Youth Shaped
Contents
- Welcome from the Chair
- Different thinking for a different world
- Safety first
- Our purpose and method
- Vision and strategic objectives
- Skills for Life: Our plan to prepare better futures 2018–2025
- Growth
- Inclusivity
- Youth Shaped
- Community Impact
- Three pillars of work
- Programme
- People
- Perception
- Theory of Change
- Theory of Change (diagram)
- The impact of Scouts on young people
- Our finances
- Trustees’ responsibilities
- Independent Auditor’s Report to the Trustees of The Scout Association
- Consolidated statement of financial activities
- Balance sheet
- Statements of cash flows
- Our members
- How we operate
- Governance structure and Board membership – 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2021
- Our advisers
- Our thanks
- Investors in People
Youth Shaped
We believe that young people should be shaping their experience at Scouts. We know that only when young people have the avenues to use their voices and be included in decision making, can we truly support young people on their journey to becoming our future leaders, in and outside of Scouts. By shaping the movement together with youth members, Youth Commissioners and the like, we increase the excitement for and relevancy of our programme, and even increase the number of young people achieving the top awards possible in the programme.
Our Youth Shaped goals
By 2025:
– 250,000 young people will be shaping their Scouts experience each year
– 50% of young people will be achieving the top awards
Progress on Youth Shaped
In 2019, we consulted 773 young people, 200 Youth Commissioners, and volunteers to discover what youth shaped meant to them and initiate conversations about a new YouShape Award.
Together, we agreed that the YouShape Award and Youth Shaped Scouting needed to move from an annual campaign to become a core part of the programme, providing better support to youth members to legitimately shape their programme throughout the year.
The Programme team continues to work closely with the UK Youth Commissioners and their deputies to develop activities for this new award, which will highlight key elements of the Youth Shaped philosophy: ‘Plan’, ‘Lead’ and ‘Represent’. We’ve designed activities that empower young people and adults, giving members the confidence to have young people at the center of their Scouts experience.
As well as shaping the programme, we’ve also increased the amount of support we provide to our young people in leadership positions. Currently, we have 537 inspiring local Youth Commissioners across the UK. We ran multiple support webinars and days over the year, with over 150 Youth Commissioners from across the UK taking part in our largest support day to date.
Community of Practice
Our focus continues to be on supporting young people to take up leadership positions and to achieve their top awards.
In 2020, we strengthened our approach on making sure that young people are at the heart of decisions by creating a new Youth Shaped Community of Practice. This group are already playing a major influencing role in key national decision making bodies, and this will expand to guarantee that every one of our decisions are shaped by young people.
What’s next?
The pandemic has inevitably slowed our progress in designing activities for the YouShape Awards as we focused our efforts on supporting the movement, but we’re optimistic about its future. We’re currently developing high quality activities to support the award for the Beaver, Cub, Scout and Explorer sections.
The award will be supported and promoted locally by our hundreds of Youth Commissioners across the UK. It’ll help us to achieve our strategic goal of 250,000 young people shaping their Scouts adventure by 2025.
We’ll continue integrating the Youth Shaped Community of Practice across our national decision-making boards, making sure that the group represents our diverse youth membership and ultimately aiming to have young people sitting on every national board.
