Iona, Sri Lanka BLOOM Project Launch

In March 2019 I along with 17 other adult Girlguiding volunteers from North West England travelled to Sri Lanka to launch a 4-year project called BLOOM. The project started following a request from Sir Lanka Girlguiding Association (SLGGA) for help with three specific areas where they would like to move towards the UK’s guiding model.

The project’s three main aims are:

1. Improving retention and training of young leaders.

2. Creating a new learning and development methodology.

3. Improving internal communications for grassroot leaders

As the first group of leaders going to Sri Lanka, we needed to scope out the situation, identify the reasons they were struggling to reach these targets on their own, and develop a long term plan that will tackle targets they had set.

Prior to visiting Sri Lanka I needed to come up with a strategy and liaise with SLGGA to find out what opportunities and support were available to us. I also had to think of ideas, activities, and our method of execution that would be useful and relevant to the three aims.

In order to scope out the project and do what we could with the limited information we were given prior to arriving in Sri Lanka, we planned and executed workshops across the Central, Eastern and Northern areas of Sri Lanka. We split into smaller groups and ran workshops in Colombo, Kandy, Anuradhapura, Mannar, and Jaffna.

In these workshops I spoke directly with Guides and Senior Guides, and tried to identify their feelings towards guiding, leadership and reasons why they did not want to continue after they left school. I spoke about my guiding experiences in the UK, and explained that volunteers are women from all walks of life, all ages and varied professions.

We also ran a ‘future girl’ activity, which had been a badge in the UK. We read statements and asked the girls to decide how much they agreed or disagreed with the statement. These were good for gauging what the current situation in Sri Lanka was.

In-between these we did some active teambuilding games and I also led some songs with actions. Overall the workshops were successful, and empowered young women. The feedback was positive, and some girls felt inspired to continue with Guiding. By running these workshops, I felt inspired in my own way to continue with Guiding.

Occasionally the workshops were personally challenging. Sometimes there was no translator, or the language barrier was hard, and I had to think of activities that would be possible. Other times I was challenged with different sized groups and spaces, making interacting and moving about difficult, limiting our activities. I had to improvise and adapt the activities and plans I had made to overcome these challenges.

We then discussed as a team some different approaches teams some different approaches that SLGGA could take, before meeting the SLGGA chief guiders in Colombo for a debrief. In this I had to apply my own knowledge from guiding in the UK and advise an approach that would be applicable, and was adapted to suit the unique challenges that occur in a country foreign to my own.

My contributions and work towards the project will continue in the coming months, by providing my knowledge and experience of Sri Lankan guiding to the second team of leaders to visit Sri Lanka. As the UK team, we are also still in the process of compiling our notes, resources and ideas into a report to send to SLGGA to advise on what they can do in the coming months before another group of leaders goes out to Sri Lanka.