Meeting #24: NS Membership Challenge

I Am Growing Guiding in Nova Scotia Membership Challenge

You in Guiding: Learn About Guiding (YiG2)

Nova Scotia created a Membership Challenge to help with their goals of retaining and increasing membership. The pink part is earned through doing activities and the blue part is earned by increasing membership in your unit.

As Guides, we needed to do 8 activities to earn the pink crest. We had done a number of activities as a unit through the year to complete this--just through our normal unit activities--and we used this meeting to reinforce what we did to earn this challenge and then do a couple of activities specifically for the challenge.

5 Activities from I Am Growing Guiding Challenge:

1. Participate in a bridging activity with at least TWO different levels of Guiding.--our Halloween parade with Sparks and Brownies
2. Do a service project in your community while wearing your uniform. --Feed NS
3. Participate in a large Guiding activity such as a District or Area camp, or day camp. --Thinking Day skate
4. Participate in a community event such as Remembrance Day, a community parade or fair -- we attended Remembrance Day as a District

3 Activities from I Am Keeping Guiding Strong Challenge

1. Share your Unit activities: send a photo (make sure everyone has a photo release), a poem, or an article describing one of your Unit activities to your District, Area or Provincial PR person.--my fellow Guider and I have tweeted a number of our activities to @GGCNovaScotia. Camp, Feed NS, Screen Printing, Thinking Day--whenever we do something fun, we try to remember to tweet it. We learned well from our session on Social Media at the NS Guider Conference!
2. Plan a joint activity with another Unit. -- Campfire with the Sparks

So that left us with one activity from each section to work on.

6:30-7:00 Patrol Time--we asked the girls to think of things they can do as they grow with Guiding, in Pathfinders, Rangers, and as an adult. (Make a list of Guiding things you want to do when you are older. Share the list with your Unit.)

7:00-7:15: We discussed what they came up with. International trips--both as independent groups and on National sponsored trips; Canada Cord, which counts as a high school credit (and then we had to explain what a high school credit was and why you would want one!); Chief Commissioners' award; Junior Leaders in younger units; scholarships; camps. (YiG2#3)

One group misinterpreted the instructions and came with things that they've already learned and how these skills will transfer into every day use, which was also interesting to hear!

7:15-8:00 Write a song about Guiding. 

We asked them to break up into groups of 2-4 and make up a song about Guiding. They were all very creative and wonderful. One of our other Guiders recorded them, and when she sends them to me, I'll put them up here. 

8:00-8:20 Games

We played Fruit Basket, which we had planned to play when we were doing the Healthy Eating badge, but ran out of time. They had a lot of fun with this game. After they played with fruit for a while, we changed it up to be animals.

8:20-8:30 Closing