Revive & Sparkle - but don't make the audience cry!

My first county day where I facilitated the crying of a Brownie Leader - to be fair it was tears of joy! We ended up with a really emotional session - there were 11 leaders and the overall theme was sparkle & shine so I was working through the 5 Essentials one by one looking at how they could be represented in the unit programme in a fun, enjoyable but meaningful way.

We started talking about GG's new hash tag campaign that had started that week and one of the leaders had managed to save it to her tablet (I had tried and failed) we all watched the video which was really hard hitting. It starts with a group of skate boarders - one of whom is wearing a guide hoody and then we hear the words of (discouraging?) men coming from the mouths of girls in various scenarios. Very effective. The leader in question become quite emotional because she was proud of joining guiding and everything it stands for!

We discussed the Quality pilot and I delivered the message on the programme changes (as much as we new at that moment as this was pre November Guiding magazine) and fair to say there was a lot of positivity about all the changes to come. I enjoyed the session but didn't really stick to the Training Plan (but did cover most of the material - although I forgot to use the red, yellow, & green voting cards) they were a really caring bunch of leaders and I would happily go back there again to train. I was particularly impressed with the Counties merchandise e.g notebooks, pens, A4 folders, shopping bags and clothing - they even had a badge for their county day.