Lead volunteer for learning and development, and former Netherurd working group member, Beatrix joins us to talk about the group’s impact and continuing adult training opportunities since Netherurd closed.

Training for our members is so important for developing their skills and confidence and ensuring we are able to deliver a great guiding experience for all Rainbows, Brownies, Guides and Rangers across Scotland.

In 2022 a working group was formed to feed members’ views into the best use of funds from the sale of Netherurd activity centre. One of the areas of focus for the working group was how we can continue to offer fantastic training opportunities for adult volunteers.

Many suggestions from the report the working group submitted in the summer of 2022 have been taken forward with the support of the Girlguiding Scotland Operational Board. The ideas we gathered from the consultation exercises have now fed into several new projects from the Volunteer experience team. From looking at how we deliver training to our volunteers on the ground, continuing a more flexible delivery format post pandemic and looking forward to delivering training in lots of different styles to suit all of our members. The responses from our volunteers during the consultation process showed that we need to be flexible in our approach and consider not just our usual face to face format but also video calls and online learning options. Our volunteers love to have an opportunity to speak to one another and chat socially as well so we have been looking at how we incorporate that opportunity into our learning offer too.

I am very proud of our wonderful team of Trainers who work incredibly hard to not only deliver training to our volunteers in Scotland but also across the UK. They are continuously working to develop and refresh the content of those sessions. I’m also proud of our ability to be flexible and deliver sessions across the country in ways that work best for them from small county trainings for 15 people to larger scale county days with hundreds of people to hybrid online and in person trainings for areas who can’t get together in one place. We are happy to work with counties to deliver something that will work for them.

Coming up in the next year we are looking forward to continuing to deliver training to our counties and well as developing the training and induction support for our local commissioners. We are going to be offering more support for Leaders in Training completing the Leadership development programme as well as their mentors. We’ll be working towards building more peer support networks where people with the same role in different counties come together to share ideas. And not forgetting our 2024 One Team event in October which will be sure to be a highlight of the year! We are also exploring several exciting ideas which should allow us to deliver trainings in a different way, along with getting new ideas from our membership.

If you have any ideas for training and development that you would like to see offered by Girlguiding Scotland either at a national level or more locally, please get in touch with the learning and development team at ggsld@girlguiding-scot.org.uk. We are always keen to develop new ideas and projects so please speak to us.

Beatrix,
Lead volunteer for learning and development.