Scoutmaster Podcast 206

I'm Russell Altman and I am an assistant Scoutmaster with truth number 555 in Ridge Spring, South Carolina. This edition of the Scoutmaster Podcast is sponsored by backers like us.

And now see you, Scoutmaster. Wow, it's cold.

Have you noticed? Man, it was really cold this month.

Three of my favorite scouts, Liliana and Sabrina and their brother Xavier, went camping in this cold weather and they built a fire and it was so cold that the flames froze, So they chipped off a few pieces of frozen flames and put them in their pockets to keep warm. That's how cold it was, Really. Hey, this is podcast number 206.. Hey,

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clarke Green.

Well, let's take a look in the mail bag. Christopher Cooper was kind enough to leave this nice review for our Android app.

He says this is an excellent scouter reference and a well thought out app for scouting and provides several features that will aid you in your role as a scout leader. Thanks for making this happen. Thank you, Chris, for using the app. Hey, it's available for your Android device and for your iPhone, but more about that later. Don Fowler is a cub master of Pack 295 and an assistant Scoutmaster for Troop 95 in Sparta, New Jersey. Don was listening to Podcast 204 and he heard the name of his local scout camp and he wrote to tell me I wanted to point out that the CH in the name isn't a hard K.

So, Don, I'll give it another shot. It's Camp Alamachi, not Alamaki.

Like I said last week, We don't want to mess up any pronunciations, if we can help it right. Dan Kendall is in Batavia, Illinois, at the Emmanuel Lutheran Church with Troop 12 and he wrote to say I enjoy the blog and the podcast very much. They're spot on on how do we try to run our troop.

I am not so good at letting scouts run things, but the guy we recruited for Scoutmaster is great at it And fortunately I have respect for him and leave him alone most of the time. Thanks for your blog. It's often very timely and inspiring. Thank you, Dan, for being in touch. Dan Cheney is a Scoutmaster with Troop 723 and he said I was inspired by the Get a Life articles and I'm using them in my monthly Scoutmaster minute for our troop newsletter.

Well, thanks, Dan. I'll take the opportunity to mention that anything you find on ScoutMasterCGcom is offered to support scouting and you are certainly welcome to use it. Just let folks know where you found it. Dan's referring to a series of three articles we published last week written by Enoch Haize, a young man who is an Eagle scout and has recent experience in being a youth leader in a scout troop.

Enoch's written some great stuff for patrol leaders and senior patrol leaders and scouts who aspire to youth leadership, So you want to make sure to check it out. We've got a whole section of scoutmastercgcom with a forum on it for youth leaders that's called Green Bar Life. Green Bar refers to what was on the patches to indicate that you were a patrol leader or senior patroller etc. Years and years ago, And they were- wait for it. A green bar, a series of green rectangles, indicated your leadership position in the troop.

I want to take a moment to thank Tim Jakes, who became a backer this past week. If you're a regular reader of the blog or a listener to the podcast and you're finding what we are offering valuable and helpful, you can help keep things up and running by becoming a scoutmaster CG backer. The funds that you send in will go towards the expenses of producing and publishing the blog and the podcast and the videos and all the other stuff that are proving to be a valuable resource. This will make all of these resources. Thank you, Tim, for your support as a scoutmastercgcom backer.

So in this podcast and Scoutmaster ship in seven minutes or less, we're going to talk a little bit about listening- the skill that scouts need when working with scouts listening- And then we've got a couple

Of email questions to answer. So let's get started.

Shall we Scoutmaster ship in seven minutes or less? Now, whatever you're rolling scouting or, and certainly as a parent and as a leader in your community who works with youth, we have some goals.

Now, the overall aim of scouting, of course, is to produce good, contributing, compassionate human beings who are solid members of every community that they're involved in- in their family, their school, the wider community, their churches- And we want our scouts to take the values of the scout oath and law with them into adulthood. Now, if you work with young people, you're eager to share the benefit of your experience with them, Although you may find them reluctant to receive what you have to share sometimes. I know, in my role as a Scoutmaster, a lot of what I do and a lot of the interaction that I have with scouts is kind of directive.

You know, even though I'm a big proponent of asking questions rather than giving orders or making statements, asking questions seems to be a good way for scouts to discover what needs to happen next and kind of help center them and keep them focused, But those are still kind of directive interactions. Scouting has lots of opportunities for us, though, to simply listen- A Scoutmaster conference or border review or two good examples, some more or less formal opportunities to listen- But there's lots of informal opportunities as well, And I want to encourage you to hone your listening skills. I have found that I learn a great deal about my scouts and about the world that they're living in If I just listen, not eavesdrop, but if, in a conversation, I carefully listen to what they are saying, If I ask them what it's like to be 14 or 15..

If I, if I ask them what it's like to be them and what kind of challenges and interests do they have, and then listen carefully for the response, I need to dismiss the idea that I'm going to be making judgments about what I hear, or that I'm going to follow up on what I hear with with some really great advice or comments or anything like that, and just be satisfied to sit back and to listen. Now the scouts that I work with are all boys, and boys between the ages of 11 and 17 develop a very studied way of talking to adults. A lot of times they're not very interested in revealing too much about what they're thinking or what their plans are or their opinions about things, because adults usually respond with judgment or advice or some kind of comment that indicates that they didn't really hear what the scout was saying in the first place.

So it may take a little bit of ice breaking to get through that kind of studied way of talking to adults that most scout age boys will have and to get to the heart of matters and to find out what they're concerned with and what, what they're interested in and what challenges they may be encountering and what they see in their own future. And again, I really recommend the idea of turning off the advisor, mentor, instructor part of the brain and just listening to what they have. It will inform a lot of things.

It will inform who you are as a parent, who you are as a scout leader and you know basically who you are as a human being, if you'll allow it. So this is just an encouragement. It's not.

It's not six steps of how to do it or anything like that, but I think that when we learn to listen, and we learn to listen without an agenda or without any, or without trying to judge what we hear, we'll better serve our scouts. Then you are all in from the beat boy, beat boy. I'll hang it in the sweet boy, sweet boy and we will dance into the beat boy, beat boy. Write me a letter, send it my name

Email. That is, folks, and here's an answer to one of your emails. Hey, you got a couple of quick email questions to answer here.

Todd White got in touch and asked: will you be supporting Trail Life or some of the other scouting programs that have been cropping up in the past year? Now, if you don't know what Trail Life is, that is a group that grew out of the membership change controversy last May and that's the principal one that I know about. I imagine there are probably other efforts and things going on, Todd, the real simple answer to that is is what Baden Powell was fond of saying, and that scouting is not an organization, it's a movement.

Now, organizations are great, useful things that help us administer scouting, and I am a 35- 36 year veteran member of the Boy Scouts of America and I'm proud of that association and I'm happy to be a member of that organization. But what's more important to me is that we are all members of the worldwide scouting movement. One of the best things about having a podcast and a blog that can be listened to and seen all over the world is that I hear from people all over the world who are involved with scouts and they're all involved in different organizations and it really doesn't matter to me, it's kind of inconsequential what organization they're involved with, because the things that we share in common are much greater than any differences that there may be in organizations. We're all striving to make the Scout oath and law a reality in this world and to make this world a better, a more peaceful place, and when you really focus on those things, the differences are are totally inconsequential.

So far as I'm concerned, scouting is something that's bigger than any organization. No organization has a corner on doing scouting exactly perfectly. There's no such thing as a perfect organization. That's why, and what we talk about and what we do. I'm more interested in the broad underlying concepts and ideals contained in the scout oath and law than I am in any specific organizational expression of those things, if that makes sense. Thanks for getting in touch, Todd.

Tim jakes is the Scoutmaster of troop 93 in west chester, pennsylvania, and he said: thank you so much for the podcast. I anticipate its publication each week.

My question is: what will you and your committee change in light of the new policy statements from the bsa concerning scout accounts? Well, tim, I have two answers for you. The first answer is the short answer, and that is not a whole lot, and the second answer is the longer answer.

So if you would like to listen, just hang in there with me for a moment. Sometime back in the summer, the bsa did issue a policy document that brought into question the idea of having accounts within the troop within a unit account where monies are specifically assigned to benefit a certain individual. It's safe to say that recent internal revenue service rulings that this practice financially benefits specific individuals and that that is in contravention of the rules for charitable organizations. When you start talking about rules for charitable organizations and the internal revenue service and all that kind of stuff, boy, you get into some deep water pretty fast.

Before we start thrashing around with that, I want to point out that I am not a tax lawyer or an accountant- I'm far from it- and I am only giving you my basic understanding of the issue. As far as our troop is concerned, the money that gets assigned to individual scout accounts is pretty minimal and it is only used to defray the cost of any activities that individual scout may be participating in. The challenges to this practice came from organizations that had been accruing quite a sizable personal benefit to their members using the charitable organization cover from the IRS.

So we may have kind of an apples and oranges things here, but I am going to encourage my committee to do away with scout accounts and not to use them anymore because, like I said, they've reasonably insignificant amount of money in them to begin with, and administering them is a bit of a pain to begin with, and I think it's more in the spirit of scouting that a rising tide lifts all boats and that all the monies that we bring in through fundraising are equally distributed to all the members of the troop and benefit them equally. That seems to be the fairest way to go about it, but, as I like to say, it's just me. What you've just heard is my opinion and my best understanding of the question. Perhaps the most important thing I can say, bearing on the subject, is that that nobody should be listening to me and basing what they do off of my opinion.

Here's what you need to do: you need to read and understand the policy statements that have been made. You need to talk to your scouting professionals. Talk to the folks administer your chartering organization. If, within your the circle of families that you have in scouting, there is somebody who is a tax lawyer or an accountant, all the better. They can help shed some light on what to do next. I know that this has been a tough question for a lot of people, and people are very concerned that this is going to cause a lot of trouble or massive changes to the world of scouting.

I think we all need to take a deep breath, look at the facts and see where we go from there. And in direct answer to your question, Tim, as far as our troop is concerned, it's not going to represent a whole lot of change, although I'm sensitive to the fact that it may represent a bigger change for some other units. I hope that helps. If you have a question for me, you can get in touch and you're going to find out how to do that in just a moment.