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Most scouts will be at activities. But the SM and I and our two other ASMs in our troop are preparing for anything. For example, if the scouts might rather split up and exchange patrols with another country, one group may just decide to bring treats and chill in our campsite. I'll have my espresso ready for any leaders who were "forced" to tag along with their scouts and come to our campsite. Likewise if some of our scouts "need" me to come with them to meet Saudi scouts and I "have" to drink spiced coffee with their leader ... well I'm bracing myself for that kind of sacrifice. We won't let our scouts sleep in their tents all day. But we herd them all to the activity areas if they came up with a better plan.

@willray, stop struggling. This is a scout who should be suspended from your troop (at least from camp-outs) until he decides he wants to actually work in a patrol. His behavior is 1) unsanitary, therefore threatening the health and safety of others, 2) willful and unseemly, and 3) has no chance of changing if you deny him discipline. I assure you, games where you reward the other scouts for showing scout spirit -- no matter how rich the reward -- will not inspire this kid. Let him and his parents know that up until now he has chosen to not be a scout (as in helpful, courteous). Your troop only has scouts. And until he chooses to be one -- just like he promises every time he gives an oath -- he's not welcome. You might have to insist that a parent join you adults and be prepared to haul the boy home at the first sign of misbehavior. Now, be prepared to listen. There might be some bullying going on, and this is his way of protesting. So you may have more twisted threads to untangle. But you simply have no game until the boys decide that they want to be on the playing field. P.S. - We had a scout who slept in a lot. No problem. He missed breakfast, and sometimes his tent was dropped for him with him in it. (Parents were fine with this, BTW.) He packed up and hauled off with his patrol without a complaint. He was a swell kid in so many other ways -- especially courteous and helpful. The guy's an Eagle scout now -- gainfully employed.

I make a distinction between team challenges and trust-games (not to be confused with trust-falls). Trust games require you to depend on an opponent to advance your mutual standing. Team challenges allow you to be sporting - or not. One team might win a challenge, but another team might have a member who demonstrates unparalleled levels of sportsmanship. We really don't care if the same team consistently wins challenges -- if indeed that team has remarkable skills. But, in the long run, we want good sportsmanship to spread across the league. So much so, that unsportsmanlike conduct would lead to suspension/ejection from the game ... possibly even the league. Fine point: I've encouraged the use of suspensions only for a behavior that 1) threatens the safety of the scout or others, 2) is willful and unseemly, and 3) the scout has no chance of changing if we deny discipline. It really stinks when it becomes that serious, and has little to do with the positive reinforcement you want to apply. But, I think it goes along in the sense that the lives of 11-17 year olds are so volatile that even your most "scout-like" individual one day may need strict discipline the next. When a scout breaks bad, don't dismiss (or let others dismiss) your point system. A high score might be evidence to a wayward scout that he has it in him do better if he decides to come back. A suspension might be evidence to other scouts to not think too highly of their points because "But for the grace of God, there go I."

Oh, that's really ineffective. You're not having anything like a standard year-long competition. At the end of each day, patrols should know what points are being credited to them and why, and they should have a good idea of where they stand on the "leader board." You could have a traveling totem that at courts of honor, would move to a winning patrol for that term. So, time-scale might be your problem if your patrols reconfigure every year (that's why suggest recognition at every CoH, which should be happening more than yearly), but how you all are announcing results is the number one issue. As youth age out and new ones come in, you will find that what works today won't work next year. So, definitely your PLC is the place for after action review. Tell them you got some feedback from strangers on the internet, and listen to their responses. What they think is worthwhile, implement; what they think is dumb, put on the shelf and maybe bring it up with the next class of PLs.

They are especially my scouts when they go on be professional video-journalists of stories like this Orlando Sentinel article

I like @scotteg83's suggestion if the strips are still available. If they aren't ... I met one troop who had really sharp embroidered name name tags. They sacrificed one shirt for a seamstress to use for material to make the tags. This made the background an exact match to the shirts! Doing something similar for these letters sounds like a good idea. You could talk to your seamstress if it's worth the trouble to try and lift as many letters as you can salvage so that she can sew/glue them on the material from your sacrificed shirt, or if it's just as well to embroider new patches or just sew them onto the shirts directly. There are probably other modern solutions like digital-to-cloth printing/transfer, but I'm not sure they would be cost-effective.

I agree that "trust games" are not appropriate with youth. They may be barely appropriate with adults. Look up "win-all-you-can" on the Woodbadge forum. The best of these are classic disaster-drill/rescuse scenarios. Really good Klondike derbies should be set up this way. No single patrol has the resources to complete whatever task they've been assigned. (Usually they find their resources at "air drops" on opposite sides of camp, and they open their "crates" by demonstrating a skill or showing patrol spirit.) But, by delivering resources (which usually involves some sort of rope work) to every other patrol, they can complete the task. Observers award points based on skill and teamwork (both within- and across- patrols). That's why I like wilderness backpacking. As a complete exercise (with each patrol assigned a different hike from a common insertion to a troop rendesvous, adults who won't correct them until they've gone a mile off course, etc ...) it demands a level of selflessness that young scouts are not used to giving.

Oh the beauty of hiking in the land where you face shrinks so tight against the wind-chill that your eyeball's fall out. Here, backpacking dinner (preserved by a fleece wrapped around a frozen nalgene) is something like a dry-rub Delmonico steak roasted slowly on a bed of coals, potatoes under the coals, carrots/beats, bread baking on a stick over the coals, and your favorite green vegetable fried in butter with dried parsley, thyme, and marjoram and a clove of garlic. (You can try olive oil instead of butter, depending on the temperature.) Desert -- if you have room for it -- may be a muffin mix with fresh milk roasted on a reflector oven jury rigged from the foil used to wrap the steak. What are the boys eating? Dried noodles. But who cares about them? They're going to be hiking a half-mile up the hill because the oldest needs to check in with his new girlfriend because they let you pick the rendezvous point, and you chose the one which has zero cell coverage.

Online accessibility is definitely a problem -- even if we have parents who would allow the patrol to have the tech. For example, my solution (or any of the other cloud related solutions that I've proposed) requires the scouts be at lest 13. Works great for a crew or ship, not so much for a young patrol in a troop. In this case, I think Field Notes (it's actually a brand, but scouts could make their own) are a good idea. The youth would maintain the records required by their position, then at meetings have a responsible adult snap a picture and save it to the cloud. Actually, you don't even need to be net dependent. there are lot's of old scanners and workstations with a good many years of working life remaining. (Our Goodwill actually has a store dedicated to them.) Cloud storage is nice, but probably overkill for what most troops need. I honestly think paper + digital image backup is the ideal mode of operations for 21st century groups.

(Side note: I keep laughing because our new SM is a fan of the adult beverage of the same name. So, deep breath, get beyond the sillies ....) Yes, recognizing the different ways that others hew to ideals is a big "reward" in the scout who does it. Usually that scout is in the middle of his/her teen years, and isolation will be a threat to his psyche for the next two or three decades. One form of isolation is thinking that you are the "last good man/woman" standing. By looking out for the good in others, you discover that that's not true. You'll find someone working through their ideals to everyone's mutual benefit and be uplifted. That's why "recognition" is specifically a method of venturing: it's synergistic with "ideals" and essential in the life of a maturing teen.

Our spaghetti dinner fundraiser is partly an alumni reunion. We have a plaque with the names of all of the names of Eagle Scouts from the troop. This year, our troop's first Eagle Scout dropped in with his son to show him his plaque. I pulled the boys aside and introduced them to him.

It sounds like an average church announcement policy, which is what many of our CO's have. What many of us may not be used to is the national church leadership mentioning bulletin boards specifically. But it does give councils an "invite" to promote scouting along the lines that they do with other organizations.

Or most likely, the boots-on-the-ground don't give a rip over their respective organization's battle for brand identity. So, they are leveraging their collaboration to do good in the world.

Yep. He's a recruiter. There are many recruiters who go unrecognized, but ask your SM if the troop would recognize this scout. More on the strip: https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2019/03/06/most-important-patch/

Interesting concept. In fact, they are under my stewardship for just a little while. But then they become these men and women who come around and touch base from time to time.

What do I look for? Well lessee ... Trustworthiness Loyalty Helpfulness Friendliness Couteousy Kindness Obedience Cheerfulness Thrift Bravery Cleanliness Reverence How to recognize? Get scout's attention and say, "Mr. <insert scout's name here> that was one formidable act of <insert from 1 through 12 of the above here>. Keep it up." Then return to your coffee. I have had parents tell me that their youth returned home bragging that "Mr. Q told me that what I did was the best ___ he ever saw!"

@Terasec I agree about the difference between solo woodsman and scoutmaster. I started out a scout, turned minimalist, then family camper, then became an ASM/Advisor, there was a good bit to unlearn, a bit to teach others, and a steady pace of re-learning. It's a growing process. But I'm not putting mastery on the level of sensei. My criteria: barring disabilities, can a scouter do everything that we've ask of a first class scout? If he or she can't or hasn't even tried, then he or she needs to "walk that mile" with his or her scouts. The scouts see the leader trying, and it inspires trust and admiration. That process builds leadership. Then, when a scouter goes to roundtable or a leader's campout, we all can focus on the things that sharpen us as leaders, rather than kill a half hour watching a district scouter not start a fire.

Agree. I chose my strategy because it is about as innocuous as it gets. On my sign-ups, I usually only ask for first name and initial. I guess the real question is: "What are we trying to track?" If you want to just track that you've collected enough to pay for an activity. And be able to go back and see what expenses were from for an activity, what I did worked. Paper isn't that much harder. But, when training youth to hold one another accountable, it was nice to have key leaders aware of what's happening. If you want to figure out if a scout is always "skipping the turnstyle", my tool isn't that great. I kept personal info to a minimum, and simply didn't care about tracking a member across multiple activities. The only time I did that was collecting payments for super-activities (i.e. Seabase) and for each member, I had multiple columns for each month's payment. Again, we could have used paper, but I was training a youth to keep track of things (the checks got mailed to her), and it was a good way to know where we stood.

Hmmm, maybe I should draw some espresso for Aussie leaders at WSJ and find out their regimen. Not sure I'd require it. But JTE could be average of ASM/SM's Rank*100 - years since tested.

For my crew, I used google sheets (one document for each trip) which I would share with my co-advisor and crew officers. I would make an online-form to collect sign-ups and other info -- like if you were an adult how many could you transport, additional fees if renting gear, etc ... I would then use a column to note how much they paid and compute how much they owed. I would print that on the day of the trip. I would then tally totals and log expenses on another sheet in the same document. That and any receipts and deposit/reimbursement requests would go to the treasurer. In retrospect, I would just use BSA permission slips for most activities, but I would still track the sign-ups with a shared document.

For kids? Their direct-contact adults are not held to the same level of skill mastery as the youth. Ideally, if someone asked me how to find an SM/ASM/Advisor who knows his/her stuff, I could say, "Ignore that trained patch. Look for the one with the first-class-rank oval on his left pocket." For adults? They are not held to the same level of skill mastery as the youth. A weekend of IOLS for a trained patch? Give me a break. What scout of yours do you know get any rank patch just for toddling along on a camp out? My SM was rightly embarrassed and stomped off when I tossed him a line and said, "Tie it off around that trunk, a timber hitch will do." He knows how to tie a timber hitch now. Want to solve your training problem? Ditch IOLS and "Trained". Have an SPL or JASM or crew officer (if you're a new troop, it may be a seasoned SPL/JASM from another troop) sign off on each wannabe direct-contact leader's rank requirement. Let skilled leaders sew on their ovals, maybe with a service star sewn on it to say they tested/retested as an adult. The problem with modern skills instruction is the presumption that there's this thing called "adult leader" from which skills emanate to this thing called "youth." That's not how the real world works. Anybody, youth or adult, can let skills lapse. Anybody, youth or adult, can help somebody else get those skills back. It just takes a little humility in recognizing who might need to get that skill from whom.

Of two minds. The real challenge is to get folks to not jettison their gear (yes, drinks bottles and plastic wrapper are just a another form of gear) in the first place. But the only hope of doing so is by people actually taking a moment to try and clear an area they care about. Most of us have our scouts do this as a matter of routine. Bling is secondary -- so much so that BSA has to constantly remind us to log those service hours!

I also don't want to single out BSA. Youth groups are up against similar quandaries. I believe there are some urgent shifts on that front as well. The problem is that scouting inspires independence commensurate with proven accountability. It is irrational to presume that every unit of every program is going to land on their feet after each shift toward caution.

RB, spare us the doublespeak. This is no path forward. It is a compromise to keep litigants at bay. The OP is not about "a meeting", it is about a patrol meeting. You know full well that as recently as three years ago the patrol leader's handbook said: And the guide to safe scouting backed that up. This is no subtle change. This is a turn careening into the abyss. What membership gains do you expect to see as SMs lose their pool of caring adults who could back up on meetings, hikes, and campouts?

The De La Renta third-world-general look is what's wrong. That, plus boundary issues. https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2018/05/04/do-you-wear-your-neckerchief-over-or-under-the-collar/