Each year a special badge is created and awarded to members of all Branches who successfully complete the annual national challenge. Since 2018 the themes of the challenges are based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Scouts for SDGs campaign. The theme for 2023 is “Champions for Nature”.
Each branch of the movement (i.e. Meerkats, Cubs, Scouts and Rovers) has a number of tasks to fullfill to achieve this badge. Some of the activities we have done this year include completing the miniSASS badge which we did on our annual camp back in February.
This term we participated in a beach clean up organised by Save a Fishie. This not for profit organization (NPO) was started by a former girl guide, Zoë Prinsloo. This year they launched the Coast 2 Coast campaign in May which has the aim of cleaning over 100 beaches in 60 days along our South African coastline. To date they have travelled almost 8000k, collected 2962 kg of rubbsh and cleaned 111 beaches.
It was an excellent eye opener for cubs and parents alike about the dangers of single use plastics. A particular shocker was the amount of nurdles covering the beach. For those of you who don’t know what nurdles are, they are pre-production plastic pellets. Tiny plastic pellets that are universally used in the plastics industry for the manufacture of plastic products. In 2017 a ship carrying this infamous pellets, wrecked off the coast of Durban and spilled 49 tons of nurdles into the ocean. These are virtually impossible to clean up and have no spread along the entire coastline of our country. We found countless of these on the beach.
The cubs and families worked hard to clean up as much as possible as they possibly could. In the 2 hours they contributed to the collection of 664 kg. We could not be prouder of our cubs! They lived up the the cub outdoor code.
