Aim

Offer large scale, diverse residential experiences to young people in the local area, promote youth engagement and improve mental well being

We are a quickly growing Scout Group based in Ipswich. The group was founded 11 years ago with a start-up grant; however, the group has not purchased much equipment since then. Our current kit has aged, is not fit for purpose, or does not fit our current ambitions. We have 70 young people and 15 adult leaders/executive members within the group, this includes an expected short term drop due to Covid 19. We facilitate the aspirations of young people, providing them with opportunities they would not otherwise be able to experience, taking part in a fantastic program of activities guided by a dedicated but small team of enthusiastic adult leaders. The purpose of Scouting is to encourage the physical, intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual development of young people so that they take a constructive place in society as responsible citizens, and as members of their local, national and international communities.

The UK currently sees the Scouts struggling with 500 groups at risk of closure and the Scout Association having to sell off big assets to safeguard the future. The UK government has classed Scouting as a vital service during Covid restrictions due to the mental and physical benefits we offer to our young people.

The project hopes to get our group bouncing back as Covid rules relax. We want to be in a position that we can offer safer scouting and a full-scale group camp with all our young people participating when Covid restrictions end. The long term plan is to improve the camping efficiency and quality of equipment allowing for faster setup/take down of equipment and quicker meal preparation.. The equipment will also go a long way to vastly improving the safety of camping, weekly activities and storage of food.

We are hoping to purchase a host of different items to help progress the group in a vast number of different ways. The plan is to buy quality equipment that will last many years therefore ensuring the group has a good founding of assets for the future.

Below is a breakdown on what we are expecting to purchase with money donated.

• Lighting – The group currently has no way of lighting mess tents or marquees for camps, reducing the length of usable camping season significantly. Lighting will also help us in or Covid response allowing for outdoor meetings to take place in a more Covid secure way giving more of a sense of normality to our young people. 
• High Visibility Jackets – To be used for outdoor activities such as hikes and community events such as car parking or litter picking.
• Commercial Gazebo – to be used as a dining shelter/kitchen area, this will replace our current hard to erect, extremely heavy and damaged dining shelter with something strong and lighter to move around whilst more than halving the setup time. This will also help us during our Covid response by allowing outdoor meetings to take place in bad weather conditions.
• Gas Water Boiler – This will allow quick and easy access on camps to up to 37L of boiling water for food preparation and washing up. This improves safety around camp in not having to lift and pour large saucepans of boiling water.
• Flat Plate Cooker – a flat plate will allow everyone’s food to be cooked simultaneously instead of having to do smaller portions in frying pans, this will speed up food service therefore increasing activity time.
• Aqua Roll - This will replace our 25L jerrycans which young people cannot lift, this will allow young people to be more independent in their camping experience and allow leader more time to prepare the next activity.
• Fridge – This will stop the need for daily trips shopping for fresh food and allow more adults to remain on site providing activities whilst having the added benefit of increasing the groups hygiene and being able to cater for young people with refrigerated medications more easily.
• Whiteboard – This will give young people more independence on camp allowing them to check timings and locations of activities planned and the added benefits of being able to use it for group tuition or games/drawing.
• Gas piping – to be used with the water boiler and flat plate cooker and also to replace the piping on our current gas hobs as they go out of date.

The main purpose of the project is to make residential trips easier for leaders and therefore more enjoyable which in turn means we will retain more volunteers in future to help grow the group. This will in turn allow us to grow our membership base and give more young people things to do rather than spending hours in front of a screen or getting into county lines gang/ drug culture.

This project successfully funded on 16th December 2020