County Youth Lead Team

The County Youth Lead team are a team of young volunteers, all put into position before they turn 25, who are responsible for ensuring that Scouting within Essex is youth shaped. This means giving young people the opportunity to express their views and ideas, lead their peers, and collaborate with adult volunteers to make Scouting the best that it can be.

The County Youth Team works alongside other county teams to ensure the youth voice is heard and is used to shape the county programme; by running youth forums we are able to engage young people and hear what they want to do within Scouting. The team are responsible for ensuring that the young people’s ideas are heard, so that all aspects of Scouting within Essex are youth shaped. Read more about youth shaped Scouting here

The youth lead team also work with district youth leads and district teams, supporting them in promoting and implementing youth shaped scouting within their district. This may be ideas for interactive youth forums, ways to involve young people in the planning of district events, and supporting volunteers in designing a programme that enables young people to earn their YouShape award.

The YouShape award is an award available for young people to earn in Beavers, Cubs, Scouts, and Explorers. The award is made of four parts, the centre badge, lead, plan and represent. The centre part of the badge involves young people choosing one thing to change, improve, or deliver within their section and then making it happen.

Once they have earned their centre badge the young people then can complete activities to earn the other three sections lead, plan and represent. The YouShape award teaches young people leadership and planning, both of which are skills for life. Read more about the YouShape award for each of the sections here