THE future of the Mount Gambier Girl Guides appears secure with Mount Gambier City Council foreshadowing a significant financial sum to allow the group to move to another facility.
Council has offered the group a large shed at Hastings Cunningham Reserve and in addition flagged a contribution of up to $37,000 to allow for complete necessary refurbishments.
It follows the community group being informed in September the leased building on O’Halloran Terrace would be demolished to make way for the Mount Gambier Community and Recreation Hub.
After uncertainty about where the group would relocate, Mount Gambier Girl Guides leader Kathryn Davies said the new site was a good solution.
“It comes with storage and is a property we can lease ourselves straight from council, so we can make the space our own much like we did with the original hall,” Ms Davies said.
“It is still disappointing that we had to move and it was at such short notice, but to have this solution is quite good and we are looking forward to working with council to fix it up.”
Ms Davies said the group would try and retain as much of the history – which spans over half a century – at the old hall as it can in the new space.
However, she said the “bricks and mortar” is what the Girl Guides community would miss the most.
“It was guide families that originally built the hall and there have been many generous donations and a lot of hard work to revamp the hall over the years,” she said.
“It’s the bricks and mortar that we cannot take with us, but we still have the girls who spent a lot of time in the hall who will carry their cherished memories with them.”
The girls will be given a chance to relive the memories when they farewell the hall at a special public celebration on November 30.
“We will have memorabilia out on display and it’s been a fantastic opportunity for our older girls to run a public event,” she said.
“It will be great opportunity for the community to come through and look at what the girls have done throughout the last couple of years.
“Most importantly we will be able to send off the hall in style and thank all those people who have contributed to the hall.”
Moving forward, Ms Davis said she was excited to see the current girls turn the new facility into their own.
“We have already started thinking about what we can potentially do to beautify this space and it is certainly going to give the girls a lot to do next year,” she said.
“The hope is we will be able to keep them very busy because the original hall was built by girl guide families, so the idea is to get them to make this their own space as well.”
If council gives the final tick of approval at next week’s full council meeting, construction is expected to start in the new year.
Ms Davies said the group hopes to occupy the new space by the start of 2020 school year.
“We close down for the summer school holidays anyway, but by the time school is back we need to be in the shed, so we need to make sure it’s fully-functioning,” she said.
“The girls are going to have to get to work and it might be a mad dash, but we are confident we can get it done.”
