kadiera

I'm really surprised that the materials aren't available as audio files - there are lots of reasons someone might be better off listening to them than reading them. It seems to me that, other than the fact that Eagle projects can't benefit BSA, getting all (or even a portion) of these available on tape would make a great Eagle project...are there other opportunities for large-scale service projects that might find this a good target?

"How does a "Wiccan" profess belief in Wicca and not the God/Goddess or the dual aspect of divinity?" Not that I really want to get into this discussion, but there are quite a few Wiccans who believe that the Gods are archetypes - basically, that they only exist as symbols, not as actual beings separate from our own imaginations - and as such they represent the ideals we should strive towards. Not my thing, but I've seen people do it and it seems to work out ok for them. As far as atheist families in scouting...if you look through many of the threads here about all the benefits

On the question of whether there's a point where malicious over-reporting is stopped... ...a good friend of ours has two children from a previous marriage. The situation is seriously disfunctional. The father admits that he made several reports to children's services - and that he convinced his parents to make reports too. There were three investigations in three years. No issues were found in any of the investigations. After the third case, the case worker stated that she was flagging their file, such that only reports from teachers, doctors, police, and other state mandated r

I'm with Beavah and the common sense approach, and I do wish the G2SS had a little more willingness to defer to good judgement. In my experience, most of these things are written the way they are because there are a ton of people who mistakenly believe that they possess enough common sense to make good judgements. I know that I re-wrote a lot of things for SpiralScouts in ways that eliminated judgement calls based on experiences where people used poor judgement in a situation repeatedly, even after discussion and coaching. For example, the leader on one of our first camping t

GoldWinger, I keep telling you, you'd be surprised at some of the people in SpiralScouts. I don't ask the political affiliations of my fellow leaders (and generally avoided the question myself when I was the ...um... lucky... (yeah, that's the word) person responsible for most of the organizations operations. Among the adults behind the scenes, there are doctors, lawyers, engineers....and even a politician :-) Kudu's right though - I've seen several cease and desist letters, not just the one that went to SpiralScouts. And I've seen replies from several lawyers, who have each taken a diffe

Interesting discussion here. This is actually one of the reasons SpiralScouts avoids the whole concept of "advancement" - as it's set up within Boy Scouts, "making rank" is too often the goal, rather than learning the things that make up that rank. Not that the idea of advancement is bad, just that it sometimes encourages *adults* to forget that this is supposed to be about learning things through fun, and that causes us to make it not seem like fun to them, you know? In my experience, telling young people that they're learning to safely build and maintain a fire so they can use it t

Kudu - I suspect this is not *quite* what you're looking for, but the closest we have to a statement of methods is probabaly http://test.spiralscouts.org/node/2 (this is from a nearly completed major revision of the site). I know that at least one or two badges are supposed to be on the site as examples, although they aren't there yet. SpiralScouts has a somewhat different take on advancement. Advancement is seen as something that comes with experience - so rather than having requirements for various "ranks" (which we don't have), SpiralScouts offers the same "topic" for a bad

<i>In the meantime, I'd like to ask Kadiera to tell us more about SpiralScouts. For example, I'm curious about the nature of the program for your older members (SpiralScouts and Pathfinders). Is this an outdoor/camping oriented program, similar to what people likely think of when they think of Boy Scouts? I'm also curious about membership. About how many members do you think you have? And while I notice that your website says that members of all different faiths are welcome, I'm curious to know whether that includes atheists (which is, sorry to say, often the context Spiral Scouts are br

CA_Scouter, I'd say that the BSA *does* discriminate against Wiccans and other Pagan faiths, given that the BSA won't approve a religious emblem for wearing on uniform the way that other religions have.

Slouchhat: The thing to keep in mind about "America" on the whole is that we're very good at taking the easy way out (whether because we're lazy, or over worked, or just because it doesn't make the neighbors think you're crazy). Or, more to Lisabob's original point: Let's say you have a son of Cub Scout age, and you don't agree with the BSA's current stances. Your options are to put him in Cub Scouts, where most of his friends are and where there are already leaders and resources in place, OR to join some other organization, which in all likelihood means starting a brand new tr

Gold Winger asks about Pagan beliefs. "Pagan" is a fairly broad term (and how Pagan things drive SpiralScouts is something I'm working on making more clear on the new version of the SpiralScouts website). The slightly less broad view taken by the founders of SpiralScouts would be more accurately labeled as "neo-Pagan" - a wide array of modern interpretations of pre-Christian beliefs, usually polytheistic - either in the sense of many gods, or in the sense of many faces of a single god, or the sense of duo-theistic (e.g., God and Goddess). There is generally (though not always)

Ed, obviously you think BSA is better, or else you wouldn't be involved. However, I think Lisabob's original statement was that it didn't seem to her that SpiralScouts was a viable alternative, and I'm just pointing out that what makes a group a reasonable option still all depends on one's viewpoint - I don't think BSA is a reasonable option for my family, and thus I'm not a member. If there was an existing organization that came reasonably close to meeting the needs of my family, I would have taken the easy road, and joined something that was less work from the beginning. This start

Long-time reader, first time poster :-) As someone who's been involved in SpiralScouts for a while (and who wasn't a girl scout because the troops were all full in our area), let me put this out there: I read a lot on these forums about the difficulties in finding leaders - and it seems like a large percentage of BSA leaders were former scouts. Most alternative programs don't have that sort of alumni support. In fact, a huge percentage of SpiralScouts leaders weren't ever scouts, but think that "scouting" is something important for their kids...important enough to find a program that