AwakeEnergyScouter

I forgot a category - National Historic Trails! They often (always?) have Junior Ranger programs, and create engagement with the land as well as local history, and hiking sections of them for all the outdoor adventures that require hiking (so everything except Outdoor Adventurer) doubles up on activities and requirements. Our pack has hiked trails that were prepared on top of El Camino Real de los Tejas and made a stop to complete the Junior Ranger booklet, and we've also used the booklet as a trailhead gathering activity. Since many modern roads in our area started as part of El Camino Real, the cubs get reminded regularly by road signs that we are now driving the same paths that Caddo once created. The trail is still very much here, we have just built on the work of our local predecessors/ancestors so that it doesn't look like a trail anymore in large sections.

Two years ago, our pack started actively providing opportunities to earn the NPS Resource Stewardship Scout Ranger patch. In the process, we've discovered a number of Junior Ranger programs that can be done outside a national park on topics that I thought others might find useful to have a list for as well. We do have a national historical park nearby, but we want to provide more variety of experience and learning for the cubs than doing the entire ten hours just in that one park, and probably few packs have easy access to several NPS parks in the first place, so perhaps some of these will come in handy for others pursuing the Scout Ranger patch as well. Junior Cave Scientist - limestone/karst cave geology and ecology, conservation in karst landscapes. This was a perfect companion for a pack summer limestone cave visit to Cave Without A Name in Texas, and I imagine it would work well in almost any show limestone cave. If you happen to be near Cave Without A Name, you can email them ahead to time to request certain topics on the tour and had I done that, they would have just walked through the Junior Ranger booklet for us. Passing that on for someone else to plan a smoother outing. Getting the badge in the mail requires sending in the completed booklet, so you will need one printed booklet per cub. Some show cave tours may be too fast to allow for the booklet to be worked through, though - Natural Bridge Caverns might not work well here for example. Even without trying to do the booklet, the cubs didn't have time to ask all their questions and linger as long as they wanted. Wildland Fire Junior Ranger - what it sounds like. Pages 3, 8, and 9 connect to Into The Woods re: fire-adapted and fire-aversive ecosystems. Page 16 and 17 relate to wildfire emergency preparedness, potentially useful for the My Safety Be Prepared For Natural Events activity. There is a patch as well as a badge for this, although since I got my cub's patch at a national park I don't know if one can get them in the mail. I don't see any instructions for that in the booklet, but there is an email to email for the badge through the mail. Because you don't have to send in the completed booklet, you could work out of one or a small number of booklets for the group for this one if you wanted. Junior Ranger Night Explorer - connects to Sky is the Limit, the Let's Camp Tiger Flashlight Tiger Hunt activity (importance of red light instead of white), and Leave No Trace for Kids point 6 (Respect Wildlife) in terms of light pollution. Junior Ranger Let's Go Fishing! - all the fishing adventures, of course. There is a list of all of the themed junior ranger programs that aren't focused on a particular park that you can find a few more in - my cub did a few more based on personal interest, and while they didn't do them all, these were the ones out of the ones they did that make sense to do as a den/patrol and/or pack because of the program tie-ins. Happy Junior Ranger training!

You're welcome, @Chisos! I thought there might be some people not currently in the council who might be wondering. Glad to have helped.

Maybe it's that I was a scout, maybe it's that I'm from a country with high accountability expectations for politicians, maybe it's because it was my job for many years to foresee and prevent problems so that we delivered to spec on time... But it blows my mind that people keep doing this. Both that the government allows it and that people don't learn and so many act like this came out of left field. It absolutely did not. It's one thing to not know. Even if perhaps you should have been more curious or critical or something. It's something completely different to know and not act. And it sure wasn't the responsibility of children to do floodplain management.

We have a summer camp in the area that flooded badly last weekend called Bear Creek. The only people up there were the Ranger and his family, because the camp is shut down for repairs this summer with all Alamo Area Council activities moved to McGimsey Scout Park in town (and a lot of folks going out of council this year). The eponymous Bear Creek is a tributary to the northern fork of the Guadalupe and it did flash flood, but in the wider context the camp just needs some cleanup. Images council sent out attached. Debris in the Order of the Arrow ring (amphitheater-style seating for campfires) and on the wires for the slides. (We have a swimming area in front of the boathouse (on Bear Creek itself of course) with waterslides and zip lines and a floating dock, but the water slides themselves are only on the river during camp sessions, so they weren't in the river when the flood came.) Our floating dock has been lost. Water entered the Dining Hall from runoff coming down the hill; cleanup will be required. (The dining hall is pretty high up on a hill, where the campsites are also located, and it's a pavilion with rolldown closures of openings rather than real walls.) The Eco Pavilion appears unaffected, and all canoes and kayaks remain in place. The road below the Dining Hall has been washed out, exposing a water line and currently preventing vehicle access to the Valley View campsite. Water also entered the Main (storage area behind a novelty facade of an Old West town at the entrance) and the Ranger’s porch, though thankfully not the Ranger’s home itself. Some fencing is down, including a fence belonging to a neighbor near the rifle range. (The rifle range is located in the creek valley.) I think a lot of us in Alamo Area can't help but put ourselves in the shoes of the parents who lost campers on and off. And in those moments, other than working with other unit leaders to make sure we're Prepared(TM), I often become very proud of Scouting America and scouting. As you may know by now even if you're not in the area, Hunt is geologically very prone to flash flooding and is part of an area colloquially called Flash Flood Alley. Just like heat, severe flash flood risk is baked into the experience of camping there. (This is not the first time campers have died in flash floods outside Hunt.) So, this requires Being Prepared. And all the campsites as well as the staff housing is located near the tops of the hills. The entire valley below would have to fill for campers to be washed away in the middle of the night. That's good, because cell phone reception at Bear Creek ranges from none to text messages only at the hilltops. Had Bear Creek itself risen as much as the entire Guadalupe did at its worst, scouts camping at Bear Creek would probably have had their camp week ruined but they would be alive. Camp Mystic (not accredited) had cabins in not just floodplains but floodways, and we have no people sleeping in even floodplains other than (for some inexplicable reason) the Ranger's house. Source: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2025/texas-camp-mystic-guadalupe-fema-floodplains/, for reference Bear Creek is really close to Camp Waldemar which is marked on the map. The floodway that goes upwards to the left left of Camp Waldemar is Bear Creek the creek.) Apparently FEMA and Camp Mystic argued about flood plains and cabin locations repeatedly, including when they last expanded Camp Mystic in 2020. (Source: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/12/camp-mystic-flood-plain-FEMA/) And we didn't even get close to needing to do anything like that - we just put our campers well away from flash floods and make them all hike up and down hill instead. Good for the folks who planned this camp! Is it irritating to have to hike up and down steep hills in the heat when you're down in Program Valley and realize you forgot something you really must have at your campsite? Yes. Does "Cardiac Hill" deserve its nickname? Maybe not. We are in the physically fit business, after all. But is all the up and down worth knowing that you and your scouts aren't going to die in a flash flood? Absolutely. Safety rules are written in blood, let's not forget. May we all learn to respect the power of nature and be mentally awake enough to recognize when advance planning is the difference between life and death.

Maybe I'm just overly cynical, but that sounds like someone in your council fighting the success. It could just be poor job performance, of course. But the kind of stiff, emotional resistance to girls and women being a full, authentic part of Scouting America that some people in the organization have doesn't just evaporate in a year or even in the face of evidence. For them, it's not about success for the organization, it's about forcing the world to be a certain way. In this case cooties-free. It could definitely be that your council's policy is a result of an internal struggle between people who wanted coed and people who didn't. Did you see Scouting Maverick's take on postponing coed in Scouts BSA earlier? https://scoutingmaverick.com/2025/01/21/celebrating-a-sexist-scam-linked-troop-wood-badge-highlights-sas-cultural-rot/ Your example of a CC who is so invested in no girls that he's going to de facto let his unit die rather than go coed isn't the only one I'm sure. Actually, you mentioned several such units, so... They're going to keep shrieking until it stops working, which seems to be roundabout now or soon. But some won't stop shrieking because they realized it's actually fine, they will still sabotage what they can. Meanwhile in my corner of my female-friendly council, many leaders are working together to build out a coed pipeline from Cub Scouts into Scouts BSA. Not coincidentally we're about equal numbers of men and women. And it's working - all of our units are growing. If we keep working, Scouting America is going to come back from cultural oblivion in a decade or so.

Off topic now, but I certainly hope that's what's going to happen. In a generation, GSUSA is going to have a real struggle on their hands if they don't open up membership to boys. Gender segregated scouting is niche, and once enough time has passed for everyone to know off the top of their heads that Scouting America is coed and the girls growing up in Cub Scouts now have kids of their own, there will be as many moms as dads who fondly remember their scouting youth and want to share scouting with their kids based on what I just saw at cub resident camp. I think that's what we're all doing as parents - whatever experience we had in scouts as youth is what we want to share with our kids. Right now, moms who were Girl Scouts with daughters want to share Girl Scouts with them, and often do. My cub and I are usually the only mother-daughter pair with no boy siblings in the family at events. Moms who were Girl Scouts but who have boys have to put them in Scouting America if they do scouts; but dads who were Scouting America scouts can now share that with all their kids. Once both US-born moms and dads were Scouting America scouts... I predict the same fate for GSUSA as other girl guiding organizations - niche. The vast majority of people want coed scouting and Scouting America now has first-mover advantage in the US. The longer GSUSA delays in letting boys in, the harder it will be to make up the time for all the reasons Scouting America has just gone through. Or, I suppose, they can just experience what our single-gender units are experiencing now.

I have to apologize, I didn't want to type the whole phrase "family packs, linked troops, and coed troops" every time and made the assumption that readers would know that cub scouts has family packs (coed), but that there is a range of coed-ness among troops, depending on whether they're in the pilot or not and how closely linked troops operate. Some operate completely independently, others have meetings and outings at the same time. To supplement the troop information above, coed packs have been around since 2022. I was surprised it was so recent when I looked it up, but I suppose that's because we joined a pack in the pilot in 2022 and I didn't realize it was new. I was so relieved to find my normal I didn't think about it further. https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2023/06/22/cub-scout-family-dens-what-they-are-and-how-they-could-work-for-your-pack/ The relative newness is perhaps also why so many people seem to not have thought about the choices AOLs have to make about troops and friendships. It's been obvious to me from the start, and I've wondered why I keep running into people who seem blindsided or surprised by that if AOL friends choose to stick together, then that rules out a single-gender troop that operates independently. But it may be because most US scouters truly haven't thought it through from the perspective of AOLs crossing over from coed packs because it's so new to them. At a troop fair last year, I was a little surprised that several single-gender units schmoozed me up without announcing that they were single-gender or checking to see what gender my cub was. I assumed that if they didn't take half the cubs they'd say that up front so parents and cubs would know the limitation before wasting time. But now I realize that this may literally be the first years of cubs from coed packs that have been together from Lions on up together crossing over.

Apologies for the late response, but you have your answer (or at least a big part of it) yourself to what happened in just 10 years hyperlocally right here. It's not that nobody is interested in scouting, it's the interest in single-gender scouting that's declined. It's the same in my council - coed units are doing better as a whole than single-gender units. This matters because if you did manage to boost interest in scouting in your community, it wouldn't necessarily result in a surge of new members for you if what's happening empirically is that coed units are healthy and single-gender ones less so. Also, think about crossover friend group and family dynamics - friend groups from family packs have to choose between splitting up the group or choosing a coed troop. I see this happening in slow motion for the AOLs in my pack now. Because of older siblings and tight den friend groups, the coed troop AOLs crossed over into three years ago is going to get at least three years of AOLs from us, and us adult leaders with them. The core AOL patrol friend group is tight and wants to stick together, so no single-gender troop had a chance no matter how well run they are because there are well-run coed troops that they can choose. If you want to solve this problem, you're going to have to figure out who does want single-gender troops and how to reach them. I'm the wrong person to have guesses, but you know your community better than strangers on the Internet anyway. Who in your community might share your reasons for wanting single-gender scouting? Articulate the value proposition clearly and go tell those people.

Definitely not. The word 'forest bathing' may have been coined in Japan, but the observation that people in general feel calmer and more connected to the Universe in nature is old and universal. This is also why some of the old ways linger around even today, despite centuries of attempts to get rid of them.

I almost included 'reverent' from the US Scout Law, but since it seems like there is a large contingent of people here (including in scouts) who don't feel that nature is sacred it may well not resonate generally for Americans. But I agree completely with what Kate is saying here, and at least in Sweden I am typical. We seek and find spirituality and sacredness in nature. That's also why we have no problem with atheist scouts - feeling the spiritual connection to nature and all things doesn't require belief in deities. That's part of why that works for us. (Presumably some scouts' and scouters' difficulty in imagining spirituality not centered around deities is why the WOSM constitution needed to be clarified a while back also.) This is also why I want to be out there and why I want to get more kids out there. They should get to know and protect nature, this generates right view and right action grounded in reverence. 🌍Happy Earth Month! Remember, this is the month to launch your Scouting for Clean Waterways project! Let's trash own trash and be water protectors! https://www.forskning.se/2020/05/28/naturen-har-blivit-svenskarnas-kyrka/

From WOSM's web site https://www.scout.org/who-we-are/world-organization/about-organization : "A Global Educational Youth Movement Scouting's mission is to contribute to the education of young people through a value system based on the Scout Promise and Law. Through Scouting, we are building a better world where people are self-fulfilled as individuals and play a constructive role in society. To be the world’s most inspiring and inclusive youth movement, creating transformative learning experiences for every young person, everywhere." Point six of the Swedish Scout Law is "A scout gets to know and protects nature." The sixth point isn't above points 1-5 or 7, of course. But having made a promise many times to do my best to follow the scout law, I certainly feel obliged towards environmental activism when the need arises. Point six of the first version of the Scout Law was "a scout is kind to animals". That's not necessarily pointing to environmental activism taken literally, but we as a movement have clearly committed ourselves to being Earth protectors. See for example everything at https://www.scout.org/what-we-do/young-people-and-communities/environment, or more locally https://www.scouting.org/outdoor-programs/scouting-clean-waterways/ "Now more than ever, we need young people to stand up and take action around the challenges facing our communities and our planet. To promote human rights and act against injustice, to tackle climate change and promote gender equality, and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals." Ahmad Alhendawi Secretary General, World Scouting (2017-2024)

I will absolutely not be participating in this phenomenon. Facts exist and they matter, period. You ignore them at your own peril. Pretending that things are one way (pravda) when they are plainly another (istina) is the root of the rot that always ruins whatever our (Swedish perspective) only remaining enemy to the east does. Just look at Karelia, and inversely the Baltic countries now compared to USSR times. If you want things to work in your country, citizens need to know what is actually happening in it and how things work on a nuts and bolts causal level, not what some high-level politician wants to be true or wants you to pretend to be the case so they can defraud your state. I can't control other people, but I will absolutely not pretend that the sky is green because it's inconvenient to someone else that it's blue. I don't care how out of touch or elitist that might seem to other people, for me that is a basic act of patriotism and cultural identity. I am of a people that doesn't operate on parallel political and factual truths. One of our defining cultural traits is that we operate on factual truth only. This might sound a little harsh, and in a sense it is but it's not directed towards you. I just grew up knowing that I would be the target of political propaganda and that a country that did not wish us well was trying to convince citizens that they should give up resistance so that they could take over our country and suck all the resources out of it too, like they already have the territory they control. I've thought about the importance of seeking and confirming truth for a very long time, in several political time periods and in different countries with and without political censorship and repression. In addition, I have a religious obligation to never give up trying to see reality as it is in order to help other people. If you give up truth and respect for the equal intrinsic value and dignity of each human being, it doesn't matter how slick your talk is, it's all going to go sideways in the end. Convincing other of something is all fine and good, but what's the point if you don't make sure to be right first?

Mine is cub-age as well, and I didn't think anyone would bring up current events/politics during this adventure until I realized with some shock that my child's probably entire class discusses US politics and their opinions of parties and individual politicians on the regular, including speculating or sharing who their parents voted for in the 2024 election. (Before the election, it was "was going to vote for".) Evidently we had done a good job of not voicing our political opinions in front of them (thinking as you did, that the time was later and that we ought to start somewhere nuanced and thoughtful), because they came from from a sleepover last year and asked us to vote for a particular candidate because they didn't know who we were going to vote for. The kids at the sleepover had made a pact to get their parents to vote for that candidate! The young age at which they did this really took me aback. But then again, at the Webelos-AOL overnight camp our pack attended last summer a Webelos yelled out "To elect Trump!" as an answer to the question "what do we have an election for this fall?" during that same adventure. The answer the staffer was looking for, was, of course, "president". I don't know if this is typical or unusual, but wanted to pass on the experience in case it's more in the common side. I know we definitely weren't discussing politics when I was their age. But since they seem to be, I wanted to prevent political shout-outs like the one we saw at camp. When it comes to reliable media, everyone has offered good observations already, but I wanted to add a general strategy for cross-checking and/or finding higher-quality reporting: public service media. It's never behind a paywall, and since the funding doesn't depend on advertising and the mission is explicitly to educate and inform their citizenry the quality is much higher than many private media these days. In Swedish public media, I regularly see reporting that forces politicians and civil servants to take action to fix problems, such as that 2/3 of the train delays in a certain region was due to the same five malfunctioning switches that had been due for exchange for years. Poof, those switches got exchanged real quick once that reporting was published because who wants to seem incompetent? If you only speak English, your options are more limited, but the BBC is excellent. France 24 also publishes news in English, as does Deutsche Welle. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand also publish public service news in English. https://www.bbc.com/news https://www.france24.com/en/ https://www.dw.com/en/top-stories/s-9097 https://www.cbc.ca/news https://www.abc.net.au/news https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world

I just scheduled the "talk with an elected official about whether they were elected using majority or plurality voting and why" requirement of My Community, and decided to add this to the invite. "Note about scouting and politics: The scouting movement is nonpolitical in that in our roles as scouts and scouters in uniform, we do not express support for any particular political candidate in any particular place. We are a civic movement that recognizes the inviolable human dignity of each human being, freedom of thought, religion, assembly, and expression; democracy, equal rights under the law for everyone, rule of law, and human rights. We encourage our members to take an active role in creating a harmonious society that is consistent with our value foundation, but also encourage each member to reach their own conclusion regarding which political candidates have the best suggestions for how to do that in the country in which they live, consistent with freedom of thought. Given that we have over 50 million members worldwide, our fellow scouts and scouters are almost guaranteed to be mixed political company, but actively voicing support for the importance of human dignity, civic freedoms, democracy, equal rights, rule of law, and human rights is not considered political as far as the scouting movement goes, even if they are contested in a country with a scouting organization." I also agree that advising youth on not getting their news from social media is a good idea. "I read it on the Internet so it must be true" is the new "I saw it on TV so it must be true". Being able to evaluate the source of information and knowing how to cross-check it is a key skill in an information society.

Ki ki so so!

I actually found it pretty easy, but I also have a professional background as a project manager as well as with running operations and quality control and went into the course clear on why I am a Scouting America leader and how that connects to my personal values and spiritual path. Defining the vision and writing some SMART goals to support it was just codifying my long-term to do list. Helpful to get the prompt, especially since we could sit down and coordinate - I could cut several things off my list because my CC is doing them instead. As always, I am fulfilling my vows, in the case of Scouting America the Mahayana stage vows being the most relevant. (Bodhisattva and Enlightened Society vows, so to liberate all sentient beings and to always stay in touch with the primordial nature of all sentient beings and build a society based on the view that all beings have indestructible dignity and intrinsic value) Meeting the dralas - in the case of scouting activities, the land spirits especially - is a key part of discovering sacredness and one's own primordial nature. Your face before your parents were born, as the Zen folks say. There's solid reasons for why BP used the outdoors as a feedback mechanism for development. So in order to connect youth with sacredness, themselves, and the land, our outdoor program needs to be well-executed and easy to operate for a rotation of leaders coming and going. Based on previous observations of what's worked well and what hasn't, combined with the need to continually welcome parents in as new leaders, I intend to lay the groundwork for a long-term sustainable outdoor program for our pack by: * Creating a veg-friendly pack cookbook with all the the "hooks" for the new cub scout program requirements that pertain to cooking - met someone at IOLS a few weeks ago who had the exact problem beyond my own that I wanted to solve, namely omni leader with vegan scout whose parents weren't that helpful or experienced with camp cooking so that was a win * Creating a field manual for running our hiking club, including the necessary modifications to meet all the new required hiking adventure requirements as well as provisions for at least occasionally completing the related ones like Math on the Trail and Tech on the Trail (currently I am running the whole thing, but will have to transition it to someone else during next scouting year or it will die when my cub crosses over) * Create a field manual for running our campouts that likewise delivers opportunities to earn all the Let's Camp adventures plus Outdoor Adventurer every campout, and is easily adaptable to complete other outdoor adventures (hiking, fishing, Into the Woods, Into the Wild, eating requirement for the personal fitness adventures, etc) that solidifies what parents and cubs appreciate the most about how we do campouts right now while also spreading the organizing burden as widely and fairly as possible * 5S our camping supplies to make it easy for an adult to make sure we have everything we need for every campout in a way that doesn't require tribal knowledge * Go recruit in five completely new places where we've never recruited before to get us out of our recruiting rut and reach people who may not have thought they'd be welcome in Scouting America and/or don't really know what we do We pack leaders spend so much of our mental energy on campouts on managing the physical that we don't always have the calm to model that connection to the sacred. We need to collectively just get a grip and sort it out so that we can have more transcendental moments with the grass, the touch of the wind, the kisses of the sun, the call of the water, all that. Ultimately, we need to maintain some degree of samadhi ourselves and raise windhorse fearlessly in order to offer our cubs what they need to develop, and we aren't doing that if we're running around like chickens with our heads cut off. May this be fruitful, may this be of benefit, may this be auspicious, my it be so 🙏🏼

The requirement isn't done, so the youth isn't due anything until it is. Therefore, there is no delay in receiving what is due because it isn't due yet. Downvote for explaining something factually and calmly? Noted. You're right, the Internet can be a hard mean place. That's why we scouts do better, right? May you also find happiness and contentment. I'm following swilliam's cue and sticking to my RL scouter friends for a while.

Take care of yourself. May you be well and happy, and may your scouts blossom into happy, healthy young adults as well.

As you can see, they were not. She was asking for help on manually marking off a partially completed requirement, that was the whole question.

Exactly! Adding to my satisfaction is that two of my fellow leaders went at the same time, so now we're working on improving how our unit runs at the same time. By the time our tickets are finished, we will have significantly improved operational efficiency and have incorporated all the new adventure requirements into the operations in a scalable, repeatable way. And now when we need something, we have contacts at council as well as other units. Much better situation to be volunteering from.

To me, the natural solution is for him to join the scout corps in Ecuador since that's where he lives now (https://scoutsecuador.org/) and then just come visit your troop whenever he's around as a social and networking visit. My troop had some foreign visitors like that, although mostly scouters. Some of my patrolmates had expatriated also, and joined in that case Scouts NZ while they were there. When they came back to Sweden, they brought scouting contacts with them. All part of the worldwide siblinghood of scouting. Your troop would be in an excellent position to earn the International Spirit Award! You would have an old scouting friend to visit, perhaps at an Ecuadorean camporee. You would have a much easier time planning cool high adventure in Ecuador with a local scouting friend to help. Lots of cool possibilities there!

I found my people! Now I can reach out to people in the area to talk about scouting instead of the Internet. I came here to connect with other scouters in the time that I have - the in between times and late nights. Now I can text people I know personally instead. I quite enjoyed WB, and would recommend. The brief format made it a great reminder of things I already knew, I learned a few new things, but above all I got plugged into engaged scouters nearby.

All, naturally, true, but I wanted to thank you @skeptic for causing me to read this particular section. Thinking of some recent conversations about acceptable cub squirreliness, I'm not crazy after all, and it's always good to know I'm not the only one who thinks simply meeting the sacred in nature develops spirituality 😃

Yes, yes, and yes, happening right now as we speak in the US and has been happening for literally over sixty years elsewhere. There is ample proof of concept here - this is a weak argument unless you have data showing that a large enough fraction of parents to cripple Scouting America as a whole refuse to send their children to youth activities that only have other children that are just like their child demographically. And even if you did, it's an argument pertaining to the goal of growing or maintaining Scouting America the organization as opposed to preparing youth to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law. And like DuctTape said, parents centering identity politics over a quality alternative learning program isn't really the fault of Scouting America. If the parents in your community can't stand doing things with people that aren't just like themselves in every way, then arguably they were never interested in scouting in the first place. We have always been a movement consisting of different "categories" of people - remember that Brownsea deliberately included scouts of different socioeconomic status. The current WOSM reference document The Essential Characteristics of Scouting starts with this BP quote that I'm sure you've heard before, in the context of Messengers of Peace if nothing else: The first paragraph reads Scouting isn't equally popular everywhere because our ideals aren't equally popular everywhere. But we don't compromise our values just because they're unpopular in some particular place. That's a key strength of our movement. The implied proposal you seem to be making is that while you agree that trans and cis kids are equally important and valuable, we should exclude the trans kids (and perhaps everyone else who isn't able-bodied, cishet, at least middle class, etc) anyway because the parents of the cis kids don't want their kids hanging out with trans kids. Is that correctly restated? Sorry to hear that your troop is having problems, but my unit has to my knowledge 100% straight cis kids and plenty of boys whose parents are happy to have them there, are happy to have them share a campsite with the girls, and wives of male leaders who don't have a problem with them going camping with us female leaders (and vice versa). (To be fair, I don't really care what their sexual orientation is and they're cubs so I could be wrong about that 100%, I'm not really seeking that information.) Heck, one of the probably straight cis boys who's having a hard time got a man to man emotional intelligence talk from one of the male leaders recently. We've had a good recruitment season and have now made up the losses we suffered after COVID. Are you sure that you're framing your unit's problems correctly in the first place?