It's been a busy two weekends around the County with St. George's celebrations and festivities taking place.

In Nene District, following on from the celebrations at Windsor at which local Scout Joshua Hewitt was a special guest, Scouts from the South of the city held a celebration for St. George's day on 21st April and walked from all four sides of the pedestrian areas of the city centre to meet at St. John's parish church beside the Queensgate shopping centre.

Across the County in the Ely District, Scouts started the day on Sunday 28th April with a game of MonopEly, where the cathedral city was turned into a giant Monopoly board for them to navigate around. This was followed by a parade from the Ely Porta to the cathedral, led by the Littleport brass band. Once in the cathedral, 100 beach balls were released into the congregation to create an ad-hoc beach party to add to the celebrations.

The April 2013 version of Policy, Organisation and Rules (POR) is now online at scouts.org.uk/por.

You can use the link above to view individual chapters or download the whole publication, which is also available as a printed version from Scout Shops.

Click here for a list of amendments for April 2013 (PDF download)

About POR
Policy, Organisation and Rules (POR) is our governing document, and contains detailed explanations of all the principles, policies, governance and rules of The Scout Association.

The 2013 Cambridgeshire Young People of the Year Awards has now launched and it would be wonderful to see nominations from Cambridgeshire Scouts.

YOPEY looks for young people who are positive role models, not necessarily because they are brilliant academically or great at sports, but because they 'give to others'. 

They may be good mentors, fundraisers or turning their lives around after some bad behaviour or bad experience. They may be rallying round another young person who is having a hard time or going through a serious illness. As long as you, a colleague or a peer consider them a positive role model who gives to others, please nominate them.

New to Scouting? Thinking of starting up a new section and need to know more about programme planning? Then take a look at the new Start-Up Kit, now available for download. The kit has been created to give you all the information and guidance you'll need to start and run a successful section.

Are you already a user of programmes Online (POL)? If so, then great, you will already know the benefit that it can bring when looking for that last minute filler or for when you are planning your weekly meetings. If you don’t, then you are really missing out on a plethora of resources that have been tried and tested with other Beaver's, Cub's, Scout's and Explorer's. Everything on POL has been placed there by other leaders and they work, they come with, indicative timings, full equipment list, full instructions and templates as required! You can enhance the library by uploading your own ideas and activities for others to use.

As you will all be aware we, Cambridgeshire County, have just submitted our annual membership census return for this 2013. The picture is a mixed one from around the County as it is across the Region. The County team are very grateful to both David Briston and Colin Daniels for collating this on the County's behalf and for what is never an easy task. Although we must stress that Scouting is not just a numbers game (we need to talk about Quality, Impact and Growth as being the real factors in the development of scouting in Groups, Districts and the County) but unfortunately numbers are the easiest, if not the only real metrics, measure of where we are going and the impact that we are having in our local communities with engaging young people into the movement.

We are very pleased to announce that we have three roles filled (pending AAC approval) Events, Explorers and Network.

As you will have no doubt seen in many of the recent scouting news announcements, MMS, our membership database have been declared "not fit for purpose" and is in the process of being replaced. Project Compass is the working name for that replacement database project.
The project team at Gilwell have now issued a roll-out date for the new database, from October 2013 for a period of 12 months.

How would you like to open a new Scout Group where its members have 6 first languages (Lithuanian, Roma, Polish, Latvian, Slovakian and English)? Well that is what has happened in Wisbech following an open request from The Orchards Church of England Primary Schools headteacher, Mrs Nicola Parker, for Scouting to be brought in to the School. Along with 2 Teachers at the School, Dawn and Nathan (Beaver and Cub leader respectively) the Fenland District Team took up the challenge and behold on Thursday 28th February 2013 they held their first formal meetings. 20 Beavers and 30 Cubs have signed up with another large number on a joining list waiting for their opportunity to be part of the Adventure.

As the nation shivered and slithered around in the grips of winter, applause and cheers of celebration rang out for over 470 youth members of Cambridgeshire Scouting who attended the i-Achieve awards event in Comberton last weekend, demonstrating they were prepared for winter. This celebration was hosted by Liz Craig, County Commissioner for Cambridgeshire and Her Majesty’s Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire, Hugh Dublerly Esq, CBE on the weekend of 19th/20th January.