Scoutmaster Podcast 28

And now, for you, Scoutmaster.

So I took a friend of mine out on his first canoe trip. Never been in a canoe before. I was in the stern, and he was up in the bow. And we were on a river, and there was some whitewater ahead. And he looked back at me. He was a little nervous. He says, if the canoe tips over, are we going to fall out? And I said, no, there's no reason we can't continue to be friends. Are we going to fall out? Okay. All right. Not real funny, but this is podcast number 28. All right.

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster's podcast. This is Clark Green. Hey, thanks for being patient with me last week. Podcast number 27 was a little late getting online. I was at Scout Camp, and, well, I was at Scout Camp. So it took a little bit more than I thought to make sure it was online and got to you in time. Here's an email I received recently. I just wanted to say thank you to Liberty Frederick. I just wanted to commend you on your excellent podcast and a tremendous resource for Scouters everywhere. Though your podcast is Boy Scout specific, I have chosen to stick with Cub Scouts and more recently in a district position. The general information you offer in regards to a well-run program is invaluable. I was especially fond of the show in which you described the pitfalls of over-volunteering and also thoroughly enjoyed Podcast 21 in which you discussed recruitment on a Boy Scout level. So thanks for your podcast and for all you do. Well, thank you, Liberty, for writing in. Sure do appreciate that. And you can email me at ClarkGreen, C-L-A-R-K-E-G-R-E-E-N, at gmail.com. Today in Scout Mastership in seven minutes or less, we're going to talk a little bit about troop meetings. And this will probably stretch into two or three different podcasts. But we're going to talk about the role of the Scout Master and his assistants in troop meetings and what troop meetings should look like and what they're meant to achieve. Then moving on from there, I have a Scout Masters minute about our 100th anniversary. And finally, we're going to move into planning for the future, planning for your unit and for you for the future. And that is going to be installment number two of that feature. So we're going to go ahead and get moving. Lots to take care of. Scout Mastership in seven minutes or less. The mission of the Boy Scouts of America, I mean the official mission statement, reads this way. It is to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and law. That's the official BSA mission statement. I think it puts it very succinctly. Now, it doesn't mention a product. It mentions a set of competencies and skills that are going to be developed in young people. We're not looking for a model citizen. We're not looking for a leader, even though we talk about leaders an awful lot. And if we were producing some kind of a product, it would make sense to have efficient means of production and quality control, but it's not our mission. We don't produce a product. Note that the mission statement doesn't say much about leadership and developing leaders. What we do in Scouting is we play a game, and the gist of the game is to offer a set of circumstances that challenge Scouts to think for themselves, to make decisions, and develop skills. This process prepares them for a lifetime of challenges. When they leave us prepared, we've completed the mission. There's no test to measure the results. There's a little anecdotal evidence that we can look at. But when they leave us prepared, we've completed the mission. I harp on this subject a lot. And I do it because I think it's one of the toughest things to get about Scouting. It was one of the toughest things for me to get. Face it, most of us in our professional lives were involved in the business of production, or the science of management, and we're used to having some demonstrably measurable result. When we become scouters, we're eager to make good, and so we apply the principles of our professional work to our scouting job. We try to make scouting more efficient. We try and have quality control. We try to have some kind of optimum production practice. And we're frankly frustrated when scouts don't behave like widgets on a production line. I know I have been, and I would guess that you are too. What we need to do is liberate ourselves from being results-oriented and become more process-oriented. Concentrate on the process. Learn and maintain the game. Protect this integrity and keep it open and vibrant, interesting, and challenging. And we need to give our scouts a safe place to play, to win, or to lose sometimes. We don't look so much for measurable results as for some real intangible things like growth, like being prepared to meet life's challenges, and having instilled in them those things in the scout oath and law that make them into decent human beings in the end. One of the major ways, one of the major tools that we use as scouters to do this is a troop meeting. So we're going to take a little time and talk about the nature of a troop meeting, what's supposed to happen at a troop meeting, how things are supposed to unfold, who does what, because I think this is something that we really need to work on. I know that I'm working on it all the time personally. I'm checking on it. I'm thinking about it. I'm applying a lot of effort in making troop meetings what they are supposed to be. And I think we all spend a lot of time doing that. So that's the basis for the next several installments of Scout Mastership in seven minutes or less. And I know it's getting to be that time of year where we're beginning to look down the next several weeks and we see troop meetings are going to be starting up again and things are going to be happening. So I think it's a good time to discuss it. And we'll come back to this subject in the next podcast.

So this is the second in our series of talking about the future of your unit. Whether you're leading a Cub Pack, a Scout Troop, or a Venture Crew, hopefully some of the questions that we're working on will be useful to you. This series is based on four questions. And the first of them that we're going to discuss right now is what is the minimum annual number of new members, both youth and adult, it takes to maintain your unit. Well, let me talk about my troop for a moment because it's just a good way to get started. Our troop has been hovering around 30 to 35 Scouts for many years now. We go slightly below and slightly above. Happy to say that we brought in 16 new Scouts last year. So we're at around 45 to 48 Scouts right now. They never hold still long enough for me to count them all. I'm sure the troop committee knows exactly how many guys we have. But so we know that we need to bring in, you know, a certain number of Scouts to maintain the program as we run it every single year. We have probably five or six, over time, five or six very involved, committed, uniformed leaders, the Scoutmaster and Assistant Scoutmasters. These are the ones that we see at every troop meeting. There's probably another three or four that we don't see at every meeting, but that still maintain an interest in helping out with the troop. And then we have four or five core committee members. And then we bring parents in two or three times a year to help work out with fundraisers and the like. We need to recruit five or ten new Scouts every year to maintain our troop over time. What we say, you know, our little slogan is five to stay alive. That's our watchword. Every single year we have three or four boys who reach their 18th birthday and they're off to college and we say goodbye to them. I think it was five this year. And by natural attrition we tend to lose, you know, two or three out of ten Scouts within their first year. Once they've been in the troop for a year or more, we tend to lose very few of them. But within that first year, you know, they're leaving the fifth grade, going into the sixth grade. Their interests are changing, their lives are changing, and sometimes they, you know, we don't see them. And that's a natural attrition, and I don't get too upset about it. But, you know, it's something that we have learned to expect over time. We devote a great deal of energy to recruiting every year. One of my assistant Scoutmasters is a former Cub Master, and he is charged with actively communicating with our three or four local Cub Packs and keeping up a very active DEN Chief program. We offer our Cub Packs leader training. We offer assistance to help them with anything that they need help with, anything at all. And that way we keep the door open, and they know what the troop is doing, and we know what the Packs are doing. Now, I won't say that we've always had that because we haven't. And we've gotten caught short. Because for many, many years there, we just had a natural expectation that we would see our five, six, to ten Scouts cross over from Weebelos every single year. And that's the way that it went. And then there would, you know, come a year where February would roll around, and we would realize, wow, we're not doing too well. We're only going to have one or two boys cross over from Weebelos this year. And then we go into full assault mode on recruiting. And that's kind of frustrating, and it takes a lot of energy. And it often doesn't yield very much. So here's the way that we've decided to handle things, and the way that I encourage you, just in the way of broad concepts, is you're constantly recruiting. There's not, if you concentrate on one or two big recruiting events a year, either a school night for Scouting or that Weebelos crossover, there's going to come a year where you're going to lose out. Any number of factors can come into play, and all of a sudden you discover, wow, we're not bringing any new boys in. In addition to these, you know, kind of big single events, we have kind of a culture that we've developed with our boys, who are especially in the sixth and seventh grades, to make sure that they're talking to their friends. You know, we get three or four boys every year that way, and we present whoever recruited them with the recruiter's patch, and we make a big fuss over them. And we encourage our guys to build their patrols through recruiting. We encourage our parents to talk to other parents about Scouts. And you don't have to have, like, this full frontal assault on recruiting if you've always got it on the back burner, if you know what I mean. It just makes life a lot simpler when we have that as a part of the culture of the unit. And that's what I suggest to you. One of the best things that you can do for your unit right now is to inculcate the idea of a continual recruiting. Continual recruiting. I know what I'm going to do if somebody shows up at a troop meeting with a parent, because that's what we ask them to do. And I know what I'm going to do. I know I'm going to sit with the parent. I'm going to explain the program to them. The boys are used to seeing visitors at troop meetings, so they don't have any problem involving them into the program and things like that. And it seems to work. It seems to work very well. Now, that being said, we do depend on that big single event, those Weeblos crossing over every year, to supply the majority of our Scouts. But if we concentrated on that alone, we could run into trouble from year to year. We need to add approximately one active, dedicated adult every year or two. Our typical adult leader tenure is maybe about five or six years. But it's amazing to me that a lot of adults have stayed around well past their son's years with us. Some for 10, some for 15, some for even 20 years. This is my 26th year as a Scoutmaster. And I'm amazed at the number of people who have hung on and continue to work with the troop. But I'm very, very thankful for them. I can tell you that. We have to train and nurture our new adults. We have to get them developed. They need to understand the program. And to do that, we work with them, train them. And then we make sure that they're rewarded for their service very simply, annually. And that we maintain a good cadre of people and that they're happy. That's all a lot simpler than it sounds, isn't it? I mean, you know, you're going to have problems and things like that. But the broad concept here is, you know, how many new Scouts, how many new adults do you need to put in every year? You're not waiting until it's an emergency. You're keeping a constant eye on recruiting. You're not waiting until that den leader says that they're not going to come back next year. You've always got your eye on the bench and who's going to be next at the plate for any given den or anything like that. Now, the particulars, I don't think are as important as the concept that we are continuously thinking and acting to keep our troop on an even keel. Slipping membership. And like I said, I've been caught before. We've had those low years. And it's like kind of like getting dehydrated. You know, if you've discovered that you're dehydrated, it's too late. You can't, you know, grab a gallon of water and slosh it down and expect that you're going to be back on an even keel real quickly. It's going to take a couple hours before you're back. And, you know, you've got to go sit in the shade and drink some water. And that's the same thing that happens when you've forgotten about membership and you kind of put it aside. And you're not taking sips of water all the time. And then you think, oh, my gosh, our membership's way down. Well, then you're off to sit in the shade and drink a gallon of water figuratively. Membership is a similar ongoing concern. You know, if it becomes a real problem, it's harder to resolve. It's just much easier if you can maintain it. So the next time we're together, we're going to talk about our second question in this series. And that is, who are your key unit leaders for the next five years? We'll be right back. I saw the same blog post that many of you saw from the Smithsonian Institute's Museum of Natural History. One of the curators was peeking into their collection of scouting artifacts and put them online in a way of recognizing the 100th anniversary of scouting. And one I thought was particularly, one of the artifacts was particularly compelling to me. It was a jacket dated between 1911 and 1914. So just a year into the founding of the BSA. I have one similar to the one that they put on there. It's quite a bit older. It's from the mid-20s, I think. At least that's my best guess, according to the patches that are on it. And what I really liked about that new scout jacket that was, you know, new in 1911, it represented a period of scouting when boys often kind of cobbled together their own uniforms. I don't know for sure whether, like, you could go out and buy a scout uniform in 1911. Perhaps you could. But I know that boys were so excited about scouting that they kind of put together a scout uniform with whatever they could get. You know, they would just try and get close to the pictures that they saw in the Boy Scout handbook. And I think it speaks of the eagerness and excitement of the time. As boys became aware of scouting, it was a new idea and it really sparked their imaginations. And I got to thinking about it and 100 years later, each of our boys, each of our scouts has a very similar experience. Each one discovers scouting as those boys did a century ago. To each of our scouts, scouting is a new idea. They continue to respond to the invitation of scouting, to the invitation for adventure, for challenge, with the same eagerness and excitement as those boys did in scouting's early years. We have a great history. We have long-observed traditions. But it's all new. It's all new to a boy who discovers scouting for the first time. Our culture may have changed in many ways in the last 100 years. But scouting is still relevant. And that relevance is renewed in the mind of each boy that becomes a scout. Because in his eyes, it's a fresh discovery. Well, thanks once again for listening to the Scoutmaster podcast. You can read the Scoutmaster blog at scoutmaster.typepad.com. You can follow us at Scoutmaster blog on Facebook and ScoutmasterCG on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the Scoutmaster podcast on iTunes. And feel free to leave a comment or a review or rating when you do. And thanks to all of you who have. You can email me, Clark Green, with your comments and questions at ClarkGreen, C-L-A-R-K-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. Oh, no, no, no. Nope. Nope. Just me talking into a microphone, trying to lend a hand to Scout leaders, and perhaps have a bit of fun along the way. So we can't leave you without tipping our hat to the founder, Sir Robert Baden-Powell. And, Sir Robert, what have you to tell all the nice people out there? Good luck to you, and good camping. Why, thank you, Sir Robert. And thanks again for listening, and until next time. Good luck to you. Good luck to you. Good luck to you.