1st Dartford Scout Group have bought these badges since 2007
Report from Mpumalanga, South Africa
As you will hopefully be aware, Scouts and Leaders from Medway Towns have been involved in ongoing fund raising and projects in support of Scouting in Mpumalanga, South Africa. The report and message of thanks below has been received from the South African Scout Association:
We would like to thank you for your support of our Ice Cream Badge project, through which you have made a substantial contribution to the growth and development of Scouting in Mpumalanga – R25,558.00
This year we decided to focus on the development of our Scouting in two major areas. One area being the training of our Patrol Leaders and the other area being the training of our young adult leaders.
For the Patrol Leaders we ran a PL training course for 60 Scouts representing almost every troop in the Province. The course took place over 5 days. It was led by a young adult from a city group in Witbank and tutored by 5 Patrol leaders from a disadvantaged group in a squatter camp, who had previously attended a similar training in Gauteng Province. The course was a fabulous success, using the principals of peer education and learning by doing as key learning methods. Additional to the Scouting skills we added on a special module around three prominent social issues namely: HIV & Aids, gender discrimination and the rights of children.
Our hope is that this specific training will improve the standard of Scouting in the rural groups, so that the aims and goals of the Scout programme will be realized to their optimum in all the groups in the Province. We held our first Provincial PL forum in June and look forward to sending the representatives to the National forum soon.
We also recognized that our average age of adult leaders was quite old and that we have a huge potential within the Rover age group to become Troop and Pack Scouters and more. However, the greatest challenge with these young people is the fact that they do not have money to pay for training, considering the fact that many are still students, others are unemployed and most are living in impoverished communities.
We subsidized a Warrant training for 23 Scouters and can now proudly say that we have a strong team of young adults taking leadership of the groups. Furthermore we ran both a Cub and a Scout Woodbadge course and once again focused on training 16 of our most promising young leaders in this prestigious course. We will continue to support them through their various projects and we are looking forward to present many Gilwell Scarves soon. This group will then be qualified to take up leadership roles in our Province and also to become members of our adult training team. A tutor course is planned for later this year.
All of this training was made possible through the funding which you have so generously provided to us throughout the year, through making the costs to the participants realistically affordable. The office has also been able to operate efficiently to facilitate all these activities.
Of course none of this would have been successful without the dedication and hard work of our Field Officers, who co-ordinate the invitations to the courses, advise on suitable candidates and then continually support the participants in the implementation of their learning. It has been exciting this year because we were able to add two more Field Officers to our team, increasing the Districts that we could develop and work in.
Ultimately all of this progress will bring more and better Scouting to the children in the Province, and that is our main aim. You can be assured that your support has directly influenced our activities this year and for this we are extremely thankful and grateful.
Wonderful sunny Scouting greetings from everyone in Mpumalanga.