scout groups

  4. Provide guidance to help groups hold effective and timely AGMs with reports and accounts that conform to current scouting and charity commission rules and procedures

  5. Ensure group executive committees are kept up to date with new and relevant scout association practice, policies & procedures

  6. Develop tools and resources to help groups with the recruitment of executive committee officers and members

  7. Provide an information pack for groups to use with their existing and new executive committee members

  8. Create a support network for group and district executive committee officers and hold regular meetings to enable them to discuss hot topics, issues and best practice

  9. Explore ways in which one executive committee could govern two or three scout groups 

 

To ensure that our explorer scout units are governed efficiently within the district, we will:

  1. Develop a partnership agreement for scout groups and explorer scout units can use to create and adopt their own agreement

  2. Develop an operational model and guidelines for districts to set-up an explorer scout sub-committee of the district executive committee to focus support for their explorer scout units

  3. We will provide support to ensure that district executive committee members are aware of the committee’s responsibilities in the area of the governance of explorer scouting in the district