I’m really pleased in the last few weeks of my term as County Youth Commissioner to be talking to you about the incoming YouShape Award. This award launches on 5th October 2021 and is now a permenant part of the programme for Beavers to Explorers ensuring there is a focus on rewarding and encouraging young people shaping their own scouting experience.
The award will entail customisable goals and objectives meaning it will be accessible for every young person so that they can each feel challenged but also that the award is attainable and meaningful for them.
There are loads of resources to push this out including for social media, these can be found on the brand centre.
I encourage you and your other leaders to read about the award and give it a try with young people in your sections. You may be surprised by their interest and passion to assist in planning and creating new activities and events.
The link below has all the information you will need, and the staged badge is available to purchase on Scout Store for each of the sections.
Link: https://www.scouts.org.uk/volunteers/running-your-section/youth-shaped/youshape-award/
The award shows how important young people making decisions with adults continues to be in scouting and provides a fantastic opportunity to empower young people with a reminder on their uniform of how valued their opinion is. This award is great short term but also helps us find amazing young people whether they become young leaders or become adult volunteers, continuing their scouting journey.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and I would really like to say this award is the culmination of a lot of work by young people across the past few years and it would be amazing to see this being rolled out in our County.
One a personal note thank you to all the adults and young people I’ve met in my time as County Youth Commissioner. It really has been an incredible journey in this role, with opportunities and skills for life I’ve picked up that would be hard to get outside of Scouting.
Please tell your older explorers and network age leaders to look out for the County Youth Commissioner role being advertised in the next few months, and if anyone wants to talk to me about the role, please feel free to get in touch.
Best wishes,
Lewis
Lewis Foster
County Youth Commissioner
