Scouts raise awareness of disability with new badge

The Disability Awareness Badge is a new concept which the 6th Gosport (Rowner) Air Scout Group has not done before, and they said they could not wait to get involved.

The idea of the badge is to make young people more familiar with disabilities and how people are affected by them.

They focus on all different types of disability – as reflected in the Paralympics – for example, physical, visual and hearing impairments.

Lisa Young, cub scout leader, said: ‘It’s great that the young people have taken an interest in learning more about disabilities after watching the Paralympics.

‘They are also learning about how they can support people that have disabilities.

One of the challenges the scouts have taken part in is playing football-on-bottoms – whereby the players spend the whole game sitting on their backsides, using only their hands to move.

There is also a blind trail where the scouts made sandwiches with their feet to try and understand the challenges people living with a disability face.

The scouts have started a project called A Million Hands, to try and encourage young people to get out into their community and help those with disabilities.

The older scouts group were visited by a speaker from the charity Dementia Friends.

The charity took them to a care home which looks after people who suffer with dementia so that they could get a better understanding of the disease.

Lisa added: ‘The activities have been designed to be fun, but also to give them experience of the difficulties that people with disabilities might encounter.’

The Gosport scouts will be involved in several different activities that are all focused around raising awareness for those who suffer with a disability.

Once all the activities have been completed they will be awarded their Disability Awareness Badge.