Seven Days of Great Safe Scouting Activities

Personal Safety means taking care of yourself — in every way, in all places, and at all times. It includes how you react to an emergency, and it includes looking after your mental and physical health. After all, looking out for your wellbeing will help you to be prepared to react to a dangerous situation, and it can help you to avoid hazardous scenarios in the first place.

All of us have, in some form or other, a home and a family. A home is the place where we feel most comfortable—some place to eat, sleep and be with our family. Our family includes the people we’re closest to: our dearest friends, our relatives and the people we choose to live with. We spend a lot of time in our homes with our family, and it’s important to know how to keep home a safe place for everybody.

Every time we step out from home, we enter our streets and community. Here, we need to be aware of the potential hazards all around us, and we need to know how to act responsibly so that we don’t make hazards of ourselves. This safety theme is concerned with traffic safety, whether it’s in or around cars and trains, skateboarding and cycling or encountering strange or wild animals.

We all know that Scouting should involve getting out of the meeting hall on a regular basis. Given most of us probably spend more time on outings than doing anything else in Scouting, it’s worth thinking about how we can be as safe as possible while having a great time in the outdoors.

Learning how to deal with bullying and verbal abuse is part of growing up, but with the stake as high as we know they can be, adults need to educate youth on how they can address these issues effectively—or better yet, prevent the problem in the first place.

As new technology comes along, new threats come along with it. While we communicate more and more in a virtual world, online activity has real world implications. It’s not only important to teach our youth to think about how to be safe online, it’s important for adults to think about internet and mobile phone safety, too. After all, it’s hard to have the benefit of experience with new technology.

Halloween’s right around the corner. Costumed kids are going to all head out into the streets at once, in the dark of night, knocking on the doors of neighbours—and strangers. There’s plenty that can go wrong, but if youth follow sound advice, and if adults can follow a little themselves, then the night should be a fun, safe time.