Scout Radio

Gilwell Reunion 2018 – Hannah Kentish

Gilwell Reunion 2018 will see the first handover of the UK Youth Commissioner role as Hannah passes on the reigns to Ollie Wood. We caught up with Hannah to discuss her time as UK Youth Commissioner.

After being appointed as the first ever UK Youth Commissioner Hannah has had many successes, not least building the role up from an idea to national, and international, prominence, however in Hannah’s words

There are a number of things that I would say have been huge achievements in the role. We took the concept of a youth commissioner from a UK Youth Commissioner to having nearly 400 across the UK. In 4 years thats a huge amount of people to be mobilised into roles.

We’ve made changes to our bylaws to ensure sure that 50% of the people on our national council are young people

Hannah also explains that the most important thing is that she will talk to someone and they will say

“I never thought that I could do X role in Scouting until I saw you doing it as a young woman and now I feel like that’s something I can do”

Quite simply Hannah has helped change the perception of young people and women in national roles

Ollie Wood will become UK Youth Commissioner over the course of the weekend and Hannah advised him to ‘challenge things’ and ‘take the time to enjoy it and really have fun’ whilst also saying

‘Definitely feel like it the right time and excited for Ollie to come on board and see what he’s going to do and how he is going to change and adapt the role where perhaps I couldn’t have seen where the next progression was’

Finally we asked Hannah what is next for her, and unsurprising she will be taking a well deserved break.

“It just been really nice seeing, particularly young women, saying feels like something that is open to me as well as boys or older people and knowing that moving forwards that should create more diversity in our leadership and hopefully open Scouting up to more people.”