SEK 4.73 M / 3 YEARS
LONG-TERM GOOD IN VULNERABLE AREAS In Stockholm county around 90,000 children and young people live in socioeconomically vulnerable areas. Surveys show that they are the ones with most to gain from Scouting – but they are also the hardest to reach. In ‘Scouting for all’ the Scouts are implementing four school and leisure initiatives to make outdoor life more accessible and reduce exclusion.
The Scouts are a movement that has been around for a long time. Many people have heard of you, but perhaps they don’t know much about what you do these days. How would you describe it? Membership development manager Elisabeth Danefjäll: We work with children and young people, mainly aged 7 to 25. Here in the Nordics many people p robably associate Scouting with the outdoor life: sleeping under canvas and going to Scout camps. And yes, we do that – but the purpose of it all is for children and young people to learn leadership skills, to act as a group and to dare to test their limits. Scouting gives them tools, values, courage and the ability to act so that they can go out and change the world, in both big things and small. In our vision we refer to young people becoming ‘world improvers’. Emma Berggren, project manager for ‘Own your nature’: Another important thing is that there really is room for everyone in our organisation and in the activities we do. Scouting covers a vast arena. Compare it with playing football, for example, where you have to be good at one thing, i.e. football. In the Scouts you don’t have to be good at a s pecific thing in order to fit in. We do so much. There’s always something you can be good at with us. That’s hugely important, and really good. Elisabeth: Also, Scouting is global. There are 60 million Scouts in the world. That creates a feeling of belonging. So in addition to the individual p erspective, there is also a social perspective. I would say that the Scouts help to build up and maintain democratic, peaceful communities. With all the currents that exist today, we are more relevant than ever.
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Tell us about the project ‘Scouting for all’. What’s the idea behind it? Elisabeth: It’s clearly linked to both these p erspectives; the individual and the overall social perspective. For us it’s important to be there for all children and young people in Sweden. At the same time, we’ve n oticed that we are still more of a presence in the places where the usual traditional clubs and associations are established.
“If the children aren’t coming to Scouts, then we’ll go to the children.” It’s not so easy to find us in vulnerable areas. So if the children aren’t coming to Scouts, then we’ll go to the children. That’s why we’re now going to them in schools, because all children are there. Emma: We started in Husby, with two schools. We would rather concentrate our efforts on one place than dabble a bit here and there. It’s vitally important that we don’t just go there but that we stay there for the children and young people who we have actually engaged. Naturally we hope to be able to spread this to more places. We already have an entry into another school in an area where the Scouts have found it hard to recruit and we hope to start working with that in the next step.
