You may know your own value – and that you can get a job anywhere – but who wants to work ‘anywhere’? I have worked in well-known and prestigious national organisations and across sectors, and know that the values and culture of your workplace are likely to make you stick around longer than anything else. Bear with me here.
I have had the good fortune to be custodian of this 90+ year old charity for 8 years. But there’s nothing stuck-in-the-mud or stuffy about it. Our core values are courage, challenge, self-belief and community. The rightness of those values is epitomised through the energy, knowledge, and unshakeable generosity of our genuinely jaw-dropping community of staff, volunteer professionals and supporters who live them every day and with whom we’ve achieved so much.
We prepare and take young people with diverse – often very challenging – experiences of adolescence on adventures and expeditions to wild and remote locations for extended periods as part of their preparation for adult life. We help them find their fire… you can feel this fire in our team and trustees too.
Our programmes are now free at the point of delivery for everyone. I am proud that this makes us the most inclusive UK provider of youth development in wild and remote locations. Having successfully pivoted to deliver live adventures online to reach locked-down young people during the pandemic, we quickly got back out into the wilderness in 2021 and sadly we think we’re now the only national charity in the UK doing this work. With nearly a century of experience, my priority is to safeguard the quality and relevance of our work for the future.
We have published a 10-year strategy narrative – A Wild Future – which outlines our commitment to ensuring the sustainability of our work in relation to our people, to our purpose, and to our planet. We’re now in the process of enacting that commitment. This means thinking about and considering how we can make positive changes in our team, in terms of who we work with, who we can support, where we go, how we get there, what we do in-country, and how we understand and measure the value of our work. It is enabling valuable, illuminating conversations with that jaw dropping community which will impact on the decisions we make. From the youngest Explorers who have just completed a programme, to those who have supported us for years, or whose first experience of us might have been in the 1960s, they are central to everything we do.
Always learning, we now feel like we’re properly in post-COVID planning, too. As we start the planned hand-over and recruitment for a successor to our current Chair, who steps down at our AGM next spring after an amazing period of leadership, we’re also recruiting key roles in the team to deliver A Wild Future, like a Pipeline Scout. I want to sound an optimistic note – We are supported in every possible and practical way by members of our community. With our values, enterprise and unstoppable drive, anything is possible. Our motto is, after all, Find Your Fire.
– Honor Wilson-Fletcher, CEO British Exploring Society
Become our new Pipeline Scout & Relations Manager.
With the support of our Development Board and wider community, the Pipeline Scout and Relations Manager will play a fundamental role in helping us to build a wild future.
Ready for a new challenge and the chance to make a difference? We look forward to hearing from you.