jc2008

Balloons filled with flour or water would be cool to shoot at. Why not wear lab coats ?

Do a certificate? Get a frame from the Dollar Tree for $1 and customize/print your certificate for your leaders here: [url=http://www.cyberbasetradingpost.com/docs/Create-A-Certificate1.cfm]http://www.cyberbasetradingpost.com/docs/Create-A-Certificate1.cfm[/url=http://www.cyberbasetradingpost.com/docs/Create-A-Certificate1.cfm] Can write whatever you want on them. Only costs $1 for the frame + 1 printed piece of paper.

I would definitely tell the parents that are absorbing costs to remember if they itemize they can claim ANY unreimbursed expenses on their taxes. Anything from leader uniforms to den supplies to gas mileage to meetings/camp outs.

We do one pack meeting a month. Our den does a den meeting every week except for holiday weeks, pack meeting weeks and the week after a campout. So basically once a week there is a den meeting or pack meeting. Not all the dens in our pack are as ambitious though.

we have one event in june and one in july. Usually bowling or laser tag or something else easy that the kids can show up to and we can have a good time no matter how many are able to make it.

The way I look at everything with our cub scouts, is : What is best for the child. It probably isn't the child's fault that his parents aren't bringing him to meetings or letting him participate. It isn't the child's fault that his parents aren't working with him to make up the work he missed to earn his rank advancements. The way I see it, if you can give this kid the best and greatest summer camp, DESPITE his parents being totally apathetic, then you have done your job and done it well. That kid will grow up with the memories of a fun summer camp even though, all throughout the year, his parents didn't care enough to help him attend all the other scouting Den Meetings and Pack meetings etc. It may motivate him to sign up for Boy Scouts and since he will be older, he can have more of a hand in his ability to be able to attend meetings and other things. You really need to separate the child and parent in these types of situations.

Just wondering what the best price on custom patches and where you get the best deals? We have a pack of around 50-60 kids so we would be ordering 50-100 patches (for the scouts/siblings/adult leaders) Usually the 3" patches with the loop so the kids can wear it on their uniforms. Last year we had 100 made and paid a total of $144 shipped so 1.44 per patch (from stadriemblems.com) . Is this the best price for those? or is there a place that does them for a lower price? They also did the artwork for us on the patch with guidance from my terrible MS Paint picture.

We have regular Den Meetings + Pack Meeting in May/August For June/July we usually do one Pack Activity each month, such as bowling or a picnic or lazer tag or some other fun activity that people can come to and participate in.

We have an "open" race after all the racing is done. This is for siblings, parents, leaders etc. Its a bunch of fun, especially between the adults.

You could look at doing something nice for your Charter Organization, like fixing their flowerbeds or picking up the trash on the road in and around the organization as well. So that kills two birds with one stone for the badge and also your charter org appreciates you too. This is how our kids earn the requirement from service projects we do throughout the year for our chartering org.

This thread reminds me of the following: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference. The CM is basically in charge of their pack, for better or worse really. Nothing a UC or DC can do even if they think that it could be done so much better. This really goes for all levels of cub scouts, cubmasters thinking the den leaders should do better, den leaders thinking the cub master should do better and the cubmaster/DC/UC relationships. And as said in the prayer above, realize that there are some things you just CANT change. It has taken me a year to get used to this fact, and now I just concentrate on what I know that my family can change and make a great experience for the boys, which is at the den level. Everything else I just don't have control over Its a hard thing to swallow sometimes..

The up front fees I don't think deters people. As one parent put it at a roundup we held earlier this fall, baseball was costing her hundreds of dollars in fees/equipment/uniforms/trips and it only lasted a few months. Scouting is year round.

Den Leaders are infinitely more important than the Cub Master. Its the den leaders that the boys and families see every week. Our Cub Master runs the once a month leaders meeting, and pack meeting. The Pack meeting outline is done at the leaders meeting. He also does a lot more than that, like rechartering, tour plans when we want to do a pack camp and probably dealing with the behind the scenes whining that probably goes on. But the Cub Master's main purpose is to MC the pack meetings. It should be the committee chair etc doing the rechartering, but some packs just don't have that level of commitment from a lot of people to take over all those jobs. I have never asked our CM to come to our Den Meetings, but I am sure he would if he could if I asked him to. He is also the Web2 Den Leader and will be moving on at the end of the year after a long tenure as CM of our pack. Our new Cub Master we hope to give him enough support so that we have people who can handle rechartering etcetc and he can be the MC/face of the pack. Is your Cubmaster in charge of everything? Collecting money for events etc, can't that go to your Treasurer? Den Meetings are run by the den leaders, shouldn't need to have a CM there. If this was a Den Leader acting like this I can see your point, but the CM, although he isn't wonderful, he isn't horrible either. (This message has been edited by jc2008)

My son is only a wolf but he loves his hydration pack (like a camelbak). Or something more sentimental like an engraved knife ?

Some great ideas. I especially like the sock snowball war. I just took at look at www.AnySolder.com and a lot of guys there are requesting white socks, so could gather them up and ship them over to afganistan for the troops too. (If you go to http://www.anysoldier.com/WhereToSend/ and click on the magnifine glass on top of the left hand list of names and type in white socks you can get a list of units asking for white socks

We have to buy anything we don't sell. No returns for our council. I would have taken more of a chance if I knew I could return part of our order, and made more money for our Pack, but I was a bit chicken, being our first year and all and stuck to an intial 4k order. We did over 10k total this year. Being popcorn kernal was like a job. I think if i spent the past 3 months working a job for as many hours as i spent on popcorn and motivating people to go sell etcetc i could have made 10k myself.. or at least our 30% cut of it lol.

Our council will not take ANY of the things we order back. We can trade between units and transfer entire cases to other units, but you have to find a unit who needs what you got. We actually had 3 order dates this year which was AWESOME. That ment that we could do our initial order for some show and sells, and I collected a few take home orders before the 2nd order date, and only ordered what we had "presold" for that order date and did more show and sells with that product, and now the 3rd order date is coming up which im going to order/reorder everything i need to finish filling takehome. AND we can order in 1/2 cases on the final order which is even more awesome. we have over 60 kids in our pack and ended up with a total of about $150-200 per kid in sales. That isn't too bad considering I didn't get all those 60 parents to participate, and some of those 60 kids are not actually participating in cub scouts as happens when people drop out. This was my first year doing it, I have a plan for next year to increase sales already This year I just wanted to make sure I didn't get stuck with popcorn the pack would have to pay for lol.

We have a few "on the fly" games. Including a version of the sharks/minnows. Most of the time our Pack meeting is inside the cafeteria, so not much room to run around. A good one is "rock, paper, scissor, snake" where you go up and play "rock paper scissors" with someone, and the loser goes behind the winner and puts their hands on the winners shoulders. Then the person in front plays rock paper scissors with another random person and the loser goes to the end of the chain of kids behind the winner. This is giong on all over the room with a bunch of people playing rock paper scissors. So you have a bunch of small "snakes" of people with the "heads" playing rock paper scissors and the losers going to the end of the chain until you have two big snakes that go up against each other, resulting with just one snake chain of all the kids together. The parents usually join in this one as well (This message has been edited by jc2008)(This message has been edited by jc2008)

How many kids are in your troop? We very often do raffles at the pack meeting. You can get tickets from the Dollartree (like 250 of them for $1) and we usually get 5-10 prizes from the dollar tree as well. Then we sell tickets at 5 tickets for $1. Last year that was how we eeked along paying for awards and such since our popcorn and camp card fundraisers were rather poo. As for the penny jar thing, I can see how that would work at a school as they can view the results daily and always be thinking about it and bringing more money in daily. With scouts though, you would only see those things once a week at most? (This message has been edited by jc2008)(This message has been edited by jc2008)

I wish two troops would fight over our pack and offer up den chiefs!

we ordered a bunch of leather shapes from http://www.beckleather.com/ they gave us a discount since we were scouts and it was a pretty decent discount.

We also have very few units that sell popcorn at stores in our town. We just finished a second set of show and sells last weekend and have another set scheduled for beginning of november, a week before our final order date. And I was surprised that the kids seemed to make just as much money selling at this time of year as they did when we got our first order of popcorn back in september. So our market is far from saturated with popcorn sales. I didn't see anyone being rude to our kids, luckily. But I did have one lady come up to me and start this weird conversation about BSA letting in people who didnt believei n god or crossdressers. She seemed to be very religious and somehow had the idea that gays were an approved part of BSA. It was a very odd conversation, but she had it with me, not with the kids. Just smile and nod to strange people with strange ideas and pray that they leave soon as not to cause some weird scene in front of the store/kids. One thing we REALLY pushed with the adults supervising the sale was for them to mention the 70% goes back to local scouting line. When a person seemed to waver over the prices that line usually brought them over to buy something or donate. We got a lot of donations, and if you look at a 2-3$ donation, that is like selling 1 $10 can of popcorn in terms of money back to the pack. (This message has been edited by jc2008)

UPDATE Well we did our first set of show and sells after the 1st delivery using this method. The second set of show and sells at the second popcorn delivery i changed a bit from what I learned the first time. some notes: 1. 4 hours is a tad bit too long for the Cub Scouts. Maybe some kids can do it, and ours did do it, but I changed the time on the second set of show and sells to 3 hours and that was just about right. The kids earned enough to make it worthwhile (4 kids in a group) 2. Beck recommended to just get a little bit of grease and higher price point items. Next year our show and sells will be 99% stocked with the $10/$15 tins/microwave only. I believe that while making a $20 sale is better than one $10 sale, from what I saw the boys could have sold a lot more $10 tins. We had people walking away who had $10 bills pulled out of their wallets when we had none left. Although I think our intake of money to the pack itself would still be the same, as people who probably would have paid $10 for the tin gave us $2-4 dollars donations which would have been our pack's profit of a $10 tin anyways. 3. We gave the kids index cards with the presentation speed on it to read to customers if they had problems memorizing it or were too nervous to remember it while speaking. Usually by the end of the shift they didn't need the cards anymore, but they helped intially to get them confident and in the groove of speaking to people. But one think I found totally true is that when the kids went up to people and did the presentation, it was literally 90% of the people they spoke to bought popcorn or gave a few dollars donation. It was literally proven to the fact that the kids would go up to people and start speaking and the people would slow down and eventually stop and then do the donation or make a purchase. If the kids hadn't spoken to them they would have just walked on by. Probably only about 20% of the sales/donations we got were from people who actually came up to us ready and willing.

The scars from units splitting can last for years. We are only on our second year in the program with our son, and our pack had a split about 5-6 years ago or so due to adults not agreeing. There is still uneasiness and hurt feelings between the two packs. Next year it should get better as the leadership of the first pack turned over this year and our pack leadership will be turning over at the end of this year, so the new leaders won't have the same grudges/axes between each other. We recruit from the same schools, so it has been strained at the roundups etc.

Thank you Brewmeister and Seattle, that seems to be what I want to read and give to the new lucky Den Leader And yes 5yearscouter, this pack is brand new and the den leader is brand new, so I am trying to give her all the resources possible along with my own support and help. The hope is that next year they will be able to recruit more boys to make single tiger/wolf/bear/webelo dens. They are recruiting from a decent sized school, but they didnt start the recruitment process until earlier this month. Yes, the things I get myself involved with outside my own pack (This message has been edited by jc2008)