That Monday morning feeling

After the excitement of the elections yesterday and the hard canvassing that had been put in by the UK delegation, that Monday morning feeling kicked in on day 4............

This morning started with the announcement of the Chair and Vice Chair of the WAGGGS Europe Committee.  Corinna Hauri has been elected as Chair and we are very proud to announce that our very own Amanda Medler has been elected as Vice Chair.

The delegation then split up and attended 3 different question and answer sessions on future strategy regional and global.  The 3 sessions were:

-          Membership development strategy

-          Thematic strategies

-          Governance Review

 

After a much appreciated coffee break, the delegation took part in discussion groups that provided an opportunity to broaden the exchanges on the regional strategic themes, from a Membership Organisation and Regional perspective.  

Diversity highlighted the challenges faced from well established to relevantly new organisations.  Common themes emerged around migration, social disadvantage and financial restrictions.  There was a lot of overlap with this session and the session on membership growth.  Both highlighted that visibility of Guiding and Scouting was essential and needed to be developed.  For example, in the UK we are known as a trusted organisation and this has enabled us to campaign on issues such as ‘No more page 3’ with far reaching impact around the UK and globally.  There were discussions around the changing roles of our volunteers and young members in society and the impact this has on our membership.  Some Countries explained how they have trailed ‘Being a Leader for a day’ sessions to allow adults to understand what it means to be a volunteer  and that you do not have to be a lead volunteer but can support the organisation in many other ways.

This morning we spend time in various discussion sessions including Diversity and Membership Growth.  For the Diversity sessions we were split into groups made up of neighbouring countries and discussed what were the barriers and solutions