Deki Loans - A great Christmas gift for kids and teens

I get a little bit annoyed when someone buys me 'a goat' for Christmas.  It's a juxtaposition, I know I should get a warm fuzzy feeling inside but I also wanted something for 'me'.  You just put your goat to one side and poof the  fun is gone.

But I do like giving (and receiving)  Deki loans as gifts because the person you give it to has to do something with it.  They decide who to loan the money to and they get the money back for themselves at the end of it.  It's a hands on charitable gift.

The person you give the loan to will pick the person they choose to loan the money to and then yes, they have to wait, but the loan will be repaid fully in 6-12 months. At that point your recipient can then choose to withdraw the money from the scheme and keep it for themselves or invest it with another entrepreneur. 

They can have a direct impact on people’s lives by lending anything from £10 to an entrepreneur in the developing world.  100% of the money you lend goes directly to the person they choose to support.
Deki is a charity designed to help people work their way out of poverty, so the loans don’t generate profits for lenders. 

There are lots of people to choose from that are looking for money for different business ideas. The total loans are often made up of mini loans from lots of different people so with £10 you can 'complete' a loan and set the person off on their journey to work their own way out of poverty.

This is a great way to give money as a gift to a tween or teen and let them make a difference to a life but with complete autonomy, they choose who, what for and they will see the money come back to them.

To give a loan as a gift you just pay for it and print out a gift voucher, they have something to unwrap and then they can do their favourite thing - log onto the internet!

And remember the money does come back to them and if they want to they can take it back for themselves and buy the iTunes voucher they always dreamed of, or they can re-lend it to another person of their choice.

I think it's a great way to introduce children to charitable giving, to give them a sense of being part of one large world and learn that as individuals they can make a difference to someone very far away.

The fact that they can have the money in the end if they want it makes it different to your standard 'goat' or 'mosquito net' gift.  But maybe they will re-lend it so that it really can be the gift that keeps on giving.

Have a look:

 

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17th century grammar, one handed clocks, thatch and wonder

 Cog had to visit a new music teacher this week, in a village not too far from where we live.

Whilst I was waiting for Cog to finish I noticed this building plaque. I pondered 'this/were' and couldn't make it sound right no matter how I read it. I'm sure the school and well endowed Sir George must know their grammar better than what I do.

I was so busy pondering the words, I didn't notice the truly noticeable thing about the front of this building until I was looking at the photograph later.

The one handed clock.

This is from the school website: 

"Single-handed clock, possibly one of only a dozen of its kind in the country, with the clock face hour intervals divided into quarters and half hours (in the 17th Century when the school was built, time was not so critically measured as we now do in the 21st Century)."

 I've said it before, but I live in a lovely part of the world and it's (mostly) tourist free.

 The church yard was peaceful and pretty normal for this sort of village church, but this memorial stood out like a sore thumb amongst the rest of the 'normal' headstones.  I pulled the ivy off the writing to read about a 15 month old girl.  Such a huge memorial for one so small, at at a time when infant mortality would have been fairly common.

But this memorial also stood out.  She was a vicar's wife.

Born 1891 and died 1973.  What a lot of change to live through.

She would have been :
9 when Queen Victoria died,
10 when Edward VII was crowned
20 when the Titanic sunk,
22 when World War 1 started,
26 when the Spanish flu epidemic was killing millions,
45 when King George was crowned
47 at the start of World War 2,
53 when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima,
61 when Queen Elizabeth was crowned
71 in the Cuban missile crisis

That's just the big stuff, what about the lesser events but the ones that would change life so much: electricity becoming common place, fridges, washing machines, television, telephones, even the changes to transport, the introduction of the social state, contraception and free love.   The world at the end of her life would have been unrecognisable from the world at the start.

An hour of my life spend wandering and pondering, an hour well spent.

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Queens Guides

We are so blessed in my County with a great commissioner so full of energy and motivation and she seems to inspire her leaders forever onwards.

Today we had as many Queens Guides as they could muster in our county at a big get together to celebrate their achievement.  There were 160 from many generations.  Some ladies there received their awards in the 1940s. (A couple of Queens Scouts sneaked in too but we won't mention that!)

It was a lovely afternoon of displays, tea, scones, bands, presentations and the UK Chief Guide Gill Slocombe came to join in and make some new presentations too.

The Queens Guide is a hard award to work for, it takes a lot of time, effort and dedication.  Every person there that had achieved it had every right to celebrate and feel very proud. 
I was never Queens Guide material in my teens and I'm not sure I could pass now but I am very fortunate in having some great Guiding blue blood friends who did get the award and one chose to take me along as her guest.

What today has done for me though is make me realise it is my responsibility as a Ranger Leader to make sure the girls coming through me now get the opportunity to tackle this award if they want to. I need to be able to support them though it and this will be quite a challenge in itself.  Being a Senior Section leader is a serious challenge compared to a Brownie Leader. I hope I am up to the job.

I look at leaders like our last County Commissioner and wish I had her grace and style. Our current County Commissioner is one of the most motivating people I have ever met, I am just totally in awe of these ladies and aspire to be half the leader they are.

I wonder if I'll finally have it wrapped just at the point where I'm herded off to Trefoil!

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Diamond Jubilee Youth Enclosure

I wanted to share with you the 'sheer luxury' of the Youth Enclosure we were in on the Mall for the Diamond Jubilee Procession.

We had to be there before 9am which meant a very early train, tube and walk but we made it.  Although we seemed to be one of the last groups in, there was still plenty of space for us to stand.  I did speak to a Guider from another group and appealed to her 'Guiding Spirit'  to allow our Brownies to stand in front of her and her other leaders, not her Brownies, they had room a plenty.   The guilt trip seemed to work just fine and our girls had a great view with the taller adults stood behind.  I felt it a shame that I needed to ask, and a Guider I was speaking to from Lincoln came and repeated a similar story to me later  (sort yourselves out Guiders - the girls come first).

The land sloped slightly and I was happy leaning up against a tree to rest my back a bit and watched it all happen from a little further back.

The area we were in was completely enclosed and ringed by Police the whole time. Proof of identity was required to get in.  We had our own loos, that were clean, with paper and hand wash and stayed that way the whole day.  We rarely queued for the loo and when we did, the police sent us a little further into an area the public were not allowed into to use their loos.  The Rainbows were making the most of the privilege with what seemed like as many toilet trips as they could possibly get away with!

We cheered the Queen on her way to the service.

And then sat and had a picnic whilst we listened to the service over the tannoy.  It was so good to have space to spread out into, to leave our places at the barrier and know that later we could just stroll back to it.  In contrast HWMBO was jammed in crowds at St Pauls unable to see or move whilst our girls sat and made crowns and did some colouring in.  The Beavers played football and the Scouts were climbing the trees!

Lots of bands marched past us, so many that we started to wonder if they were going round in circles and changing their hats around the corner.

To the side of us was Horse Guards Road and ceremonial soldiers were riding through there too, I think this was part of the Changing of the Guard.  The kids ran back and forth between the front and back of the enclosure with things happening on both sides.

We had a view of Horse Guards parade as the 60 gun salute happened, they had previously pulled the guns up the Mall.

And yet whilst all this was happening, some children just chose to play football!  If you look through this picture you will see the crowds further down the Mall stood forty deep.  Whereas we just left our bags piled up knowing they were relatively safe and stood around chatting, cheering and generally enjoying the moment.

We had a fantastic view of everything and even whilst we were waiting for the 'best bits' there was always something happening be it soldiers marching, police moving about, horses, bands, guns, yet more toilet trips (!)  The police cadets were used to look after us. Great training for them and I think the police knew they could trust us to behave.







 I think it is absolutely fantastic that someone decided the Youth Groups deserve this space.  Taking children in large groups to see the procession would have been an impossible mission for us without this and 1600 (ish) children and leaders got the experience of a lifetime.

I know I keep saying it, but sometimes I just can't believe our luck.

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Awesome just doesn't describe it

I've done quite a lot of things across the Jubilee but being at the front of a procession of 250,000 people probably was the best bit.

I'm not being facetious when I say probably either because behind this most incredible moment is another Guiding story of amazing parental trust and privilege.

On Tuesday we took a number of Brownies, Guides, Young Leaders and Young Adult Leaders to London.  We were so lucky to get special tickets to the private youth enclosure and spent a glorious day in London and I plan to do a couple of posts covering it as one would be just too long.

These pictures are lifted from the BBC as I don't have personal photos of the moment.















That big banner is ours.

I didn't take my own photos as my priority at the time was ensuring I went home with as many children as I left out with and given the crowd we were in, that meant hanging onto them for dear life.  We had a good briefing from the Police before we started the procession about exactly how they would control it and about what the crowd would do once the masses were allowed to join the youth groups.  I also had a conversation by phone with a very experienced Scout leader (he and others had travelled down with us to help out but hadn't tickets to go in the enclosure) who explained how to line up the girls into a block, surrounded by leaders so the crowds would at least run around us and not break up our group. And it worked out fine.

We were at the front, and stayed close to the front all the way down the Mall. As we walked up to the Victoria Memorial, all the people in the stands (from the previous nights concert) cheered and waved. I was so proud to be there, all of us in uniform, Guides and Scouts together.

A couple of the brownies with us had only just turned 7 and it was their first time in London.  But it's not just trust from the parents of the littlies, it's the parents of all of the children we took. 

What a massive privilege to be allowed to take them, to be trusted to keep them safe.  Of course we are trained to do it, we do risk assessments galore, we briefed, de-briefed, we labelled them, counted, double counted, then counted again.  We even had extra experienced adults with us to help with the journey on the tubes as we expected mayhem.

We gave those children an experience that they will never forget, something they will remember for ever which is great, it's what we aim to do, we call them 'Mountain Top Moments'

BUT those children allowed me to have an experience I will never forget, something I will remember for ever and that is the privilege of being a Guider.

Awesome.

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