yknot

The trend in my area is to move to basically a self funding option supported by fundraisers that do not involve product sales. Most activities are pay as you go although the fundraising we do allows us to often defray costs for certain activities. Our fundraising is mostly connected to service where scouts are out in uniform doing something in the community and we set out a tip jar. A few random things: Council sites need a freecycle feature where units can donate used flags, stands, camping equipment, etc., to defray start up costs for new units. Councils should also even offer seed funds to new units. Family bonds are used in other activities, especially in sports. You pay in an amount and can work it off through volunteering and get it back. If not, they use it to hire help or pay for equipment. Scouting should look into this more. Advancements line item was always a challenge for us, first when I was Committee Chair of the Pack and later at Troop. Our units always paid for advancements, but some scouts would earn way more bling and that was an issue for some families. Some kids are just not that interested in merit badges they just want to camp. If you do go a family bond or promised fundraising option, you need to balance that with not making some volunteer's job more time consuming by tracking such things. Scouting is not 'dirt cheap'. It is pretty comparable to other activities. You can always find examples that reinforce that message, but those examples often don't include items like the fact that it is not really a drop off activity and most parents need to volunteer far more than they do than with other organizations, or that you can't compare the accommodations of a campground in the woods with a stay at a Marriott at the beach or ski resort. We need to stop using that mantra because it's not true and eventually families figure that out. We need to focus on what scouting offers that no one else does instead.

This is the ideal but in our units the scouts are in charge of running each activity so things get a little messier sometimes. They have an adult mentor who is supposed to help them but depending on the adult they are sometimes no more organized than the kids. There is a punch list for activity planning and a templated calendar of what needs to happen and when, but oftentimes these things happen last minute. Unless we morphed to a more adult run system, we would not be able to budge this way because too many things change. We also seem to have a lot of families with very irregular schedules between work, recreation, sports, or other activities and I think they would be reluctant to commit lump sums ahead of time. We had some similar holdouts but most younger families do not even have paper checks anymore so they had to switch to be able to accept Paypal, Venmo, and the like. Also, once Covid hit, we did not want scouts handling cash or checks. We have tried to be as touchless as possible.

I am sensitive to people's feelings -- I have friends who don't want their children to even know American slavery existed because they are concerned it will warp their budding self esteem and I can see that -- but on the other hand I believe in history in all it's warts and beauty. I believe it's contextual. I believe it's living -- so that a name that meant one thing for one group centuries ago now means something else for other groups today and that needs to be acknowledged too and not just wiped out. We have a lot of veterans who went through military bases with names that have been found to have negative connotations but that wasn't their or their family's connection to them and their personal experiences were very powerful. I don't believe history should be erased or hidden. All these statues, all these names. all these places aren't any one person's or group's history, they are all of ours. I think we have a duty to look, to ponder, and to try and understand. Some things may be so egregious that they absolutely need to come down, but other things maybe need to stay until cooler and calmer heads can assess their historical value. While I don't want to see statues come down, I am all in favor of more statues. We have so little public art any more. Let's just keep telling the stories, including the new ones we find, instead of bringing down those that are problematic.

I think that's kind of sad because unless the names were established in some kind of annoying way -- the made up name would seem to fall into that category to me -- it's just losing history. In the Northeast, almost every other place name has an indigenous origin. I don't think it's offensive to keep those names in order to remember who was here first. I do think some of the NA hookum hokkum aspects of scouting need to go, no matter how many NA locals sign off on it. I'm not Canadian but I've spent a lot of time there and I like how they frame this issue as First Nations because it seems accurate. Although from what I hear that also has some controversy.

I read somewhere that some YPT style adult training on this is coming for leaders. Seems to me though that should have come first.

Which is why my watch formally expires in 9 days.

I don't know that this badge will be the death of scouting but it has been so poorly implemented that it certainly hasn't helped. We lost several families over it. The ones who had issues with gender or orientation issues have been long gone, but this time it was families with connections to LEOs. It was really ill advised of BSA to throw this out there when they did. Instead of taking the time to do something more thoughtful and measured, it came across as a knee jerk reaction at a time when people were reacting very badly to reactionary things. While it can't hurt for scouts have discussions about some of these topics, it is to some degree overkill with what they are getting in every other aspect of their lives. The biggest problem for youth will be the confusion that results when their adult leaders and COs really aren't that tolerant of aspects of the badge that require tolerance. In this way in many cases it's going to be a very different situation in scouting from what they hear elsewhere from outside the scouting environment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh8BdQkHI-k You can rent it on youtube

I just watched some of this on the Methodist scouting page. Was anyone else struck by the guy's comments about youth protection that it's not just two deep that's needed but more like five deep? In a way, he's right if you want to be covered for all situations. That's pretty how we try to staff summer camp. But if that is becoming part of UMCs child protection policy then I guess it would have to also be adopted by the units. One of my churches is not a CO but we allow scouts to meet there with the understanding they follow the UMC YPT policy although it's currently largely the same as BSA's.

You are always positive ParkMan. Thanks for kind words. If I thought I could make a difference at the local level I would stay. I'll still be kicking around here though. I can't help myself.

Nutritious food is important at camp outs, not tail gate quality meals that take forever to make and clean up after and leave residues that attract wildlife. I'm tired of kids bringing bear "crack" -- meals like salmon in foil -- along on camp outs.

Yes. I agree. It wouldn't be so bad if it were more practical in the out of doors and cut down on the wording that seems to lead kids to want to make full meals for breakfast and lunch. And for so many kids to have to make meals. It gets difficult to fit them all in.

I know it's mystifying. It's almost as if they've gotten kickbacks from Dutch oven manufacturers. All it does is make camp outs more sedentary and creates all sorts of food handling and wildlife safety issues with kids trying to transport ambitious food items to camp sites or on trips. .

I would respond that I leave scouting as a volunteer as of 12/31/20 because I don't have a way to answer those questions. An organization that has so many good people in it can't be evil but I have lost faith in its ability to manage itself and prevent more crises in the future.

I wish they would get rid of Cooking. It has turned so many camp outs into tailgating in the woods.

I think it's OK for scouters to feel that way but I think we ignore the broader public perception at peril. People who are older tend to have better views of scouting and some connection to it. Younger people do not. BSA, or whatever survives bankruptcy, has a huge PR question ahead of it that can't be ignored.

I think if BSA had been more true to its core statements, it would have avoided becoming such a lightning rod. Be a good citizen, be of good moral character, on my honor, do my duty -- those tenets should have resulted in a more inclusive organization from the beginning. I don't know why BSA became so closely aligned with religious connections to the point where it lost its independence and ability to follow its own moral code, but it has certainly caused a lot of strife.

I think over the decades scouting became such a stalking horse for so many social issues, whether religious or otherwise. Instead, it should have just stood on its own and focused on being relevant to children. A lot of these headaches never would have existed if so. We could have easily staked out the outdoors/conservation ground and never did. It's not necessarily too late to still do so.

I think there is so much discussion and hand wringing on this site but it is focused on the wrong things. We're all talking about organizational structures and what we think kids need, but what scouting needs is to focus on is why kids don't join in the first place or drop out if they do. If kids loved our program, it would survive bankruptcy and abuse scandals, but the reality is that it's hard to recruit kids.

I think we need to be careful about overlaying our adult opinions on things. Part of the challenge with scouting is figuring out why so many kids drop out. I am/was a completely gung ho scouting parent, although my focus was more on outdoors and service. I had kind of a shocking moment with both my kids recently, now 20 and 15, when they both told me they loved cubs but mostly hated troop. It just stopped being fun. So you might think kids aren't getting anything out of cub scouting, but our target audience -- kids -- might have a different opinion.

That's today, or at least this December, but next year or the year after might be different. Cubs have no commitment to a larger scouting goal that would motivate them to stay involved. Few Tiger scouts or their parents are thinking I have to keep my kid active in Cubs so that he can make AOL. The higher retention at Troop levels is like due to scouts and their families who are a couple of years in and are focused on making Eagle. That same motivation won't exist a year or two as these scouts Eagle out. My point is that the lower attrition rate isn't a function of the Troop program -- it's likely attributable to Eagle. We have a number of scouts who have moved up their Eagle timetables to be finished as soon as possible. So while Troop numbers have a minimal decline this year, next year won't be the same story.

I knew John Wayne's cousin. John's real name was Marion; his cousin's name was Maurice. He used to play the piano for us at the Farmer's Grange for our 4-H Christmas parties. Somehow both an artist and a mountain man type. He was famous for his snapping turtle soup, which he caught himself. Interesting family.

Ahhh... well the days when everyone who was born in a village and then stayed in that village are long gone. I think the difference I see in BSA vs. other youth organizations is that in other organizations every adult is actively, visibly, and continually answerable to someone else. That kind of supervisory relationship doesn't exist in BSA because they kind of farmed it out to the COs but then provided no managerial follow up. You cannot blame a legacy CO, that has been in operation for decades for having no idea the extent of their assumed responsibilities if BSA doesn't inform them and try to correct it.

IMO the chartered organization model should never have existed simply because it had too many fatal flaws. I can't remember all my early scouting history, but I hardly think having churches use scouting as youth ministry is what BP had in mind. And not to say that we should be overly concerned with what BP had in mind because what worked then doesn't always work now. But if the general concept is that scouting is a game with a purpose, where does scouts as perpetual Sunday School fit into that? Some COs exert too much influence on scouting to suit their own needs, to the point where units can be wildly different experiences. If you walk into a McDonald's, you ought to be able to get a Big Mac no matter where you are. I think the idea of CO as benign sponsor and provider of space is the right one simply because BSA can't oversee anything more than that. I don't see it as COs not understanding their responsibility; I see it as BSA long abdicating its oversight role. The CO model was neglected for a variety of reasons although mainly financial and numerical and it should have been retooled long before now. The current panic may well result in turning scouting into a hot potato for many chartering organizations, not just churches.

I think BSA needs to stop relying on infrequent Bryan on Scouting blogs to kinda sorta clarify unclear YPT issues. I think the online training module needs to be condensed and redone for higher impact. I think some kind of regular communication on YPT issues needs to come out of BSA. There are a lot of things that come up that BSA could educate on or use to reinforce YPT more than take this test and you're done. And, of course, fix the tech issues. There are times that YPT seems to defy common sense such as when you see a leader bolt out of a meeting of 30 kids because they suddenly realize they are going to be the only adult in the room for 20 seconds. On the other hand, I don't ever want to hear about another case of abuse in scouts ever again.