South West Notts Scouts News

The UK Government’s recent relaxation of COVID restrictions in England and Wales means that that we can now return to offering a broader range of activities including indoor nights away experiences and outdoor camping for our Beavers, Cubs, Scouts and Explorer Scouts.

We will, however, still have some controls in place to ensure we offer, insofar as is possible, a COVID-safe environment for all our youth section members and our leadership teams. Examples of these are:

• Continued use of hand sanitizer at all activities.
• Ensuring all primary ‘touch’ surfaces are regularly disinfected.
• For close contact activities we will be encouraging the use of face masks.
• For overnight experiences (both indoor and outdoor) we are limiting the number of people who can sleep in a room or a tent. This might mean we will have to restrict numbers for some of these events.
• The use of PPE equipment if we have to administer First Aid to an adult or child.

As you can imagine, we are seeing a surge in the number of young people from age 6 until the age 18 who want to join their local Scout Group or Explorer Unit. Whilst this is good news, we need to keep a balanced ratio between the number of young people in each section and the numer of adult leaders in those sections. We are busy trying to recruit new adult volunteers. This will help us increase our youth membership. Without that recruitment we may have to put a young person on our wish to join/waiting list.

If you feel you might like to help as a leader with either Beavers, Cubs, Scouts or Explorer Scouts we would love to hear from you. Do please make direct contact with your local Scout Group or Explorer Scout Unit (details on the Group/Units section of this website) or send me an email via the Contacts page on our website.

As always, our priority is to ensure that all our young members (and our leaders) remain safe and well by providing a fully risk-assessed programme of activities each week.

As I write this, many local Groups are taking a short break from weekly meetings to coincide with the school summer holidays. They will, however, be re-starting weekly meetings in September.

We really appreciate the support we have received thus far from the parents and carers of our youth membership. We will do our best to continue to offer your children an active and challenging programme of activities in as safe an enviroment as possible in the weeks and months ahead.

Simon Clark (District Commissioner – SW Notts District

2 August 2021

Ed Hewes has served us as our District Youth Commissioner for nearly four years (which is one year longer than was originally agreed. He has done an amazing job in this role, but now feels itis time to pass on the baton to another enthusiastic younger leader. (District Youth Commissioners must be over 18 but under the age of 25 when appointed).

It is a very rewarding role which focuses on encouraging youth-shaped Scouting across the District. We are, after all, tasked to provide an exciting and challenging programme of activities which will both attract and then retain young people from the age of 6 onwards in the hope that Beavers will eventually progress through the sections and eventually become leaders! Beliieve me – it happens!

I will therefore be contacting all leaders aged 18 – 24 inviting them to ‘express an interest’ in the role of District Youth Commissioner. I look forward to being inundated with enquiries about this essential role within the District.

Before Christmas, it was announced that there was to be a competition for designing a badge to celebrate our 110th Anniversary.

The winner is Chris from 2nd Beeson. Congratulations Chris!

A massive well done and thank you to all who took part.

2020 has been a challenging year for Scouting . We have had to adopt new ways of delivering activities for our youth membership which comply with Government and Scout Association guidelines. These currently allow us to offer COVID-Secure indoor and outdoor activities for ‘bubbles’ of up to 15 young people plus up to 5 leaders per ‘bubble’.

We are aware that many families are keen for their children to join our youth sections. To make this possible we need to appoint additional adult volunteers so we that can maintain the correct ratios of adults to young people at our meetings.

Can you help?

You might be a former Beaver, Cub, Scout or Explorer Scout who would consider helping our current youth membership enjoy Scouting in the same way you did.

Alternatively you might have expertise in fund-raising, or administration and can offer to help in this aspect of Scouting, enabling our existing section leaders focus their attention on providing the exciting and challenging activities that Scouting offers week-by-week.

If you would like to help us, please follow the approriate link below:

Helping with our youth sections*

Supporting our Uniformed Volunteers*

You can reserve a potential place for your child in your local Scout Group or Explorer Unit please contact them using this link.

*All adult (18+) appointments require the volunteer to complete a DBS application. This only takes about 30 minutes and there is no cost to the volunteer.

Thank you. We look forward to hearing from you

Simon Clark (District Commissioner)