Community Impact

At Scouts, helping our communities is a huge part of what we do. We’ve always been committed to social action and making a difference, both to the young people taking part in projects and the communities they’re helping.

While high quality community impact projects take planning and time, they’re essential to any Scouts programme, especially for young people hoping to achieve our top awards.

Our Community Impact goals

By 2025:

• At least 42% of young people will make a positive impact in their community each year
• 40% of young people aged 4-14, and 10% of those aged 14+, will be achieving their top awards

A Million Hands

Over the last year, we’ve continued our ‘A Million Hands’ campaign that we started in 2019 with charity partners. It’s our award-winning campaign to mobilise members to support a variety of themes picked by our young people.

The campaign provides ‘off the shelf’ resources for leaders, Young Leaders (aged 14–17) and young people themselves, making it easier to deliver our Community Impact Staged Activity Badges.

Young people selected these themes and partners for 2019–2023:

• Better mental health for all, with Mind, Inspire and Scottish Association for Mental Health (SAMH)
• Supporting refugees and displaced children, with Save the Children
• Understanding disability, with the National Autistic Society
• Protecting our environment, with World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)
• Ending homelessness, with Crisis and The Simon Community NI
• Kindness in every community, with the British Red Cross

Progress on Community Impact

• Our A Million Hands webpage, containing information on how we leave the world a little better than we found it, as well as all our themed pages, have been viewed 20,824 times.
• Two of the top five most popular activities on our activity finder are A Million Hands activities.
• The Community Impact Staged Badge made a comeback after a couple of years of dipped sales. Badge sales rose to 38,010, which is 182% of 2021 badge sales, and more than the previous two years combined.
• As well as A Million Hands, we’ve responded to national and international events that young people felt empowered to act on. Following the response to the continued crisis in Ukraine, 649 Scouts contributed to a welcome booklet for young, displaced children, which’ll be issued by Save the Children. We supported this with more than 20 activities co-created with Save the Children to support Scouts to build empathy and understanding of what young people face during wars and crises.
• With Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s passing, Scouts took the opportunity to carry out 250,000 acts of kindness for the Queen, such as planting flowers and donating to food banks in their communities. Young people were encouraged to take action by showing their kindness on a variety of topics, from community outreach to supporting the environment.
• 234 Scouts volunteered at Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Lying in State. They supported members of the public in the queue with bottles of water, first aid, and blankets, and organised a food bank.
• We sold 6,498 of our Squirrels Local Superhero activity badges in 2022. This dedicated badge adds to their Community Impact Staged Badge. Research shows that the earlier you take part in social action, the more likely you are to develop the habit of taking social action throughout your life. This is why it's a key part of the Squirrels programme.

What’s next

Over the next 12 months, young people will lead us as we review A Million Hands and use it to shape our community impact programme in the years to come.

Our Community Impact group of young people from across the UK will carry on leading volunteers of all levels to positively impact their communities locally and nationally.

This’ll result in 39% of young people taking part in community impact projects in 2023, which is a step towards our target of 42% by the end of 2025.

We’ll also keep working with partners in the UK and internationally to review how our programme supports Scouts during continued international crises.