HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2019-01-10, Page 5Not having any connection to the Girl
Guide movement anymore, I had no
idea that there was an internal war
going on within the organization between the
local people who do the work and the people
at the Ontario headquarters.
It’s a sad day for an organization that has
been an integral part of most Canadian
communities for more than a century. Three of
our daughters were Guides when they were
young. My wife, Jill, was a Girl Guide leader
during those years. And of course Sheila
Richards, co-founder of The Citizen, was a
pillar of the movement, from being a Guide
leader in Burlington before she and her
husband Wendell moved to Brussels, to
serving at the national level and being awarded
the organization’s Medal of Merit.
But like many such organizations, the Girl
Guides was in decline. Between 2000 and
2007 membership had dropped from 71,500 to
less than 40,000 in Ontario. The answer for the
Girl Guides’ Ontario Council was, as it so
often is, in greater “efficiency”. The
organization had a multi-tiered structure with
local districts, divisions and areas leading
upward to the Ontario Council. It’s safe to say
that probably most leaders saw their own troop
as the centre of Girl Guides with the superior
levels in place to serve local needs. The
Ontario Council did not see it that way. They
saw all those levels as a barrier to getting
things done.
In 2007 the council undertook “The
Transformation”, dissolving the districts and
areas and transferring their assets and $3.2
million in funds to the provincial head office.
As happens so often in these attempts at
efficiency, the bureaucracy swelled. Staff in
the Toronto office grew from 26 to 98 full-time
positions. The payroll tripled to $4.5 million.
For the people in charge, the problem
was not the increased staff but the cost of
running and maintaining 33 Girl Guide camps
it had taken over from the district
organizations. The council decided they
needed to be sold.
One of the camps sold was Camp
Keewaydin, near Kintail where my daughters
went to camp all those years ago. Taxpayers
in Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh might
appreciate the change since there’s bound to
be more tax revenue from the tech millionaire
who bought it for his country retreat than from
the camp.
Not all the local Guide organizations went
along quietly with the loss of the camps,
however. Local volunteers in several areas,
who had bought, set-up and maintained the
camps for decades, actually went to court to
prevent their closure. A lawyer for the council
warned one local group to stay away from
their camp. “The owner has not given your
clients or anyone else permission to use the
camp property. If they do, they will be
trespassing.”
Since Girl Guides still depends on local
unpaid leaders to make the organization run,
fighting with those volunteers doesn’t seem a
great policy. When volunteers protested the
closure of one camp and got media attention,
the council saw itself as the victim. “It’s not a
civil tone to take your five-year-old daughter
and have her crying at the chain link fence,”
the council’s head complained.
Despite the ongoing sales of these camps,
the Ontario Girl Guides Council has run
deficits nine of the past 12 years.
I have some sympathy for the council
members. They are dealing with changing
times. Many young girls are more interested in
spending time inside keeping up with the latest
on social media than in going outside in the
fresh air, learning about nature. It’s also
getting harder and harder to recruit volunteer
leaders among busy young adults today.
Still the Girl Guides Ontario Council seems
to have fallen prey to a common delusion that
the grassroots is there to serve the centre, not
the other way around. The future of the
Girl Guides depends on finding energetic
and creative leaders in each community –
dynamic people who can attract young girls
back to Guiding. You can’t do that from head
office.
Over and over again, the founding model of
Canada was the mobilization of local
communities to create services they felt were
needed by their community. Take schools, for
instance. Although there has long been
provincial funding and the province provided
quality control through visiting inspectors,
schools were very much locally run by local
volunteer trustees until the 1960s. Then, in the
name of efficiency, the province set up county
boards of education, then enlarged them to
regional boards.
Today, many communities have no schools
at all. Few people feel any sense of ownership
or responsibility for their school.
If you want buy-in, you need involvement
and commitment at the local level. Good luck
to you if you forget that lesson as the Girl
Guides seem to have.
Other Views
Taking resolutions one step at a time
Keith
Roulston
From the
cluttered desk
Local comes first to ensure success Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Despite the arbitrary nature of our
calendar, we’re all in agreement
that Dec. 31 and Jan. 1 are good
days to think on the past year as well as
the year ahead. We look back on all we
achieved, or didn’t, as the case may be, and
we consider what awaits of us in the year to
come.
I guess it’s kind of fitting that, as I struggled
to find something to write about in this space
for this week, others may be paralyzed in
making decisions about the opportunities that
lay ahead of them.
See, writer’s block is a tough thing for me to
deal with and, given the fact that many
students, businesses and municipalities were
taking a break the first week of this year,
inspiration was tough to come by, until I
realized that writer’s block can be its own
inspiration.
Creative roadblocks can come in many
forms, and one of those forms is having too
much to consider to put pen to paper (or
fingers to keyboards) and start to create.
Sure: that wasn’t what I was dealing with
last Friday, sitting in my easy chair of the
living room pondering what to put in this
space, but it is something worth noting:
sometimes we’re faced with so much, that we
don’t even know how to start.
Looking at the last issue of The Citizen for
2018 can be indicative of that. In years past,
that Christmas issue has represented a huge
hurdle for the editorial department to clear:
between Christmas stories, Grade 1 interviews
and regular news for the paper, not to mention
the dozens of Christmas and holiday-themed
events near the end of the year, figuring out
where to start can be difficult. With easily a
dozen stories to write, picking out what to
work on first can be as daunting as writing the
story itself.
That’s a form of creative block that we have
to deal with that can be just as difficult as not
knowing what to write about.
The same kind of indecision can plague
those looking ahead to the next 12 months
when trying to determine what this year can
bring to them.
Sure, we’re all going to say, “I want to live
healthier”, but what does that mean? Diet?
Exercise? Drinking more water? It can be a
tough thing to nail down.
We can also say we’re going to focus more
on happiness, but, again, that can mean any
number of things, depending on the person.
Happiness for me can be sitting with my
daughter watching PAW Patrol or Mickey
Mouse Clubhouse. I doubt people without
children look forward to those kinds of
television shows.
There is a solution, though: start with what’s
right in front of you.
When we were preparing the Christmas
issue, I started by writing the interviews and
Grade 1 questions that I had most recently
completed.
I would sit and write shortly after my
interviews were completed to prevent me from
running headlong into an insurmountable wall
of work. Dealing with the opportunities of a
new year can be tackled in the same way: look
to what’s right in front of you.
Want to pursue happiness? Then look at
what you can do at home to make yourself
happier. Maybe that means keeping some
more guilty pleasure-type foods around for a
quick pick me up, or, maybe it means the
opposite: getting rid of all those chocolates,
treats and holiday leftovers so you won’t eat
them and feel guilty after the fact.
Want to be healthier? Well maybe getting rid
of the treats can help with that as well: two
birds, one stone. Or maybe you can make a
small change: buy a good water container and
start increasing your daily water intake. It’s
simple and, if the internet is to be believed, by
cutting out soda, fruit ‘drinks’ and caffeinated
drinks, you’ll start to feel and live healthier
very quickly.
Want to focus more on family? You don’t
need to plan a week-long getaway to Disney
World, you just need to make an effort to
shut off the television, put away the phone
and spend some one-on-one time with each
other.
I’m a bit hypocritical in suggesting these
simple solutions because I’ve been told, on
numerous occasions, that I like to make things
more difficult for myself than they need to be.
The term ice-skating uphill comes to mind
during those conversations. That said, as I’m
getting older, I’m realizing the wisdom in
eating the elephant one bite at a time. If you sit
there trying to figure out how to best chow
down, you may never get around to the job
itself.
So look forward to the new year,
loyal readers, and tackle the small things, and
if that doesn’t make enough of a change, at
least you’ll be building up to the bigger
challenges.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 2019. PAGE 5.
First things first
For Christmas, my mother gave me a
lovely framed map print of Ireland – a
special edition created in conjunction
with A Course Called Ireland by Tom Coyne.
He walked the perimeter of the country over
the period of a few months, playing dozens of
rounds of golf along the way, documenting his
life on and off the course. There is a flag on the
map for every course he played there.
Coyne has signed the print, along with an
inscription that reads, “The dog was going to
be a problem.” Showing the gift around the
tree, I was asked more than once what the
inscription meant. Because I’ve read the book,
I knew it to be the first line of the book. Out of
context, however, it means absolutely nothing.
Rewind to when I said it is the first line of
the book. When you first read the book, there
is no context. Those are the first words you
read in A Course Called Ireland.
As I said, I love the book, so I’m not running
it down. Coyne’s time in Ireland was one
reason that made me want to go there for our
honeymoon. He connected with some of the
most beautiful people and storied landscapes
the world has to offer, but you wouldn’t know
that awaited you by the first line of the book.
So, while I love my mother’s Christmas
present and the book that inspired it, on the
wall of my home it will serve as a constant
reminder of one of my biggest pet peeves in
the world of writing: attention-grabbing, out-
of-context first sentences that intrigue, but
serve as literary islands – all sizzle, no steak.
Many writers, especially in magazines or
longer newspaper pieces, are partial to these
ledes; cloaked in secrecy, but urging the reader
to follow the author down an alley where, trust
him, all will be revealed if you put in the time.
Now, I’m not denigrating these writers here.
It’s a conscious, stylistic choice to write that
way and, if anything, they are on the right side
of the trend as more and more writers utilize
this tool in their writing. It’s just not my way.
It’s lazy sensationalism. A quick spin
through the Rolling Stone website (reading
Rolling Stone’s features growing up, I’m
convinced, is where I picked up this pet peeve)
yields first sentences like “It had the vibe of a
campaign event, even if it wasn’t one” and
“The plan was to sell flowers” among others.
By contrast, last year I finally got Jess to
read a book I recommended (to say she and I
are on opposite ends of the literary spectrum
would be an understatement – I like,
admittedly, boring non-fiction, whereas she
likes splashy murder-mystery thrillers), In
Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I told her that,
in that book, Capote’s writing is the epitome of
descriptive storytelling, not to mention a
masterclass in building tension page to page.
The first paragraph richly and vividly sets
the scene in just a handful of words with skill
most writers would kill to have:
“The Village of Holcomb stands on the high
wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome
area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ Some
seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the
countryside, with its hard blue skies and
desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is
rather more Far West than Middle West. The
local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a
ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of
them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons,
and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The
land is flat, and the views are awesomely
extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white
cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as
Greek temples are visible long before a
traveler reaches them.”
Now that’s how to set a scene.
“Cherish all your happy moments: they
make a fine cushion for old age.”
– Christopher Morley
Final Thought