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LATEST POSTS
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Thank you kindly. It’s a simple philosophy that everyone should go home feeling good about their scouting experience. Barry -
I love your philosophy. So many make it super serious and hard to achieve some crazy unarticulated vision of the course director. -
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By AwakeEnergyScouter · Posted
I actually found it pretty easy, but I also have a professional background as a project manager as well as with running operations and quality control and went into the course clear on why I am a Scouting America leader and how that connects to my personal values and spiritual path. Defining the vision and writing some SMART goals to support it was just codifying my long-term to do list. Helpful to get the prompt, especially since we could sit down and coordinate - I could cut several things off my list because my CC is doing them instead. As always, I am fulfilling my vows, in the case of Scouting America the Mahayana stage vows being the most relevant. (Bodhisattva and Enlightened Society vows, so to liberate all sentient beings and to always stay in touch with the primordial nature of all sentient beings and build a society based on the view that all beings have indestructible dignity and intrinsic value) Meeting the dralas - in the case of scouting activities, the land spirits especially - is a key part of discovering sacredness and one's own primordial nature. Your face before your parents were born, as the Zen folks say. There's solid reasons for why BP used the outdoors as a feedback mechanism for development. So in order to connect youth with sacredness, themselves, and the land, our outdoor program needs to be well-executed and easy to operate for a rotation of leaders coming and going. Based on previous observations of what's worked well and what hasn't, combined with the need to continually welcome parents in as new leaders, I intend to lay the groundwork for a long-term sustainable outdoor program for our pack by: * Creating a veg-friendly pack cookbook with all the the "hooks" for the new cub scout program requirements that pertain to cooking - met someone at IOLS a few weeks ago who had the exact problem beyond my own that I wanted to solve, namely omni leader with vegan scout whose parents weren't that helpful or experienced with camp cooking so that was a win * Creating a field manual for running our hiking club, including the necessary modifications to meet all the new required hiking adventure requirements as well as provisions for at least occasionally completing the related ones like Math on the Trail and Tech on the Trail (currently I am running the whole thing, but will have to transition it to someone else during next scouting year or it will die when my cub crosses over) * Create a field manual for running our campouts that likewise delivers opportunities to earn all the Let's Camp adventures plus Outdoor Adventurer every campout, and is easily adaptable to complete other outdoor adventures (hiking, fishing, Into the Woods, Into the Wild, eating requirement for the personal fitness adventures, etc) that solidifies what parents and cubs appreciate the most about how we do campouts right now while also spreading the organizing burden as widely and fairly as possible * 5S our camping supplies to make it easy for an adult to make sure we have everything we need for every campout in a way that doesn't require tribal knowledge * Go recruit in five completely new places where we've never recruited before to get us out of our recruiting rut and reach people who may not have thought they'd be welcome in Scouting America and/or don't really know what we do We pack leaders spend so much of our mental energy on campouts on managing the physical that we don't always have the calm to model that connection to the sacred. We need to collectively just get a grip and sort it out so that we can have more transcendental moments with the grass, the touch of the wind, the kisses of the sun, the call of the water, all that. Ultimately, we need to maintain some degree of samadhi ourselves and raise windhorse fearlessly in order to offer our cubs what they need to develop, and we aren't doing that if we're running around like chickens with our heads cut off. May this be fruitful, may this be of benefit, may this be auspicious, my it be so 🙏🏼 -
By RememberSchiff · Posted
Oh the irony, yesterday on National Boy Scouts Day, we officially rebranded to Scouting America.
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