July 2020
During the last three months of lockdown we have had lots of time to think about the best ways to reach our past members and the best ways to update them on all things Sea Rangering. We were hoping to meet lots of past Sea Rangers at our Centenary event in Portsmouth April 2020, but due to Covid-19 we had to postpone this event. Hopefully this will take place in April 2021, but obviously we can not give any kind of guarantee…
Back in the spring we printed lots of lovely new leaflets to hand out at the centenary events, and wanted to let our past members know what our group of Friends do for the association, especially as many of the past Sea Rangers we have spoken to have no idea we have such a group in existence!
Our Friends help in all sorts of ways. They join Crews (when Crews were allowed to meet face to face – thanks lockdown!), at events and with their extensive knowledge on Sea Rangering history have helped our archivist in building up our records. They have memories and photos they share, exclusive events they are invited to, special gifts from the association (this year all of our Friends had a rather lovely centenary calendar full of photos from the past decades), and they do of course help with the financial running of association, to be a Friend is £17.50 per year.
Sea Rangers Crews have always been run by volunteers, with unpaid Trustees and a Council of Management. Costs for the girls to join as cadets and rangers is kept as reasonable as possible, and where Crews can join together to buy in bulk or work to raise Crew funds in their communities, they do so with gusto. Our Friends have helped enormously with supporting individual Crews, funding national log book initiatives and with opening up the opportunities for our girls to have experiences and challenges unique to Sea Rangers.
We have a new Friends Secretary, Bethany Dredge, and she has all of the stock of our printed Friends forms sitting on her desk at home… just waiting to be posted out! There is an electronic version of the form on the website, but as a small team run by volunteers, we have just home addresses on the forms, which we only felt was only right to remove from the version on the website. We do have a phone number where you can leave a message and we’ll call you back and give you more details on becoming a Friend 01243 595442, or you can write to Bethany friends@searangers.org.uk
She’d love to hear from you!
I will just end by saying, if you’re a past Sea Ranger, do get in touch so we can find out all about your experiences with Sea Rangers. It’s always so good to hear your stories.
