Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
12 February 2021
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This week, we sat down with Rich Flowerdew for #CloreSocialFellowFriday. Rich is a Clore Social Fellow from our 2020 Leading Beyond Lockdown Programme. He is the Head of Strategy at Scouts Cymru, and is passionate about fostering leadership development in young people.
Can you give us a little bit of background information about your organisation and the topic that you’d like to talk about?
Scouting has been around since 1907, so we're a well established organisation working with 52 million young people around the world. The organisation’s mission has always been about helping young people develop social action for themselves, and to go out and be active citizens in the future. I support the Scouts here in Wales, where we’ve got 292 groups, and the glorious countryside lends itself nicely to outdoor adventure.
Today, I really wanted to focus on how we need to support young people with leadership and development opportunities from an early age. I keep coming back to the quote that “leaders are made not born.” Now more than ever, leadership is what employers and further education providers are looking for, so if we help young people to develop great leadership skills from an early age, why not? Within scouting, that could be as Cubs, who are eight to ten year olds, or even as Beavers, who are six to eight year olds. Ultimately, supporting young people to develop these skills can only benefit wider society in the social sector, as well as the private and public sectors – these are our future leaders in our communities, industries, organisations and countries.
What are some of the ways that your organisation has been able to create those leadership opportunities?
Seven of our 21 adult trustees are 18 to 25, so we've got young people at the heart of the organisation. We also have youth commissioners, who play their part and help with decision making. One thing that we’re always mindful of is that we don’t want to include young people in a tokenistic way, which we have seen in some other organisations. That tokenism can turn off a lot of young people On the other hand, if you genuinely support and involve them so they use and practise their skills, they often end up giving something back to the organisation as well. For example, we see that 40% of our current volunteers joined the movement as youth members. So, if you put that investment into young people, they come back to support the next generation of leaders.
At the moment, a group of our youth commissioners and our youth trustees are developing a program called Grow to Lead. The programme focuses on supporting young people to develop leadership skills and wider skills for life earlier, because why e wait until the middle of our career to start learning leadership skills, In scouting, we start much earlier Even though it’s still in early stages, we've already seen positive outcomes, including young people developing ideas around how to recruit more volunteers, how to make the organisation more accessible to Welsh speakers, and how to bring in and attract new young people. The most powerful thing about Grow to Lead is that it was developed by young people, for young people and it’s led by young people.
Do you feel like your experience with Clore Social Leadership fits into this movement of providing leadership opportunities for young people?
The Leading Beyond Lockdown course has definitely helped me as an individual leader, and has also helped the organisation look to the future. For me, the programme generated a lot of excitement, and the young people around me have picked up on that infectiousness, so it really does trickle down.
So far, the Grow to Lead pilot has been really successful, and now we’re looking at how we can enhance it. The Clore Social framework has been really instrumental in that development. One thing that we really like is that it starts with leadership of self first, and then moves outward to the support that the individual needs to be a better leader. We’re looking at building that philosophy into our program as well.
Why does fostering leadership skills in young people feel especially important at the moment?
I listened to the webinar that you hosted with Henry Timms a couple of weeks ago on the idea of New Power. From that talk, what really sunk in was that the traditional power structures are focused on trying to get back to where we were and floundering. On the other hand, you've got young people who have revolutionary ideas, are empowered, and are interested in society. Now more than ever, we need new ideas, and we can't just go back to the way we were. With COVID, we've had this opportunity to pause, reflect, improve and plan how we come out of this as a better, giving more opportunities to young people to develop great skills for life, more inclusive, and more prepared organisation with a strong and sustainable future.
There's a really nice quote from Baden Powell, who's the founder of scouting. He said “try and leave this world a little better than you found it.” I believe that if we empowered young people today, they will pay it forward and go on to empower other young people in the future. This is about helping ourselves, each other and people in our communities. We shouldn't be precious about holding onto our power because they'll be looking after us one day. And if we've prepared them from a caring and structured society, then hopefully they'll look after us as well.
You can find Rich on twitter @scoutsrich, and Scouts Cymru on twitter @ScoutsCymru
If you would like to be featured for a #CloreSocialFellowFriday, send us an email at info@cloresocialleadership.org.uk.
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