Pippa shares stories of inspiring young women at the Rio+20 conference going on right now!

There are so many inspiring role models in the WAGGGS delegation here at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil, known as Rio+20.

Beatrice is from the Kenya Girl Guides Association and she inspired us all when she shared her pre-conference story during the training day. There is currently a drought in East Africa affecting the water supply in the city of Nairobi where Beatrice lives. She has to take several hours out of her day to walk across the city to fetch water for her family. This inspired her to go to the Climate Change Summit in Durban last year, where she spoke about her experience channelling her frustration into advocacy. After the Summit she returned to Kenya, keen to work on a tree planting project with her fellow Guides.

Our hosts, the Brazilian Girl Guides, and especially the five members of their delegation, inspired us with their generosity and also with the programmes they run in their communities. They are sending 170 members of all ages to the People’s Summit – a parallel event to the main conference –where they’ll experience a gathering of cultures, all keen to work together to achieve sustainable development.

Darlene, another member of the delegation, is a pilot for Air Canada – able to inspire us with stories of all the places she has travelled to. Due to the free time her job gives her, she has dedicated numerous hours to working as a WAGGGS representative with the Major Group for Children and Youth – the channel for youth organisations to be heard at Rio+20. Her passion for bringing about positive change through this conference motivates us all. As part of the Major Group, along with other members of the delegation, and with the assistance of official delegates for many countries we were able to see the inclusion of non-formal education in the current draft outcome text – a paragraph that we hope will inspire governments around the world to support valuable non-formal education providers such as the Guide and Scout Associations.

The experience of making real change in an international political process makes you feel as though your voice is so powerful – even more powerful as it is backed up by ten million more members of WAGGGS. As such, we will remain inspired to take our own action to achieve sustainable development when we return to our own countries.

Pippa Gardner and Maggie Simmons.

Find out more about what Pippa and Maggie and the WAGGGS delegation are up to at Rio+20, and what you can do to support them! http://www.wagggs.org/en/rioplus20

My guiding inspiration

At the end of June, all the units in High Barnet District are getting together to hold an On Your Marks event to celebrate the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. While planning it, I was thinking about all the people I know at Girlguding UK who inspire me to work a little bit harder to provide more help to my community through guiding.
As a child, I was never a Rainbow, Brownie or Guide. I wanted to be, but the waiting list for my local unit was just too long and there wasn’t room for me! It is largely because of this experience that I have chosen to become an adult volunteer. It meant I could help get some girls off a waiting list and I get to do all the things I missed out on as a child! I started helping out once a week and soon realised all I’d missed out on when I was young: fun, friendship, female solidarity.

I have moved quite a lot in the last few years and have always found that Girlguiding UK helps me to settle in to a new area and give me a sense of belonging in a new community. This was especially so when I moved to North London in 2010 and suddenly found myself with no job, no nearby friends and no idea where anything was! Luckily, I’d planned ahead, got in touch with guiding in the area and was placed with a Brownie unit in desperate need of help. And I’m still there. Despite a tough couple of years, I keep going back every week.

The girls are fab (even the ones who make me want to scream sometimes), but it’s really my fellow Leaders that make it special. I know wonderful women who have been in guiding for over 30 years and still bring energy and enthusiasm to every meeting; women, who work full time and have their own children, but still come along every week to run Guides; and women who decided to run two meetings back-to-back because they knew, so many girls were waiting to join, and wanted to give them the opportunity that I never had - to join Girlguiding UK. Despite an age gap of more than 30 years, we all come together every Friday night to do something that women and girls have been doing for over 100 years, and that makes me feel like I’m really a part of something pretty special.

So, I’m writing this blog post to say ‘Thank you’ to those women, who have inspired me to stick with guiding and shown me how much it can give you back if you give it your all. I hope that one day I can give someone the sense of belonging that you have given me.

Thank you.

'Together We Can'...Help children escape poverty

The 5^th Potters Bar Brownies have been very busy raising awareness of the Eight Millennium Development Goals through a resource called ‘Together We Can’.

The Brownies decided to support a charity called ‘Mary’s Meals’ with their backpack appeal, which helps children from poor families to get to school in countries like Liberia and Malawi. Very often these families cannot afford to buy basic things like pencils and notebooks, or even suitable clothes to wear to school, and so children miss out on an education. Along with the free school meal that Mary’s Meals provides (costing as little as £6.15 per child, per year) the backpacks that we send, help children to get an education that will help them escape poverty in later life.

We asked all the other uniformed organisations, Scouts, Cubs, Beavers, Girlguiding UK and the members of King Charles the Martyr Church to help us with this project by donating items such as: backpacks, spoons, notebooks, pencils, pens, pencil cases, towels, soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, clothing and flip flops.

 All of the donated items were brought to our church parade on the 25^th March and it was a great success!

We also held a cake and table top sale to raise money for the charity, with all proceeds going towards buying additional items for the backpacks. The donations being put together, compiled 50 full backpacks and we also had a box of spare items. With the money we raised from the cake and table top sale we bought additional items to complete the backpacks and still had £50 to donate to Mary’s Meal. The backpacks which we donated are on their way to Malawi to children in school’s out there who have very little.

We would like to thank everyone who donated items, as it was a whole community effort and a fantastic result for such a worthwhile project. The backpacks and money will make a real difference to children’s lives.