The community is at the heart of what we do, so when a Scout Leader in Stoke Mandeville reached out to our Engagement team asking for support with their Cubs earning their Community Impact Badge, we were delighted to get involved.
To offer our support to the Cubs in earning their badge, Haroun Khan, EKFB’s Engagement Advisor, and Carsten Mieves, EKFB’s Sustainability Agent , led a visit to the Scouts Group Hub in Stoke Mandeville. The visit aimed to get the Cubs engaged with HS2 in their local area, learning about how HS2 and archaeology coexist with one another, and how EKFB’s works go about exploring how our local monuments came to exist.
For the Cubs to earn their Community Impact Badge, they must follow and complete all five steps:
 |  |  |  |  |
Identify Need
Investigate what issues and challenges exist in your chosen community. | Plan Action
Talk to your section about what actions you would like to take. | Take Action
Work in a team with your section and people in the community you are trying to help. | Learn and Make More Change
Discuss with your section what you’ve learned, and what you could do to help even more people in your chosen community. | Tell the World
Help other people to understand why the issue you took action on is important, what you did and how they can help. |
To kick-start introductions, Haroun led a communications-based ice-breaker activity for the Cubs to put into practice the importance of communication is when working in a large team.
To add some healthy competition, the teams were split into two groups with the added pressure of being against the clock. The activity involved the Cubs standing in single file facing forward and only being able to communicate through mime to the Cub in front. The aim was for the Cubs to successfully re-enact the mime to the next Cub in line, avoiding the original mime being lost in translation.
Once introductions were made, all the Cubs sat down together as Carsten led a presentation in educating the Cubs about the phased archaeology steps we take when constructing HS2, and what responsibilities our archaeology team have when unveiling artifacts out on-site. The Cubs were enlightened to hear about the historic discoveries HS2 has uncovered during their works, highlighting how a few local historical monuments came to be, and how the findings compared to the predictions made by local historians.
To round off the visit, we put the Cubs to the test to see how they would fair at being a civil engineer themselves when tasked with constructing a free-standing structure. The Cubs were split into teams and were equipped with sticks, marshmallows, and elastic bands for construction materials. The aim was to build the tallest free-standing structure in the given time frame, not without some guidance from our team and a few Scout leaders. A few towers crumbled at the foundations, whilst one stood tall and was successfully crowned our winner.
We hope the Stoke Mandeville Scout Group enjoyed learning about the archaeology works EKFB and HS2 are doing in their local area, and we wish them all the best on their journey towards gaining their Community Impact Badge.