ANNUAL REPORT 2024

We started 2024 with a trip to the panto ~ always a fun night & enjoyed by all who attended.  Guides celebrated Burns night making fudge & shortbread & learnt a little bit of the traditions too. A slightly messy evening making bird feeders to help our feathered friends through the winter.

Some Brownies were invited to join us to celebrate Shrove Tuesday ~ everyone enjoyed their pancakes & we are delighted that a number of the Brownies have decided to move up & join us at Guides.  It was so lovely to have Brownies, Guides & Rangers all working together & having fun. 

As always both Guides & Rangers completed some Guiding unit meeting & skills builder activities.  One of the older Guides joined the Rangers & we had a great day taking part in Hertfordshire Scouts Monopoly challenge ~ it’s a long & tiring day but really great fun & the team did really well in their section too, coming 6th out of 24 teams. 

We held two weekend residentials one for Guides with a time travel theme & one for 14 + Guides & Rangers for the Great Ranger bake off.  During the second weekend Jo worked towards gaining her Ranger going away module so is now qualified to take the Rangers away for the future.

Our Great Patrol Hunt team enjoyed taking part in round two of this year’s competition & are looking forward to the final camping round later in the summer term.  Our Guide term ended with a themed wide game evening marking St Patricks Day & then some community service to clear The Dell as part of Hitchin Forum’s Spring litter pick.  Sadly there was lots of litter but after a fun morning it looked much better.

Although we had to change our plans as the weather put paid to our plans at the start of the Summer term including cancelling the annual St George’s day parade we soon recovered & carried on with our original plans.  We invited 7th Hitchin Brownies to join us for an evening & enjoyed an evening of wide games, food & ended with a campfire ~ we look forward to welcoming all those Brownies moving up over the next few terms.  We created a craft for Father’s day, did some unit meeting activities & said goodbye to the hall for pretty much the rest of the term.

We had a fantastic weekend aboard Lancelot for a Guide narrowboat weekend ~ all the Guides took turns to steer the boat, work the locks, cook & do crafts & all have asked to go again for a longer time ~ we are looking into that & are also looking forward to our trip on Lancelot’s sister boat Guinevere with the older Guides & Rangers at the beginning of September.

A lady from the Hertfordshire Guiding Walking Team came & introduced us to Geocaching which led us around Ickleford looking for these mini treasures.  We enjoyed a few weeks at Hitchin Youth allotment project, planting, watering & eating some of the produce. 

A fantastic evening of Kayaking & SUPs was held at ESSA ~ despite the traffic trying to make the journey harder ~ the Guides & Rangers that came had a brilliant evening with a few Guides making their promises out on the water during the evening too.

Our GPH team ~ Octopii enjoyed the last camp round of this year’s Great Patrol hunt competition ~ well done for taking part & we hope you all enjoyed yourselves.

We usually run a town event every summer & this year did an alphabet scavenger hunt. 

The Rangers worked around GCSEs through the term to organise our Guide end of year party. They ran their take on the Olympics & two of the leaders were in charge of running a Parisienne Creperie ~ the Guides had a great night & the pancakes were a success ~ thanks to the Rangers for their hard work planning & running the evening.

We ran a week’s summer camp & in a change to the weather last year had a week of sunshine.  We had the theme of pirates & Guides & Rangers took part in a wide range of activities to test their pirate skills both onsite adventurous activities & others we had arranged ourselves. We had a great time off site too with an inflatable water course & mountain biking in the New Forest. Catering skills were demonstrated with a cooking competition through the week & every patrol cooked a fab two course meal within the budget set. There were crafts, campfires & everyone looked after their mascot parrots too. A great week all in all & a wonderful way to round off our term & Guiding year although sadly we have wished farewell to Kirsty as she is off to university in September.  We hope she will be back for events in the future & wish her well with her paramedic science degree.

After recovering from our unit summer camp the Autumn term started with another residential weekend ~ this time for older Guides & Rangers on a lovely Narrowboat Guinevere.  We had a brilliant weekend, going up & down locks, through tunnels, we did sadly get well & truly stuck in the mud too though ~ a tree had fallen overnight so we were forced over to the shallower part of the canal & we’d obviously eaten too much birthday cake as we celebrated one of our Ranger’s birthday over the weekend as we had stuck fast.  A massive effort later including some very helpful passers by & one ranger who was driving being told to ‘floor it’ as we budged slightly & we were off again.  The weekend finished with our newest Ranger making her promise a lovely end to a memorable weekend.

The term then got under way with our normal mix of Unit meeting & Skills builder activities for both Guide & Ranger units.  Guides & Rangers did some cooking nights, Guides learning how to make & use a simple sauce for a variety of things & Rangers starting to practice & make dishes for a useful cook book for them all to take when they go off to university.  We did a supermarket comparison evening seeing if more expensive items really were worth the extra, unanimously orange juice was a yes but crisps, biscuits & lemonade many preferred the cheaper versions ~ it did make us all think about what we eat & question brand loyalties.  Guides did some firelighting & making smores ~ the Rangers were very quick to dive outside to join the fun, showing the Guides exactly how a marshmallow should be toasted ~ there are certain standards to this that must be maintained 😊.  Rangers got involved with testing a new badge for Girlguiding & gave very thorough feedback to headquarters, they definitely took up the tag line Guiding had previously had of ‘giving girls a voice’.

We entered a team into round one of Hertfordshire Girlguiding county’s Great Patrol hunt & our team had a good day solving problems & taking part in the fun activities planned.

Both sections came & took part in helping to clear The Dell of rubbish as part of our twice yearly participation in Hitchin Forum’s Big Tidy up.  Rubbish was generally a little down which can only be a good thing although we still had plenty to clear & had a fun morning making this little bit of Hitchin a little cleaner again.  Guides & Rangers then represented both our unit & Hitchin Guiding at the town Remembrance Parade & Service ~ such an honour to be part of such an important event.

We are delighted that two of our Rangers attended international selection events this term & have been chosen to attend trips to The Azores & to Sangam ~ The Guide World Centre in India.  We look forward to helping them raise some of the funds for their trips ~ keep your eyes peeled.

Crafts featured nearer the end of term with decorations for our tree festival entry being made & the Rangers printed some bags using different printing techniques.  We had a great end of term outing with everyone joining in a bowling night at Hollywood bowl in Stevenage.

Our last residential & sixth of the year was our always popular Christmas weekend, we run this every few years.  We welcomed a new leader & were glad to have Charlotte come back to help us for the weekend too.  We had a mix of Guides & Rangers attend with some slightly different activities for each section to take part in over the weekend.  We made cakes, biscuits, brownies, truffles, fudge, a number of decorations & did a number of other craft bits. Saturday evening we all enjoyed a full Christmas dinner followed by some fun & games.  Two of our new Rangers & one Guide made their promises with us on Sunday morning whilst we also enjoyed birthday cake ~ December isn’t just about Christmas & if you are going to celebrate your birthday at a Guide camp or holiday then there must be cake. A wonderful end to the year & very much the start of Christmas for us all.

Our last event of the year was decorating our Christmas Tree for the annual Holy Saviour Christmas Tree Festival & our decorating team did a great job.  We then had a number of Guides & Rangers helping again this year as both waitresses or in the Church itself as stewards & all had a lovely day supporting such a lovely community event.

 

As always our leader team evolves as people move on, Keziah left us earlier in the year & then over the summer our Young Leader Kirsten & Leader Kirsty also said a sad farewell after camp.  We wish them both well & Kirsty hopes she will be back to help when she can whilst she is at university & beyond.  We welcomed a New Young leader in September & Ruby is now fully settled as part of our leader team, having been a Guide & Ranger with us it’s great that she’s moved into this role.  We welcomed a new leader Lucie who has joined us to help on odd occasions & some of our leaders stay in the background ready to come back if they can which we are always so pleased & grateful for.

 

Thanks to all our current leaders, Amelia, Gwynne, Andy & Ruby for everything they have done to help prepare & run our activities this year.  We are all volunteers & do all this alongside work, families, school & study.  We couldn’t run this unit without being a great team & I really couldn’t wish for a better one.

 

Thank you to all of you at Holy Saviour for your support of our Guide & now Ranger unit & all your lovely comments through the year as you see us on our adventures.  As ever we want to thank our fantastic Guides & Rangers, these are their units & it’s because of them that we are lucky enough to be leaders.  You make our efforts worthwhile so thank you, without you we wouldn’t have the units & your smiles & achievements make it all worth it.  We hope that both Guides & Rangers will continue to grow. 

 

As always this report is the highlights of what we have got up to despite its length, sorry & thanks for reading.

 

Jo Clinch

 

UNIT LEADER 

11th Hitchin (Holy Saviour) Guides & Rangers