With all the excitement of Star Wars day, I didn’t get around to wishing you a happy May the fourth, so please accept a ‘hello’ from me on Revenge of the Fifth day instead!
Sci-Fi references over, it’s a quick update this week. Firstly, this time next week we’ll be gearing up for the 2020 Annual General meeting. All registered members of the Group will be getting an email (hopefully this evening) inviting you along officially and providing the paperwork and links to the voting form. This is a legal requirement for all charities and I do urge everyone to take part in the process of holding our Executive Committee to account and electing the members of the Executive Committee (who are our Charity Trustees) for the coming year. Even if you can’t make it on the night, we have found a way to ensure you can vote in advance, by completing the voting form from the website. Keep an eye out for your personal invite and link. If you can make it on the night, great! It will be a Teams Live event, meaning you can see the speaker, but we can’t see or hear you – you’ll be able to join in using the live Q&A. There’s nothing to download, just use your internet browser. We’ll also be broadcasting (with a bit of lag, I suspect) on our Facebook page and YouTube channel. There will be no option to interact/vote using the social media streams, only on the direct Teams Live event. All details will be in the email.
This Friday marks the 75th Anniversary of VE day. Lots of people are involved in events in their front gardens and I know of several communities around the centre that are holding these events as a socially distanced collective with the whole street out in their gardens. If your young person is taking part, please do share with us. We’ve also put a collection of resources on the website that you may like to try – bunting, colouring and a recipe from Prue that would be great to share with us which will count towards the various chef badges in all sections!
There’s still no sign of a return to Scouting and as I’m sure we are all acutely aware now, whatever return we can make may not look like Scouting as it was before for a while. Rest assured that the leaders and trustees are risk assessing and actively planning for our return to safe face to face meetings as soon as The Scout Association say we can, following Government advice. Some of the team have been involved in discussions involving the County team and UK Chief Commissioner ensuring we have it ‘from the horse’s mouth’ as it were. So as soon as we know, you’ll know!
Finally, everyone these days seems to be talking about statistics. Not wanting to be left out, I thought I’d share some of our statistics:
8 weeks since face to face meetings stopped. A record 237 unique visitors to our website on one day on 11th April 2020. 62 ‘share with us’ emails with 163 photos or videos. 3200 views of our ‘Pass it on’ video, with 29 shares. 60 activities uploaded to our website. 21 online section meetings. 5 leader or trustee online meetings to keep everyone informed and check in with our fab team. And finally, finally, who knows how many badges to be awarded to our members after all of this with all the fantastic effort they’ve put in to remote Scouting. I’m dreading the badge bill, but it’s worth every penny. Well done 11th Folkestone.
That’s it for me this week. Next week we may know more, but whatever happens I’ll endeavour to get back to Monday newsletter! Take care everyone and stay safe.
Craig
Group Scout Leader