Learning and development

The volunteer network for those involved with promoting guiding externally continued to flourish. In November, they had a successful online training session over 24 hours which covered recruitment and growth, how to work better with local growth coordinators and specialist training in how to use Canva, an online design tool.

We also continued our efforts to set up a similar network for volunteer membership growth coordinators. Our series of Ready, Steady Grow online workshops continued in spring, for example, to help coordinators think strategically about membership growth, recruitment and retention. In November, we held our first-ever County Membership Network Conference with support from the PF Charitable Trust. The event brought members of the Scottish team, county membership growth coordinators and county commissioners together on Zoom for a day of confidence building and best practice sharing sessions.

We developed more flexible guiding resources to help our volunteers adapt to hybrid meetings. Our flexible guiding resource bank now contains templates to help plan different types of meetings as well as games packs which can be used for online and outdoor meetings.

We piloted offering online welcome sessions directly to new volunteers to supplement the welcome and support they received locally.

Safety is at the heart of everything we do. Because we know that when girls feel safe, they feel brave enough to do things they never thought they could. So, continued to prioritise the safety of our girls and young women by delivering 1,300 A Safe Space level 3 trainings. This is in addition to levels 1 and 2 which are self-directed online courses.

A huge thank you to our dedicated volunteer Trainers who have delivered all of these courses and many more, working tirelessly over the last year.