Tonight I was invited to represent the Oxfordshire Lieutenancy as guest speaker at Oxfordshire Scouting’s recognition evening for adult volunteers. Here’s what I said: It’s lovely to be here tonight, amongst friends and fellow members of the Scouting family, celebrating some truly remarkable contributions to young people across Oxfordshire. I’m here as a Deputy Lieutenant,…
From Baby Boomers to Generation Alpha: changing expectations, changing communities and the future of volunteering in Britain I have been volunteering for more than fifty years. My earliest experiences were not particularly glamorous. As a young Scout, I spent cold, wet afternoons clearing rubbish from the Stroudwater Navigation. At fourteen, I visited an old people’s…
On the final morning of this year’s Friends of Scouting in Europe Tour, Mark and I went to prison. The former Stasi prison in Andreasstraße in Erfurt, to be precise. After our visit to Buchenwald on Friday, this was another encounter with a history which is uncomfortable partly because it really isn’t very long ago….
Our second full day with the Friends of Scouting in Europe began with a tram journey across Erfurt to the Bildungshaus St. Martin, where the morning was devoted to understanding rather more about the part of Germany we are visiting. Dr Claudio Kullmann, Ordinariatsrat in the Catholic Diocese, took us through the political and sociological…
There are days when the places you visit seem to speak to one another, and today was certainly one of them. Mark and I are in Germany with Friends of Scouting in Europe, visiting projects supported by the European Scout Foundation. This morning took us to Weimar; this afternoon, just a few miles up the…
I was nine when my mum introduced me to a line that has stayed with me ever since: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” It comes, of course, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, although at nine I wasn’t terribly interested in who Polonius was, or whether he was necessarily the wisest source of advice….
There are some things which ought to sit above politics, and saving the life of another human being is surely one of them. That is why I have watched the growing abuse directed at the RNLI, its staff and, most disgracefully of all, its volunteer lifeboat crews with a mixture of anger and disbelief. Over…
This morning I found myself at Friends House in London at something rather grandly, and I suspect, deliberately, called Volunteering Davos. There were no mountains, no snow and rather fewer private jets, but there was a serious purpose behind the name. Convened by Shaping the Future with Volunteering, it brought together leaders from across civil…
There are some places where time behaves oddly. Gilwell Park is one of them. Today I went back for the 100th Gilwell Reunion — and realised, slightly alarmingly, that it is forty years since I attended my first one. I was 22 then. I should make clear that I haven’t been to every Reunion in…
I have been revisiting The History of Youth Work in Europe, the remarkable series developed over a decade through the partnership between the European Commission and the Council of Europe. The seventh and final volume is co-edited by my good friend Howard Williamson, alongside Tanya Basarab, and it is one of those books that prompts…
