Raising money for a scout group is always very important and hard work – and its even more important with the threat of the rain tax hanging over our heads. My group has our own hut, on grounds rented from Watford Community Housing Trust (with whom we are trying to get a new lease – our current one expired several years ago!) and so are at risk of this price hike. Luckily, however, we also have a soakaway and so it should be a relatively limited increase for us. But other local groups may not be so lucky.

Yesterday we attended the annual Lees Wood Fun Day event, which is an annual fundraising event we attend. This year, we made our largest amount ever – £120. Mostly thanks to myself and the new velcro target game we got with our Sainbury’s Active Kids vouchers last year which I ran (yes, I’m not being very modest). Unfortunately for them, another group ran the same game just across from us, but because they laid their target flat on the ground, few people took part.

Our other fundraising this year has not really been particuarly successful – we held two table-top sales, which unfortunately failed to take off despite the loads of work put into it by its organisers. But at Easter, we ran an Easter Tombola, which went fantastically, making us £80. We also try to encourage our parents to use The Giving Machine as a costless way of helping us make money.

We still have our Christmas Bazaar yet to come this year, and we are planning to do a bag pack at Christmas time as well, which if it goes as well as the one we did at Easter last year could make us in excess of £1,000! Which would go down really well with our Treasurer!

The reason that fundraising is so important for a Scout Group is because it costs more than one would think to run a group. Fundraising allows us to provide the best Scouting experiences to young people that we can, through training our Leaders and purchasing good equipment. We just spent more than £700 on a new garage tent (which I am actually hoping to get back in a donation from work…) and have plenty of other purchases we would love to make if we could! Without fundraising we, as a charity, could not function.

Update: Other posts on fundraising from Nick and Grendel.