Scoutmaster Podcast 26

And now for you, Scoutmaster.

When a Scout sees a tag on a tent and it says waterproof tent, that's a challenge. They need to find a way to pitch it so that it gets wet. Yeah. When he sees a label on a frying pan that says non-stick frying pan, he has to find something that's going to stick to it. Last but not least, don't bring anything camping that has the label fireproof on it. It's just not a good idea. Trust me. Hey, this is podcast number 26.

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster's podcast. This is Clark Green. This time around in podcast number 26, we're going to be talking about something I got an email on this week. And I sure do appreciate those emails, folks. Keep them coming. But it's about cooking and menu planning and things like that. We're going to begin another series of thrilling, interesting, and inspiring talks about planning the future of your Scout unit. Yeah. What is Scouting going to look like in your community in the next several years? What's your role going to be? That's about it this time. Let's go ahead and get ourselves started, shall we? Scout Mastership in seven minutes. Or less. Ray Britton sent me an email this week. He's a Scoutmaster in Tennessee. And he says, First of all, I want to thank you for your wonderful podcast. It's a great resource for me. You're helping me see what I need to change and adapt about our troop. The first year or so, I pretty much kept the program the way it had been while trying to educate myself on what we needed to be doing and where we needed to be going. As you know, it's a challenge. And here's what I think is an example of the challenge that we face in wanting a boy-led troop and being frustrated by the path they choose when given free reign. What is the proper guidance to give Scouts when it comes to meal planning? My Scouts would simply eat Pop-Tarts, cold, and soft drinks, hot, and ramen. Yes, some have tried it uncooked. And many other food options which required the absolute least effort. I exaggerate only slightly. I mean, clearly they need to learn to cook. Clearly they should have nutritious meals. How do we find that balance of not dictating meals but achieving the learning goals we have for them? Well, Ray, first of all, thank you for your kind words about the podcast. And you have inspired me to add a feature called These Things Drive Me Crazy. That's right. There are some things that just drive me absolutely crazy. Scouts who are uninspired by my inspiring speeches. That drives me crazy. Another thing that drives me crazy are Scouts who forget their main gear, their clothing, their shoes, their mess kit, their very brain on camp outs. You know what else drives me crazy? Parents who think that meeting times begin or end a half hour before or after they actually begin or end. Oh, that makes me crazy. Another thing that makes me crazy is answering the same question 17 times in as many minutes after the answer to that question was just announced to everyone. That'll make you crazy. Of course, being asked how much farther or how much longer would drive anybody crazy. But Ray, like you, I am driven crazy by Scouts who in a grocery store with 10,000 items buy Pop-Tarts and ramen for every single camp out. Just makes me crazy. Just making me crazy. My observations have anything to do with the rest of the world. I don't think this leaves them until their college years and often far beyond until they find a young lady and they settle down and get married. And, you know, that young lady kind of straightens them out a little bit. Scouts seem to have cast iron stomachs and metabolisms that will run just fine on things like candle wax and shellac and straw for days or weeks at a time. I think that's just really the way that boys are. For them, preparing meals is downtime. Come on. It's inconvenient. They need to get it over with as quickly as possible. Why? This ramen is perfectly good cold and uncooked. Why cook it? It would be a huge waste of time. Scouts enjoy the autonomy of choosing their own food and fixing it as they see fit, even if it does drive us crazy. Some of them would eat that awful ramen stuff at every meal, whether they were camping or not, if they had their way, and consider that they were living like kings. They think it is ambrosia, and I wouldn't feed it to a dog. I can't stand the stuff. The other thing to consider is what they're eating at home and how they're eating it. I would imagine that some families may sit down together to three healthy meals a day, but they're probably exceptions to the rule. I've often said that the week we spend at scout camp is probably the only week of the year where a scout actually sits around a table with people and eats three meals a day. And that those three meals are, you know, relatively nutritious and well-balanced. I'll bet most of our scouts have fast food or pizza at least once a week. Some may have it a lot more, and I'll bet most families are lucky if they sit down to dinner more than three or four times a week. I mean, forget about lunch and forget about breakfast. If they get sat down to dinner more than three or four times a week, they probably feel like Ozzie and Harriet and feel that they've accomplished something. And when they do sit down to dinner, that boy who is a scout in your troop and is sitting at that table has one thing in mind. He wants to get dinner over with as soon as possible because there's more important things to do. Considering these things, it's kind of a minor miracle that they actually do anything about food at all when they're camping. That being said, we do have a responsibility to get them along towards an understanding of healthy eating and meal planning and things like that. I mean, a scout is supposed to be physically fit. And you're not going to be physically fit unless you're eating properly. There's a first class requirement that talks about planning the patrol menu for a campout that includes one breakfast and one lunch and one dinner. And requires cooking for at least two of the meals. Guys who wrote the requirement are very smart. Yeah. Opening a can and pouring it into a mess kit is not actually cooking. Okay. So, they also have to include the foods from the food pyramid and they have to demonstrate how those foods meet nutritional needs. Scouts have to do this to advance. A lot of them will probably only do it once and they'll consider it a huge imposition when they do. Sometimes I get a scout who's really motivated in cooking and meal planning, but I got to tell you, that's not too often. We've often said that we've never had a scout starve to death on a weekend camping trip. So, a weekend of bad food is not an immediate health or safety concern in my mind. Long-term trips, that's another matter. They have to consider nutrition more seriously when they're planning the meals. Now, I encourage and cajole and try to inspire an interest in camp cooking and good food. And I, you know, absolutely see that scouts follow rank requirements. But they usually revert to the ramen, the pop tarts, the donuts, things like that. Now, we have instituted the understanding within our troop that you are not going to bring a bag of potato chips and a 32-ounce soda and call that lunch. Actually, we've outlawed soda. It doesn't go on camping trips with us. Not in a patrol menu. If they bother to get a loaf of bread and some lunch meat and some cheese and they put that together, to me, that's an accomplishment. It's better than, like I say, the bag of potato chips and, I don't know, trail mix or something like that. The shellac and the candle wax that I mentioned earlier. One way of thinking about this is thinking about it in the same context as other skills in scouting like knots. Some scouts, they just feel like you're beating them to death when they have to do knots and lashings and things like that. They just can't stand it. They're only going to do enough to make it through to get the rank requirement. And they're much more interested in other things. Some scouts get into the knots and the lashings and they do pioneering and they like to build stuff and it's great. Most of them will kind of do the things around the requirement. Or if they become enlightened and they know that tying a few knots and learning a little bit about rope work is going to help them when they're hanging a bear bag or something like that. You know, they might see some value in it. In the end, I try to summon a bit of serenity. Listen, the boys are happy to have the autonomy to choose their own menu. Now, you can give it some definition without being very persnickety. I try and point them at that first class requirement and I say this is the way that you put together a menu. And, you know, we refer to that part of the Scout handbook that talks about these things. There's the balance that you're asking about. It's not spoiling all their fun, but just spoiling a little bit of their fun. It doesn't spoil their fun, I know. So, hopefully that helps and hopefully that'll help the rest of you. And if there's something that just absolutely drives you crazy about Scouting, email me. Let me know. Give me that a little bit.

Yeah. ¶¶ Where is your Scout Troop, Cub Scout Pack, Venture Crew going to be in the next five years? That's a really good question, isn't it? No doubt you're working very hard at Scouting, putting a lot of time in. Is your Scout unit going to continue on to serve its community when it's time for you to step back? That's a really interesting question, isn't it? And it's one that we should take very seriously as volunteer leaders. Scouting programs falter and sometimes disappear because they don't answer that question. Over the next three or four podcasts, we're going to talk about these types of questions and some of the strategies that we can use to answer them. As you know, I'm a Scoutmaster, so my familiarity is mostly with the way a Boy Scout troop runs and we'll be concentrating on those particular questions. But I'm going to try and maintain broad enough scope so that this would apply to PAX and to Venture Crews as well. There are four basic questions about the future of your unit and its service to your community that you have to keep in front of you and you have to have answers to. Number one, what is the minimum annual number of new members, both youth and adult, that's really necessary to maintain the unit? Number two, who are our key unit leaders for the next four or five years? Number three, how do we reach and or maintain financial stability? Number four, do we meet key indicators of effectively presenting our program? Now, all four of those things need to be in your mind if you're going to be a good, effective leader and as you prepare to pass off your responsibilities to the next person and the next group of people, do you have answers for them about this and can you get them to start thinking about these things as soon as they take on their position? I would guess the tenure of most adult leaders in scouting, at least in my experience, the tenure of most adult leaders lasts about as long as their children's participation in scouting. A relatively few, let's say maybe three to four out of ten, a relatively few will continue on for a year or two when their children basically age out of the program and they're not involved anymore. A couple of those will just stay with it for even longer. And successive groups of leaders often have little to define the way forward when experienced leaders move on and they have to retrench the foundations of the program and when you have to do a fresh start like that, it's like starting a whole new unit and it can waste a lot of energy. You might lose membership, morale might get a little weak, discouragement can set in and it's a lot of effort to extend towards reaching past levels of service. For those units that do recover, you know, the curve may be very shallow and very long to get back to where they were at one time. Sometimes the leadership, you know, that comes in on one of these fresh starts has to spend so much energy to bring the unit back, they're ready to move on. You know, within a couple of years, they may feel kind of beaten up and discouraged and now the whole process is going to start all over again. And this is where, you know, what was once a vibrant cub pack five years ago now has 12 guys and it's kind of fallen to pieces. Or a scout troop that has a long history is down to eight or nine boys and kind of a disinterested, detached leadership. Now, some of this is natural. I mean, you know, there's a handful of troops that have been around since the founding of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910. There are some that are 75, you know, 50, 40 years old. There are some that are 10 years old and there are some that don't last for more than five or 10 years. I'm not saying that what we're going to talk about is going to stop that kind of natural attrition over time. But if you're putting your time in and you believe in the program and you want to see it perpetuated, these are the questions that really need answering, aren't they? Many units are buoyed up by a strong leadership with expansive infectious vision that inspires a lot of interest and energy. They're hitting, you know, on all eight cylinders of the program and things are going great. And usually you can look at that unit and you're going to see one, two, three charismatic leaders who are usually the source of all the inspiration. Now, when those one, two or three leaders leave, then the inspiration can leave with them. So if you're in a key leadership position right now, you owe it not only to yourself, but you owe it to the next, you know, 150 boys who are going to be a part of that program to begin thinking five years out, 10 years out, and begin thinking about how you're going to make the transitions of leadership work and how you're going to help maintain the program when you're not there, when you're, when you've gone on and moved on to other things. Now, there's a lot of things that contribute to the success and relevance of scouting in a particular place and time. There's, you know, demographics and other various influences. But we set all that aside and we think, what are the big, broad concepts that help a scout unit stay alive over time and maintain its service to the community? Because that's the aim of the whole thing, isn't it? Over the next four podcasts, we're going to talk about these things. We're going to see if we can paint some broad concepts that you can think about and apply to the situation you find yourself in. And the next time, what we're going to do is we're going to talk about membership and how many youth and adult members do you really need to stay alive and to keep your program moving forward.

Well, thank you for listening to another edition of the Scoutmaster podcast. This has been podcast number 26. You can read the Scoutmaster blog at scoutmaster.typepad.com and you can follow us at Scoutmaster blog on Facebook and ScoutmasterCG on Twitter.

Subscribe to the Scoutmaster podcast on iTunes and feel free to leave a comment or review or rating and thanks to those of you who have. You can email me, Clark Green, with your comments and questions at ClarkGreen at gmail.com. That's C-L-A-R-K-E-G-R-E-E-N at gmail.com. The Scoutmaster blog and the Scoutmaster podcast are not official publications of the Boy Scouts of America, nor are they endorsed or sponsored by the Boy Scouts of America. No, it's just me talking into a microphone, trying to lend a hand to Scout leaders and maybe have a little bit of fun along the way. So before we leave you again, we'd like to hear from our founder, Sir Robert. Good luck to you and good camping. Thank you, sir. Thanks again for listening. And until next time. See you then.

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