A growing County

Today I collected the Census data from Joyce, our Registration Secretary. I haven't gone through it in great detail but overall we are up 1%. 2/3 of Divisions have grown - the biggest growth being 10% in River Ash. The remainder have declined with the biggest fall being 10%. Interestingly both Woking divisions fell which makes me wonder if there is a wider demographic change there. Leader numbers have remained fairly steady but we have a few more units than last year. Joining lists have fluctuated and we still have a big demand for Rainbow places where the girls are already old enough.
We probably need to do some work to work out what is happening - is it something about the locality, the leaders, the commissioner, PR.......it would be great to discover the reasons before the Recruitment training on Saturday but I expect that is optimistic.

An important day for the future

When I became CC I set myself the task of doing proper planning. To do that you need to know what you are trying to be - or what, in this case, the County should be trying to be. On Saturday a further step was taken towards achieving that when 30 Commissioners, Trainers and Advisers joined me and our facilitator Fiona to work through some thoughts about what we can do. It was an interesting session and ther were many great ideas. The Guiding Development Group meets on Thursday to try and put them into the start of a plan. Exciting times!

The best campsite in Surrey?

At the end of last year, two Guiders took on the task of reviewing Herons Wey and Weyside. For those outside Surrey West, these are our campsite and Residential centre and are in a beautiful, peaceful part of Surrey on a 50 acre site with many activities on-site. We have never looked closely at how it runs and the report, delivered in February, made many recomendations. These have been presented to the County Executive and the Herons Wey Management Committee and yesterday a sub-committee met for the first time to discuss how to move forward. Several of the recommendations have already been actioned - either wholly or in part. Some others need to be started on while others may be set aside as either too hard or not appropriate at this time. Included in this is a wide-ranging review of the marketing of Herons Wey (we are focussing on the campsite here and not on Weyside which already has very high levels of use). Watch this space. In the meantime I am after people who have never camped at Heron's Wey or prefer not to, who will visit it and take a critical view of what is there and what should be added/improved/changed. Volunteers?

Silent Guiding

As part of our effort to Change The World, 98th Old Palace Guides (my unit - if you want to know about the unit name I'll let you know sometime), held a sponsored silence tonight for Plan International. It was very hard for some of them! However, the best bit was the silent singing of Taps which had several of them in hysterics. It is moments like that that make it all worthwhile.

Life outside Guiding

Today was my husband's 50th birthday so we went to Le Manoir Aux Quat'Saisons. We used an offer from the RHS which is actually really good value for a meal with all wines included as well as a tour of the garden and a flower arranging demonstration (not on all of them). Anyway, what really made our day was that our paths crossed that of Raymond Blanc, the owner and well-known chef, who both welcomed us and shook our hands - how cool is that? Of course, I am expecting great things when it comes to my birthday in November.

Strategy Day plans

Today I met Fiona who is going to facilitate our Strategy Day in a couple of weeks time. We discussed the agenda and what I hoped to achieve from the day. If it does what we have talked about it will be fantastic and I hope will energise people - now all I need is a few more people to come along and help Surrey West plan for the next five years.

Herons Wey Borehole

There are times when I think the borehole will never be dug - and perhaps I shouldn't count my chickens now. However, in spite of a major change in plans, it looks likely to be up and running before the camping season.

A change of plans? Yes, I had a couple of concerns:
1. the borehole would be at the far end of the site and Weyside and Garners Field would both be a long way away.
2. there seemed to be little support for the single toilet block we had planned - not one of the 30 responses so far from campers supported it. Therefore, the borehole didn't have to be near the meadow at all.
Moving it up next to the powerhouse, where it will now be, seemed much more sensible as it means the lower sites can be served from the mains while the top sites, Weyside and Garners Field are served by the borehold and will therefore have better supply.
Not only that but there is room in the power house for the machinery and tank so we don't need to spend the £1500 or so to build a separate shed.
And so there won't be an eyesore.
The only question now is where to separate the mains water system from the borehole system as the waters can not mix.