Leader Jean Trewick was awarded an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours 2023 and Team Leader Pamela Fender won a local newspaper’s community hero award.
Jean, 63, was nominated for the MBE for services to voluntary organisations, including GB.
She says ‘I got a letter out of the blue about the MBE and it arrived on my birthday. I was just speechless and very honoured.’
As well as GB, Jean, who is a Business Management Lead for the Department for Work and Pensions, has been involved in supporting charities through her job, has volunteered several times in Nicaragua working at feeding programmes for children and self-funding care packages for patients in a maternity hospital, and she helped build a school in Zambia in 2009 with a group from GB and Scouts.
She adds ‘The MBE is very humbling but it feels like it’s recognition for GB and for everyone who does what I do.’
Jean nominated her fellow volunteer, Team Leader Pamela, for an Evening Chronicle Community Hero Award. Pamela was one of 20 local heroes chosen by a panel of judges to win a two-week Fred. Olsen cruise to Scandinavia this summer.
Pamela, 65, says ‘It was a big surprise being informed I was one of the winners of the Evening Chronicle Community Hero Awards. I was on holiday with my daughter in Bulgaria when I received the email congratulating me. I thought it was a scam, so I messaged Jean who messaged straight back telling me not to delete it.
‘Jean told them about how I’ve been involved in GB for over 55 years and shared about what we do – badge work, arts, crafts, cookery, sleepovers, teaching girls life skills, weekends away camping and at activity centres giving the girls confidence and team working skills and full week camps where many experience life outside the family home for the first time.’