This is from a posting on Venturinglist@yahoogroups.com during a debate about the upcoming "reforms" of Venturing.  It is a response to several comments supporting a return to mandatory uniforms and ranks for Venturing and the use of Boy Scouting as a model for Venturing. 

 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

I just found BSA's membership numbers for year ending Dec. 31, 2012 on their website.  The news isn't good, and it is discouraging to see this happen (even if we could see it coming).  We had 219,453 Venturers, 58,208 Venturing Leaders, and 17,075 Crews at the close of business December 31, 2012.  For calendar year 2012, we lost 11,674 Venturing Youth, 358 adult leaders, and 778 Crews.

The last time we had this few Venturers was during the year 1999, which we ended with 202,164 registered youth.

This is the second essay we have received in response to our recent article concerning BSA's membership standards for young people.  This one, from a very well spoken young man, is heart breaking.

I have been a member of the Scouting community since I was a Cub Scout. I have since progressed and grown with the program. It has been a part of my life since I can remember. When I
joined, I had no idea where the program would take me. I would have never experienced the many joys and struggles that have pushed me farther, and made me a more rounded person. I love the organization, and have basically given my life to the program in turn for the experiences and personal growth. And I’m glad I did.



I’m gay. I have been my entire life, but very few know it. I had been in denial about it all of my teen years, and finally, after thoughts of suicide, anxiety, depression, and stress, I couldn’t hold it in me any longer, or I might have acted on my thoughts. The only thing that stopped me was the thought of leaving my family behind and giving up on them.

I hid who I was for so long, it hurt a person I love dearly. I had a girlfriend, another person I met in Scouting. Because I had denied my feelings, I let the relationship grow into something I couldn’t do. As hard as I tried, I could not give her the love she expected. We broke up and are still friends, but she still doesn’t know, as I risk being removed from a program I love so dearly.

As I have finally accepted who I am, I have questioned this love for an organization that doesn’t welcome those like me. I never chose my orientation, just as one doesn’t have a choice over what color eyes they have, how tall they are, what skin color, or how they look. If I could have chosen to be six foot – two, dark hair, blue eyes, dimples, and be attracted to women, I would have not been in the position I’m in. But instead, I am who I am, and I can’t be living as someone I’m not. After all, a Scout is trustworthy.

I haven’t made my decision of how long I’m going to stay in the closet in Scouting. One part of me wants to leave immediately as I’m not welcomed in the program if I continue to hide. Another part of me just wants to stay and not disrupt what I have going for sake of having one constant thing in my life. Ideally, I’d love to just be accepted for who I am and the merits I have done in the program, not for who I love. But each and every day, I find it harder to carry out my duties with these thoughts in the back of my mind.

I am an Eagle Scout, and I’m not going to hide it or deny it. But to know that if I had the courage or wisdom to not deny who I was, I would have never received that honor, and many teens are being denied this because of something they were born as. It hurts to think I could have been one of them.

Every day, I deal with hate for those like me. Even though nobody knows my secret, I am filled with sadness when another person has a slur, or outright hate. When I hear how bad others like me are because they "abuse children" or are "sex crazed men," it hurts. Of course there is no denying those people don’t exist, but those traits can be found in heterosexual men and women. I would never think of doing those things. I’m not a pedophile. I’m attracted to men my age and someone I can have a lasting relationship with. And so are most gay people. My dream is to spend my life with someone I love, who will raise children with me, and will always be there. Is that not what most people desire?

I know in my heart, I can’t change people’s opinions about topics. Everyone has their own opinion and they are entitled to them. I only want to give insight of a gay teen in Scouting, and the sadness I have to overcome each and every day. I already don’t feel accepted in society if I reveal my secret, and it really hurts me to know I wouldn’t be accepted in Scouting either.

Here is an essay we received in response to our January article about the Unintended Consequences of BSA's Membership Policies for Youth:

Well, I believe that keeping gays out of scouting is wrong. I know people who have had to hide who they are and I think they make some fine scouts.  If they were ever removed from scouting, we would lose a very valuable person from the program. I also think a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is bad, because how can a scoutmaster or advisor teach a young person to be trustworthy when their entire scouting career has been a lie about who they are? In my opinion, the people who have blown this out of proportion are the people who value tradition over the youth we purport to serve. While tradition can be a good thing, in this case it is not. I know many teenagers who are struggling with who they are and who they want to be.   They are also struggling to see how they fit in with society, families, and most importantly, themselves. Tradition makes little allowance for change, and in the meantime many teenagers are embracing this change in attitudes about homosexuality.  By enforcing our traditions we are forcing scouts to accept a value that they don't support. This confuses our youth and creates a new struggle as they try to deal with the conflict between Scouting’s values and those of the world they have grown up in. A Venturer has to ask him/herself, "Do I want to be part of an organization that tells my friends to lie about themselves." And I think that for a lot of people, the answer will be no. With the right boundaries in place, teenaged boys can go camping with teenaged girls so why can't we accept gays and just put those same boundaries in place? Scouting for me is a safe haven from all the drama and stress of real life, and I want ALL of my friends, not just my heterosexual ones, to be able to join me.

 

 

We are looking for articles for the upcoming November issue of Venturing Magazine.   In this issue, in addition to the regular articles about Crews and their activities, we would like to solicit papers written for College of Commissioner's Science or University of Scouting about Venturing.  If you have written a paper about venturing, please consider allowing us to publish it. 

We still need submissions from Crews, too!! 

I am going to write an article about the Venturing Corps of Discovery and how it can be used to teach citizenship and community involvement. 

Summer's over and it's time to get back to Venturing.  Crews should be kicking off their school year all over the US, and recruiting should be in full swing by the end of September. 

The new issue of Venturing Magazine is a week late this month because of the Labor Day weekend, but here it comes!  A long article about changes that have already occurred in venturing and some of the proposals that are being considered.  It appears that Venturing is destined to become more tightly integrated into the Boy Scout program, and our independence is pretty much gone.

Another article tells the story of the Michigan International Camporee this summer. 

The July edition of Venturing Magazine is up at www.venturingmag.org! We were a few hours late this month, but I confess that I was distracted, getting ready for a whitewater trip on the Main Salmon River in Idaho.  I have run the Middle Fork of the Salmon, which is upriver, and I have run the Lower Salmon (downriver) many times, as this is my favorite stretch for Kodiak Courses.  The Main Salmon, however, has eluded me.  We are a small group, though, this year with only one Venturing Crew and a few guests.   I fear that my days of running huge Kodiak Courses may have passed.

The new issue of Venturing Magazine includes four articles contributed by Crews across America.  One is about how their Crew uses the Venturing Recognition program.  Another, about a huge public service project and a third about  a Sports Crew that specializes in Fencing.  A fourth article is about the upcoming Michigan International Camporee, a longstanding international gathering for both Venturers and Scouts.   Many thanks to our new article contributors!  Keep 'em coming!

The lead articles are about Fund Raising, and a second installment on Recruiting.  

Joe