XXXXX, thank you for your thoughts. Fundamentally, you, XXXX, and I are coming at this situation from completely different perspectives, and this is bubbling out in our discussion as a disagreement. Here is the underlying assumption that keeps us from meeting in the middle (I fear). In my view, Venturing (and LFL Exploring, too) is a last opportunity to serve and shape the lives of young people who never did Scouting. These kids, some of whom joined Cubs but never bridged to a Troop, require a different approach in order to recruit them into the BSA family. In my view, we have already lost the battle over uniforms and ranks. Instead of leading with those program features, I have always led with adventures and social interaction. I have been involved in Crews and Posts that have specialized in a wide variety of sports from scuba and mountaineering to horses, whitewater rafting, and Civil War reenacting. Once those kids have been recruited and made the emotional commitment to our Crew (or Posts), we have also engaged them in community service, youth ministry, mission trips, Philmont, Florida SeaBase, summer camp staff, and a variety of other more traditional pursuits. But we always led with the adventures, and I bristle at the implication that this is not “real” Scouting.
I have had 23 young men achieve Eagle
Rank, 7 young people achieve the Silver Award, at least a dozen achieve Bronze
Award, 2 receive Rotary RYLA scholarships, several go to service academies (Air
Force Academy, West Point), and many get accepted to other fine
universities. I have also had kids get great careers as auto mechanics,
aviation machinists, truck drivers, pastors, and so on. One of our boys
is in prison for a series of bank robberies. I have also had a suicide
and an attempted suicide. One of our alum died of Aids in the 80’s.
Another died of brain cancer three years ago. I hope and pray that
I had a positive influence on ALL of these kids, and that even the most
troubled of them had some brief happiness while they were in our Posts and
Crews.
If we want to serve the broadest
possible number of youth, we need to offer a program that will appeal to
ALL of them. By the time they have achieved the age of 13, they are not
going to learn anything from memorizing oaths and laws. Their
personalities and moral codes have already been largely formed by that
time. What we CAN do is help them find themselves as members of a
group. We can model how mature adults act, especial in stressful
situations inherent in high adventure. We can teach them how to follow, and
later how to lead (as they say, you have to be a good follower before you can
be a good leader). We can teach them life skills like first aid, responsible
driving skills, cooperation on a climbing rope team, and so forth.
We can expose unchurched kids (and their families) to our churches and to
Faith based community service.
In Scouting, rank advancement is a
personal accomplishment in the context of camping and camp craft skills and
works exceptionally well with younger children. We are dealing with more
sophisticated consumers, however, and their accomplishments in Venturing need
to be of a nature that they can talk about when they return to school after the
weekend. Their accomplishments need to be impressive to their families
and to their peers. Kicking the winning goal in a soccer tournament is a
good example. Running Killer Fang Falls in a kayak, rappelling off
Dead Man’s Cliff, or completing a bicycle trip over a mountain pass are these
kinds of accomplishments. Spending a week working at an orphanage
in Ensenada, renovating a migrant labor camp, or helping clean up flood damage
in a nearby town are personal achievements. Memorizing the Scout Oath and Law
are not.
Anyway, I am looking at this
puzzle in the context of serving the overwhelming majority of teens who never
joined Scouting. If we focus on alumni of Boy Scouts and Girls Scouts we
are engaging in a terribly unfortunate form of myopia. At any given
moment, there are about 20 million teenagers in this country. Less than a
million of them are in Scouting.
As a historical comment, it was
Exploring, BSA that had no uniform back in the 1980’s, not LFL Exploring.
And another historical perspective is that Venturing was a major step back into
the Scouting family for Exploring, BSA. The current reforms are part of a
continuum that started 15 years ago.
Joe