Making A Difference

During my fundraising, I am always on the look-out for grants and awards to apply for, which will help me towards achieving my goal of £2000 for GOLD. These grants sometimes have the most simple questions (Name, Age, Describe your trip...), and sometimes, they ask for more complicated things. Today, I have been trying to fill one out which asked the question:

Please tell us how this grant will make a difference to you as a person

Well. That threw me. I'm not doing GOLD to make a difference to myself. I'm doing it to help other countries, and their Guide (and Scout) organisations - in my case, that's Latvia. I went to both India and Finland for myself, and whilst both of those opportunities did involve me helping other people (as staff in both instances), I purely did it because I wanted to go, I wanted to experience things, to develop, to change... The helping people was an added bonus. But this one, Latvia, this time, wanting to go is the bonus. It's not like I woke up one day and thought "Of all the countries in the world, Latvia will have the biggest impression on who am I as a person." It's not even like there's a cool camp happening there that I really want to be involved in, and I have to go as staff because I'm too old to be a participant. There's a project to help people, to help Guiding, and I want to help. I'm there to make a difference to other people, not to me.

But I know that at the end of the day, whatever your motives, everything you do in life makes a difference to you. But I don't know how. So I closed the grant form, and left it for another day... and then I had a flash of inspiration, and I wrote...

I have been lucky enough to attend a wide variety of Guiding events throughout my life, and each one has made a difference to me in ways that I never expected, and often don't realise until a long while after the end of the event. Sometimes it will be skills learnt and developed, whether leadership or teamwork, or practical (how to cook for and serve 3,500 hungry Scouts and Guides). Sometimes it will be future opportunities arising, getting more involved in WAGGGS, or the chance to help run the next event. More often than not, it will be friendships gained that become more important than I could have imagined.

Right now, I anticipate that GOLD will help me to develop my "transferable" skills - including organisation, time-keeping and in training others (useful for both my Guiding life and my career), and to allow me to experience new ways of Guiding and Scouting that I can bring back to the UK and use within my own local guiding. However, I have no way of knowing the full extent to which this grant will make a difference to me personally, but I am excited to make that discovery.

Unfortunately, the box on the grant form is too small for that answer, so I'll have to re-write it more succinctly, but I think it's important for me to remember that this will make a difference to me as well as Latvian Guides and Scouts.

PS. if you know of any grants/awards that may be able to help with my fundraising, please let me know - I love filling in their forms!

PPS. - if you personally want to donate some money towards my trip, my justgiving account can be found here.