This year has been unlike any other year, and I truly believe that Scouting is more important now than ever before, to give both our young people and our adult supporters a sense of connection, belonging and to give hope to all our members, that they can continue offering and learning valuable skills for life.
As County Commissioner, I have been humbled by the dedication of our inspiring adults across Leicestershire, who have had to adapt to the digital world overnight, they became skilled in new areas of technology, who had heard of zoom and Microsoft teams just over a year ago.
Over 70% of our sections offered some sort of online programme, and when the opportunity arose, they pulled quickly together to implement the covid Risk Assessments to enable face to face scouting to restart, this was alongside the districts and county forming teams of people to check the RAs to ensure safety was our no 1 priority.
The County supported with online training and offered funds to purchase PPE/cleaning equipment to enable them to start face to face Scouting.
The pandemic has tested all of our resilience and encouraged us to be innovative, increased all our awareness of the importance of looking after our mental health and especially that of others. Kindness and caring emerged this year as the most important quality we can have. Our members have shown they have got bucket loads of it, volunteers supporting efforts of Covid 19 from making PPE to helping to fundraise for the NHS charities and helping out at vaccination centres across the County.
During the year, the County held its camp at home which was part of the biggest virtual camp but not happy with this we incorporated quarantine camp which was pulled mainly together by an explorer scout from south Leicestershire which offered a number of different challenges to keep everyone busy.
The County also ran a scrapbook challenge for all sections this included up to 10 personal challenges which had to be filmed or photographed an uploaded onto the county page.
Scrapbook Challenge also held an element of litter picking which transformed into Mucky March and became an amazing county activity which was supported by Leicestershire County Council; collecting over 1000 bags of rubbish.
During the year, the County held a number of new forums online helping to shape our COVID response. The County training team have also had some great success by switching to digital delivery of first aid and other modules.
Unfortunately, with the challenges we have lost members, however, we have retained over 80% of the membership at our last census and are already seeing young people coming back as we return to more face-to-face Scouting. Therefore, we remain focused on recruiting and motivating our adults.
We look forward to the reopening of our campsites and we hope reopening of our conference facilities and supporting our contingent to the 25th World Scout jamboree in South Korea in 2023.
Scouting does not stop even for a World Pandemic. We may adapt…. But that is what makes us such a special organisation and a movement.
The last part of my report is a personal thank you to the team that have worked so hard to get us through what has been an incredibly difficult year, not only due to Covid but with a multitude of personal difficulties that the team has faced.
Carol Black