Scoutmaster Podcast 170

And now to your Scoutmaster. We sometimes find, because America is so big in our media and in our movies and everything, that people kind of assume that we're the same, It gets really irritating. What's even more irritating is when I speak to people and I say, yeah, but speaking with somebody from Scouts Australia, they have Scouts. Yeah, they have Scouts. It wasn't even invented by an American. It wasn't invented by an Australian either.

This is podcast number 170. Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. First off, as always, let's take a look at the mailbag. We heard from Steven Jensen who said: thank you again for your service to our youth.

I think the podcast and the blog are reminding people in Boy Scouts everywhere what the program is supposed to be. Thanks, Steven, Thanks for being in touch And I really appreciate the kind words there. David Ballard is with Austin, Texas, Troop 9.. And he says: as a new Scoutmaster, a couple of years ago I ran into your podcast and started listening to them. From the start I found it would be a great help to me in putting everything into perspective. Thanks for the great resource for Scoutmasters.

It helped me get started and has influenced how I do my job as a Scoutmaster. Thanks so much, David, once again for the kind words. Glad to have you listening. I'm glad you're finding things useful. Jamie Humphries is an old friend of the podcast and the blog And he's also the Scoutmaster of Troop 4277 in Flugerville, Texas, And he wrote in in part to say it's been a crazy new year.

I just welcomed 14 new scouts from Weeblows this spring, So it's been a fun start. Again, all your info has helped tremendously. Thanks, Jamie. I enjoyed your story about the going to the campereen things And I'm glad that you're still finding what we're saying useful And I appreciate the kind words.

Before we go on with the mailbag here, let me note that this is podcast number 170.. We should probably play a fanfare or something. A while back, a listener and a reader asked if there was any way for them to donate towards offsetting some of the financial costs of the podcast. I never really considered that an option before. This is a free service that's offered to volunteer scouts And as soon as you begin to get finances involved, things get very complex and complicated and overlaid with all kinds of strange things.

But it requires a fair amount of time to produce a podcast and videos and things like that and create content for the blog, And there are financial realities involved in what needs to be paid for to put it all out there on the web, And I'm very touched and I'm very thankful that some people have expressed a desire to help with some of that. So here's what we're going to do. There will be a voluntary subscription in which you can financially support the efforts of ScoutmasterCGcom. This is not a charitable donation or anything like that. This is a voluntary way to subscribe to the blog and the podcast. If you find what we're doing useful and you think it merits some financial support through a voluntary subscription, we've made that possible through PayPal And if you go to the blog at ScoutmasterCGcom, you'll see the about link in the menu there And if you'll go to support the blog and podcast, you'll find a link on how to make a voluntary subscription through PayPal.

Several people have done that over the past week or two and I wanted to recognize them. Stephen Jarvis said I've been listening to the podcast since the very first episode. I may have missed one or two along the way, But I've enjoyed nearly all of them and learned something from every single one. Thanks for all you do to support Scouters and Scouts. Thank you for subscribing, Stephen. I really do appreciate it.

Tom Armstrong also is a subscriber, as is MJ Duff, who wrote in to say thanks for all you do for the Scouting community worldwide. You have certainly become quite productive over the past two or three years that I've followed along. Enclosed is a very small contribution relative to the benefits I receive each week.

Thanks so much. Tony Lacaba is with Troop 581 in Bristow, Virginia, and also subscribed, And he says: thanks, Clark, I listen regularly. I appreciate all your hard work. Keep it up. This is year number three of the podcast. It's been a great way to virtually meet a number of Scouts all over the country and all over the world And I really appreciate your kind words and your gestures of support.

Well, our presentation for May at Scoutscircleorg is this Sunday, May 11th, and that will be between 9 and 10 pm Eastern Standard Time. Go to Scoutscircleorg to participate. We'll have a half hour presentation by a camp director about summer camp. That half hour presentation will be followed by another half hour of your questions. You can participate in this live. Go to Scoutscircleorg and you'll learn exactly how to make that happen.

As I told you last week. ScoutmasterCG now has a YouTube channel. You can find us at ScoutmasterCG on YouTube. Last week we put up a video that is a review of a really great little tool called the Lansky Blade Medic, And you should go check it out. It's a really effective tool for sharpening knife blades. I love it.

I got mine from KanahoCreekcom, our sponsors. Bill Fleming was kind enough to send me one to evaluate, And you can see how it works by going to ScoutmasterCGcom at YouTube and look for the video of the Lansky Blade Medic.

If you have a question or a situation for the Scoutmaster's panel to consider, get in touch with me, won't you? You can email me, Clark at CLARKE at ScoutmasterCGcom. In this podcast we're going halfway around the world to Australia, where we're going to be speaking with the chair of the National Youth Council of Scouts Australia. I had a great time talking with Chris Nielsen and I can't wait for you to hear the interview.

It's going to take up the remainder of the podcast, so let's get started, shall we?

The Scout movement is forming a personal tie between the different foreign countries. A living force, a great brotherhood of service. A joyous work. Scouts Australia established a National Youth Council about a dozen years ago, in 2001,, and they did this to engage youth members in advising the organization on the relevance of their programs. I mean, what a great idea: Actually talk to the people who are on the receiving end of the programs.

Now there are 25 members on the council from all branches of Scouts Australia, aged between 13 and 25, and they each serve a three-year term. The council is separated into four working patrols and each researches and writes recommendations on their own topics. The only non-youth member of the council is the advisor, who does really not have any voting rights or anything like that. The chair of this National Youth Council is a full member of the Scouts Australia National Council and has voting rights on the National Operations Committee and the National Executive Committee. I'm really pleased that the current National Youth Council chair is able to join us on the Scoutmaster podcast today. Hello, Chris.

Hi, Chris Nielsen is joining us from Melbourne, Is that right? Yes, Melbourne.

Oh, okay, Melbourne. Yeah, You're going to have to correct my pronunciation as we go along, because Australian Scouting would be very familiar to us, I think in the United States. But let's just go through your career in Scouting a little bit, Chris.

You started out at the age of six, Is that correct? About a week before I turned six, because that's our minimum age.

Uh-huh, And what are Scouts called at that level? In Scouts Australia They're called joeys, which is the word for baby kangaroos.

Okay, So they're really cute. They stand in a circle and put their hands up like little paws and go hop, help other people. It's adorable, Oh, cool. Help other people hop. Oh, I like that.

The group of joeys is called a mob, Is that right? Uh-huh, I love that.

Just like a group of kangaroos, Well, just like a group of six-year-olds. Yeah, You know, It's kind of like a mob, And that was at what was then called the sixth ringwood scout group.

Yep, Okay, But then we merged with another group when I was in Cubs and we're now called First Maroondah. Explain to us a little bit. We're not familiar with the group concept here.

So a group is the group is all of the sections that meet there. So we have joeys, Cubs, Scouts, Venturers and Rovers.

Not every group would have all five, but my group does, And so the group is everyone who meets that hall. And you know we have group counsel to work things out.

And then we're also within a district in Victoria. Some of the different states in Australia work things out differently, but in Victoria the groups are arranged into districts and the districts are arranged into regions And then there's the whole Victorian branch. It's girls and boys in the same scouting program. Yes, All the way from six. We also have guides, which is like your girl Scouts, but that is a separate movement. Scouts itself is boys and girls.

You're in a Rover crew, Is that right? Yes, Describe what a Rover crew is, because that's kind of foreign to us.

In the United States, Rover crews are 18 to 25 year old Scouts, So it's a little bit like the upper end of your Venturer section. It's relatively similar to all of the other sections, except given that we're all adults, So we can all drive ourselves places and we can all do more adult things and give our own permission and stuff like that.

Rovers is self governing, So it means that Rovers make their own decisions. We don't have leaders, We have advisors And there is, you know, a region Rover Council and a branch or so Victoria wide Rover Council And they make decisions about how Rovers is going to run.

And there's also a National Rover Council. As the National Youth Council, I work very closely with the National Rover Council.

What kind of things do Rovers do? Do you go camping? You go hiking and things like that. We do all of that. We meet sort of weekly and do different activities.

You know, last week my Rover crew was doing New Age night And we sat there doing like tarot readings and having heaps of fun playing with the things and just making up funny stories about them. You know we go and do sort of adventurous things. My crew went ab-sailing recently.

We go camping. Our motto is service in the Rover crew, in the Rover section as well.

So my Rover crew runs a competition hike for scouts in our district. And you're also working with Cubs. Yes, I'm a cub leader. My cub name is Matka, which is the seal. No one's ever heard of it.

But you know I actually started working with Cubs back when I was about 16 or 17 because I had to do 20 hours of service to get my Queen Scout Award. It's the highest award we can get before you turn 18..

And then I just kind of never left. I really enjoyed it. You're currently at the University of Melbourne. Yes, I'm studying a master of environment. One thing I saw in your bio that I found very interesting: you took a gap year. Yeah, It was a break year between high school and before you went to university.

What did you do with that year? I went to China as a volunteer and I taught conversational English for four months, So I was just 18.

And so it was challenging but a lot of fun. And then we traveled China for a month afterwards and then, you know, did a little bit of Europe and came home ready to start uni. That must have been amazing. It was fantastic. I mean, it was very challenging at times, Very much sometimes.

You know, we talk about personal development a lot in Scouts and that was a bit of a personal development moment for me a couple of times. You know, being alone in a foreign country where you only speak a little bit of the language, it was very difficult at times, but it was also a lot of fun and I really enjoyed learning more Chinese language and meeting all the people and getting to know their culture and so on a lot more. And it's a beautiful country.

I'm sure that your participation in Scouts- you called on a lot of things that you learned along the way as you went through that gap here, All of the skills we learned in Scouting, like you know, your initiative and being self-reliant and facing challenges and knowing that you can. Okay, it's really difficult now, but I'm sure I'll get through it and I'll enjoy this later. Yeah, I definitely drew on all of those skills.

Tell me about how you got involved with that Poll National Youth Council. We have a rotating membership, which means we have about eight people leave each year and then we select eight new ones and then you're on for three years. I applied three times.

I applied once when I was 14 and I didn't get on, and then I applied in 2009 when I got back from China, and I didn't get on. But I applied again at the start of 2010 and I got on, which was very exciting.

So, as I'm sure you can understand, only taking eight people a year and we want to cover all of Australia and we also want to make sure that we have representation of the different sections and so on. Now that I'm selecting people, we've got so many great applicants, so it is very much a juggling act, but yeah, so I got on in 2010, which was very exciting. Then you've had several different positions there over the past couple of years. Yes, I was appointed minute secretary in 2010 in my first year, which isn't that exciting. I just took minutes. Yes, everybody needs somebody to write down the minutes.

Then in 2011, in March, I was elected as the vice chair and then in March of 2012, I was elected chair, which is a two year position. So I've got a little bit under one year left.

So I'm no longer in a patrol because I'm a little bit busy, but I'm sort of in charge of all four patrols- A little bit busy, I think, is the understatement. You've been doing quite a bit of travelling, haven't you? Yeah, way back in 2010, when I applied to be on the National Youth Council, I also, a little bit after that, applied to be one of Australia's observers to go to the World Youth Forum, which was in Brazil.

So I was selected as one of our three observers. So I headed over to Brazil and that was fantastic.

Last year it was the Queen's Jubilee and we're still a Commonwealth country, so they decided to hold a Commonwealth Youth Forum to celebrate the Queen's Jubilee. And, again, I just applied to be one of the two people that we sent and I was selected, which I was quite surprised about.

So I got to go over and go to the Commonwealth Youth Forum and also got to march in the English Queen Scout Parade and we got to meet the Queen and Bear Grills, which was very, very exciting, Oh my Yeah. I mean like meet the Queen.

We were within like a metre of the Queen but we actually shook Bear Grills' hands, so that was very exciting. Just in November last year it was the Asia-Pacific region Scout Youth Forum and Conference and, as I'm now in the National Youth Council chair, I was one of Australia's two delegates- didn't get enough sleep because I joined the recommendations committee, so we went to bed at like 5am one night because we were fixing up all the recommendations for the next day. But it was really, really good to be involved in the organisation a little bit.

Why should there be an organised youth voice in Scouting? Part of it is that Scouting is about young people, and young people know what they want, and young people are different.

Even the other day I was at Cubs and I was testing one of my Cubs on her Traveller Level 1 badge, and so one of the things she had to do was tell me some of the good and bad bits about four different kinds of transport, and how she described trains and buses, which I take every day, was just completely different to how I would describe trains and buses. One of the bad bits about a bus was that it wasn't as long as a train.

I think I understand Cubs, but Cubs think in a very different way to how I do. As a rover, I probably think quite differently to how some of the other members of the national team and so on think.

So it's really important to have young people saying what they want. If we want to keep young people, we need to make sure we change with the times.

Things have changed so much in the last couple of decades with technology and all this kind of stuff. I don't know about America, but in Australia there's a lot more options for young people as well.

Lots of schools are now implementing programs that are a little bit more like Scouts, and there's so many different hobbies that people can join and all these different sports and so on, and kids are getting busy because they're doing more. So if we want to sort of stay relevant to young people, we need to make sure that young people are involved in telling us what relevant is. Let me occupy the position of being the devil's advocate for a moment. I'm in my mid-fifties.

I would probably be a little frightened of youth having an active, influential voice, because I think what my worry would be is that they would try to, you know, topple over all of the traditions and you know they would stop going camping and start playing video games, or I don't really get the sense that that is what happens. Though Generally, I think you find that young people value a lot of the same things that a lot of the older leaders and so on value, and it is it's the camping in the outdoors and the trying new things, and young people value that just as much. Sometimes they want to try different new things or they want to change things a little bit.

But you know we're definitely still going camping and the National Youth Council. We don't often write recommendations about changing huge things, like let's stop going camping or something like that, because we all understand that that's what scouting is like. We've all been in scouting and we all love that aspect of scouting. We often write things about issues people might have, like bullying or something like that.

You know new badges and we talk about maybe new programs that could be introduced, but we often very little. We should throw this out.

We should introduce this as well. This would be great. We're utilized quite a lot by the National team in terms of getting feedback on ideas that they're having.

So they kind of go: hey, we're thinking about doing this, do you reckon it sounds any good? Or we're thinking about doing this, give us some ideas on how that would work.

We're kind of the research body for Nationals, so they'll be asking us to go research what we're doing, maybe what other scouting countries are doing. So we'll sit there on the BSA website and look up what they're doing to deal with a similar issue, say bullying.

Okay, we'll house life saving dealing with this, house England dealing with this in scouts, all these kinds of things. So we do quite a wide variety of topics. We're not usually telling people to throw out things that are part of scouting, because we do value a lot of the things that are in scouting. Sometimes we're talking about introducing new things, just changing things to make them a little bit more modern or relevant.

What's the dynamic between the Youth Council and your adult counterparts? You have the Youth Council and it's working cooperatively with the Executive Board of Scouts Australia, and am I right in thinking that it's kind of a parallel to a similar group of adults?

Well, we definitely work very closely with the National team and all of the National bodies. I sit on a lot of them as the chair of the National Youth Council.

They come to our conferences but all of the people involved in decision making are very, very open to what the National Youth Council has to say and we have definitely made decisions just in the time I've been chair at a National level where some of the adults in the room have gone: oh, I don't like this idea. But the National Youth Council says that the young people do, so we'll do it anyway. I noted that one of the projects that you've worked on was in dealing with the uniform.

So Scouts Australia changed its uniform back in about 2002 or 2003. We sort of decided maybe it was time for a little bit of an update, just to see that it was okay.

And you know we weren't going to say we'll scrap it and put in a new uniform again, but we wanted to say: you know, is there anything that irritates you a little bit that we could tweak a bit? We run a survey of both adults and youth scouting. This survey had the most responses we'd ever had.

We were so excited, although it was a lot of work, partly because you know the magic word uniform. I don't know if it happens for you guys as well, but the instant you ask about something that's a little bit divisive than everyone wants to have their say: oh, yes, yes, we're very familiar with that.

Yes, so the the uniform. This survey was really really great response rate.

And then we ran a follow-up survey as well, because one of the things that came out was that venturers and rovers wanted a female fitted shirt. That was one of the things that came up, and so we ran another survey on it just to make sure that this really was like a big issue and the national team was very, very supportive of this. And we're arranging to have a meeting with person who's in charge of snow gun, which is the company that makes our uniforms, and discuss with him about some of the feasibility of introducing some of our changes. I looked at the study. You came up with some very concrete recommendations. The interesting thing about the uniform report was that it was one of the topics that members of the council came up with.

The chief commissioner and all of our national team were very much yep, okay, well, this is what the young people say. So we'll keep investigating and they're definitely open to the process and very supportive of the national youth council and the fact that you know they kind of created it, so now they're going to listen to it.

You know that the council has existed now for a dozen years would be some indication of its effectiveness and that it's that it's actually valued. We're constantly evolving and changing and going all right.

Well, that didn't work. Okay, we'll train this that the national team was always supportive of the council and the idea of the council, but now that the council is getting out there a little bit more, we're trying to be heard a bit more.

We're trying to hear people more and and make sure that we can spread further which you know- the internet and facebook and all these kinds of things really helping us more of the general population of scouting and more of the you know your branch commissioners and and all these kinds of people who are, throughout scouting, involved in roles but maybe not quite at the national level, are all getting on board with the NYC and starting to know what we do and also starting to really value what we're doing. This is something that is not just happening in Scouts Australia. It's actually happening in many of the other member organizations of the world organization of the scouting movement.

Priority number one, I think, is youth involvement. A lot of countries have introduced things that are maybe a little bit similar to the NYC.

I go to a lot of these international events and and make friends and then we all discuss what they're doing. So I've chatted with the people from Canada and South Africa and New Zealand and England and France and all kinds of places about what they're doing and sometimes we pick up ideas.

So we have informal networks and we send each other our operations manuals and discuss how things are working and then go back and go to our national teams. Like it's really helpful to go to some of these- you know world youth forums and stuff like that and get ideas about what everyone is doing for youth involvement other than my own curiosity and the idea that I think my fellow Scouts here in America would be very interested to hear what goes on in the rest of the world.

You know this is also kind of an encouragement to our own organization that this would probably be a very good idea and to have a more formalized youth voice within the BSA. You can imagine if there's a lot of people like me sitting around trying to figure out what a young person wants or what's relevant to them. We're not going to get that right a good part of the time.

I mean, there's always different levels, so there's youth involvement right down at the troop level. You know your troop council with your patrol leaders and things like that, and that's just as important in youth involvement as something like an MIC. Sometimes that's more important because it's what the young people that we're actually interacting with is their local troop, and often we actually look at some of your patrol system and think, oh, we'll steal that.

You know we send people over to your BSA Jamboree and they come back with all these great ideas for how we could improve the patrol system in Australia. So, and youth involvement at a local level is absolutely, really important as well.

Being the chair of the NYC, I think youth involvement at a national level is a really important opportunity as well and, yeah, I mean it's really up to how the organization can work youth involvement. So it's all very, very specific to the organization and the country and things like that, but I'm definitely supportive of things like NYC.

Well, Chris, I certainly do appreciate you joining us on the podcast and we'll keep an eye on the National Youth Council of Scouts Australia. Enjoy the autumn.

I guess it's autumn down there, isn't it? Yes, good work, even saying autumn, not fall. I did my best. I really have enjoyed talking to you, Chris.

Thanks so much, That's alright. Thank you,

Thank you.