At the start of the September term 9th Headstone Brownies ran a Taster Evening as we were keen to welcome girls from all over Harrow to Brownies and show them how much fun they have!
“We came up with a short post that we asked parents to share on Facebook advertising the event which had a great reaction and prompted lots of comments and discussion. We even had some enquires on GO before the Taster Evening.
On the evening, we had a mixture of completely new girls whose parents had seen our post and others who were friends of existing Brownies. There was a really fun atmosphere as the Brownies excitedly showed our visitors around and told them stories of their favourite Brownie adventures.
We started off with a game, each girl shared their name with their favourite Brownie memory, the next girl in the circle added to the chain and tried to remember all the names before her!
We then played some more of the Brownies’ favourite games before one of our favourite activities ‘Girls Can do Anything’. We used templates to colour in a person and add what girls can do. We had a great variety from ‘get muddy’ and ‘play football’ to ‘have adventures’ and ‘be a scientist’. We also challenged the girls to think of something girls can’t do…. nothing!
We finished the evening with an indoor ‘campfire’ made of LED candles but with real life s’mores that they prepared outside in small groups.
We would definitely do this again to raise awareness of Brownies in our local community. Next time we would be clear in requesting an email to sign up prior to the event, – we didn’t make this clear and were worried on the day that we may have too many and have to call in extra leaders!
Of course, in current circumstances we ensured we had extra Covid precautions in place, we used a table next to the door as a check in desk to monitor who was arriving and also chat to their parent/carer before they left.
We gained 5 new Brownies from the event and I’m sure there are many more people who now know about Girlguiding and may have reached out to other units after seeing our post.”
For inspiration take a look at the Girlguiding Recruitment and growth toolkit on the Girlguiding website.