The three levels of the Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) awards are integral to the Scouts top awards scheme. They also strongly encourage explorer age young people to become young leaders, which helps us all to deliver a great programme for young people from squirrels to adulthood.
Adult participation is needed to help train and supervise the DofE participants for their expedition, and also to assess or certify that they’ve completed the other components of the award. We also need leaders at all levels to encourage, support and facilitate young people to participate and gain the awards for the things that they are already doing to give back to scouting.
NASA Approach
We’re going to be running a practice weekend around Easter, (11-13 April) and then a weekend for Bronze participants to do their expedition in mid-June, and Silver participants in early September. I’ve got interest for Gold, but not yet enough people for an expedition. Ideally we’d find a couple more people and run that in early August.
Groups need to be 4-7 people, and ideally we’d form them from people attending the same school so that they have the opportunity to meet in person to plan their expedition.
How you can help
- We need a handful of people that like walking in the hills (mostly on the low level glens for the expeditions) and camping overnight. You don’t need any permits to be useful, and this is a good opportunity to get some experience if you are interested in a T1 hillwalking permit.
- If you have young leaders, explorers, Network members, or adult leaders under 25 in your group/section/unit then we need you to encourage them to sign up and actively participate
- If you have a scout hut with WiFi I could use it to run a briefing session for those interested, both adults and young people (the DofE scheme does all it’s admin online, so being able to demo this needs WiFi and a projector)
- I need some help with fundraising and building up enough lightweight expedition kit to support two districts worth of 13.5 to 24 year olds.
If you can help here’s a sign-up link https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeE0PfLf9-jkIv7T6Ix4wmHNg_D2J1r4HuDTGz1gNm1MpYP_A/viewform?usp=dialog