qwazse

I guess there's no principle that I can think of that would oppose coed scouting ... except that it would alienate parents looking for that unisex experience. Certainly when I started in Venturing, some scouters felt that I was abandoning them. I was able to dispel those sentiments by personal example. It's much harder for an organization to shed that image of abandoning its base.

Oh but the sheer joy of those snowball fights in the circus tent!(That would be the 24-man donated by the national guard. We used it exclusively for our winter campouts.)

For those of you starting from scratch or rebuilding a battered inventory ... I would just like to point out that $160 buys a whole lot of tarp, netting, chord, and parts. If you have one volunteer with a quilting machine and another with a good rivet tool, think long an hard about your options. If I were a scout, I would rather spend more time making and less time fundraising. This achieves a lot of Fred's objectives and offsets the problem of ditched responsibility. Plus, if I cross paths with a unit whose tents have a silk-screen logo with the tagline "Handcrafted by the boys of Troop/Crew ___", the leaders can expect my personal delivery of espresso and biscotti.

We have scouts invest in their own tents and hand them down as needed. The cons are lack of uniformity. It does make setting up and taking down a little rougher for newbies. QM is only tracking tarps and patrol boxes. The pros are boys getting wider experience helping each other with a variety of tents. They learn to care for their own gear. More ingenuity with tarps and hammocks, etc ...And (what I missed from growing up in a troop who supplied the tents) a boy graduates and has his own tent/tarp/netting -- ready to face the world.

Sounds like a fun crew, and your expectation for growth is reasonable. Regardless of potential conflicts with your meetings, I would encourage you to send one or two venturers to your VOA and report back the next week. In the long run, this will make sure your crew adds to the flavor of district and council activities. Because of that, I wouldn't inject patrol method as a structure for the crew. Getting everyone up to speed with the venturing organizational structure will be hard enough. In a year or two, the ones who are really interested in leadership training will attend NYLT and get to practice the PM there. There's no point in you being critical of other troops' poorly implemented patrol method. But, what you can do is raise the expectations of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts by making sure they are fully responsible for what does and does/not happen in their own crew. Eventually, through advisor conferences and such, you can encourage them to do the same in their respective troops. The hardest part of advising, I found, is getting a youth to tone down the rhetoric of how an adult-lead "home" unit is messing with them, then getting him/her to reflect on how to be an agent of improvement.

How closely do you monitor this? Supposing that a scout was trained for den chief, then becomes a PL, so he has his red-bordered trained patch on when he swaps in the PL patch. Is that really a ding on inspection? I mean, he still is trained as a DC, and it's clear that he's an untrained PL. Once he gets trained as a PL and is awarded the new strip, how soon does he have to swap it in? Suppose another scout goes from PL to DC? Once he gets training does it matter if he hasn't swapped out the trained patch? Maybe some SPL's could keep track of such things. I'm grateful I never had to! My understanding is that NYLT trumps all. So that strip replaces any trained strip and goes on the sleeve under any, or no, PoR. But what if a scout (or venturer) completes NYLT then becomes a DC? Once he/she gets trained for that position, what does he/she do with the red strip?

@@George, have your current venturers gone through the Venturing Leadership Skills Course (either by taking a weekend out to do it -- as recommended, or by you presenting the material in small bits at every meeting)? That will help them get a sense of how they should perform. What organizational charts you present beyond the venturing model depends upon where the youth are coming from. I've always had a mix of boy scouts, girl scouts, and non-scouts who weren't interested in competing against one another -- their attitude was much like what Balsillie observed in that quote that you found. They attended different schools (some with intense rivalries), so they got plenty of that in sports, band, and theater (all competitive activities). Many craved time in large groups and preferred to attend Venturing Officers' Association (VOA) activities where they could have social time with like minded youth. (One council officer called it "structured unstructured time.") Some wanted to hike the tar out of our region with a handful of buddies, and others really were craving time to talk with adults about hobbies and professions and life in general. I've found myself spread pretty thin. (Like I said, a wild ride.) So, we don't pursue an activity if there isn't a youth stepping up as activity chair (or an officer claims it as their pet activity). That includes responsibility for research, sign-ups, and collecting forms and funds and reckoning with the adult treasurer. That's another reason why we move away from the patrol method. Crew officers should assume many of the responsibilities that get assigned to the committee members of most troops. (Periodically discussions in the patrol method sub-forum arise regarding responsibilities that adults have assumed, depriving boys of agency over their troop.) Have your youth appointed officers. Have any attended your council or area VOA?

Mrs. Q got me a tickpicker for Father's Day. The notion of me using my fingers, or a spork really annoyed her.

Sure you can. I tell my young adults that their Eagle patch is a violation of the insignia guide, but if they are okay with taking a hit on inspection (which we rarely do) they can keep it on. On the other hand, if they share their cigarettes with youth, they can expect summary dismissal.

Welcome to the forum and thanks in advance for all that you do for the youth. And, advisor to advisor, you're in for a wild ride. My crew has varied in size from 5 to 40 over the past 12 years. At no time was a patrol method warranted. Rather, subgroups in the crew centered around interests, e.g. Philmont contingent (aka, hike a month club), Seabase contingent, ski group, blood drive managers, etc ... Each of those had its own activity chair or two, accountable to the VP of program. This can be confusing to outsiders looking in. (I had an exchange student from Italy this year, and a lot about our boys perplexed her.) But with high school and college and military youths' diverse schedules and interests, it's really hard to solidify patrols for more than a weekend. That's not to say that if the youth want to arrange themselves into patrols, you should discourage it. As long as it's their idea, not yours, let them give it a try.

i don't think a POR is required to wear the patch. Although if someone's got a trained patch without a POR, I might ask him/her why.

Everything I learned about the strip came from Bryan's Blog: https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2015/11/05/nylt-patch-offers-new-way-scouts-venturers-show-theyre-trained/ Never saw the square patch. I'll keep my eyes out for boys wearing it from now on. Any temporary patch can go on the back of the sash, so it makes sense to me that boys with lots of other scouting experience would decide to sew it there.

I would have those boys get that patch on their sleeve ASAP. It's more important that what they learned gets put into practice right away. So give these guys some quality cracker barrels (say, at summer camp) and ask if anything they learned should be applied in your troop. The best advertisement to other scouts would be better leaders, and a troop who lets them lead.

Prevailing wind is my primary consideration with those things. Ridge pole sets perpendicular to wind. And the windward side hangs lower to the ground. That generally means the low side is westward. So we we get morning sun, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone. And the shade throughout the day is good enough. Boys just move their gear if it's a bother. Now, our summer camp site is in a stand of oak, so we are not as pestered by sun as some other sites. So, your mileage may vary.

Well, to my knowledge, nobody got kicked out of the BSA for keeping their Eagle patch on. They found out about the insignia guide, and adjusted their uniform at their earliest possible convenience. It makes no sense saying BSA's capitulation to those with permissive sexual ethics is cause to disregard its guide to insignia. Regarding, snowflakes, I've found them to be deadly en masse. So, the metaphor does not have the pejorative implication you may think that it has.

Really autocorrect? In what spelling-verse is "delineate" replaced with "deli oat"?

Sounds shady to me.

Oh, I see a fundraiser coming ... "The get us Coeducational capital campaign" BSA promotes the line: we want girls, but they want shower stalls. Nation-wide they estimate the cost of expanding facilities in every council camp as mandated by state regs ... or the fees for the legal wrangling needed for waivers, whichever is less. Then they tell activist donors that they will put forward a proposal at the national meeting once adequate contributions have been made to ensure female scouts anywhere in the country will have the facilities they desire (asked for or not). My line to activists has always been: show us the membership. Maybe it needs to be: show us the money.

Half and half is an unrealistic sex distribution. If we are as successful as the Brits at recruiting girls (which I don't think we will be), female membership won't even come close to 25% for decades. The camp infrastructure change would be underwhelming. Regardless, many camps around here have already built facilities for both sexes. They are following the money. With GS/USA camp closures, there's demand from Girl Scout troops (and others) who don't want to go miles out of their way to camp.

Those massive flys with walls? From camping in the northern hemisphere, I've come to prefer east-west with one face open to the north during the summer. Any other fly, I set it up with the low end to the wind. With my hammock tarp, I set it up on diagonal between two trees, so that the head corner slides on the ridge line via a rigging of rope and biners.

I try not to split hairs over this stuff. But, my scouts who found employment at HOA never counted that time as service hours. But, maybe one could pitch to the HOA the possibility of chartering a troop. My in-laws' land trust would gladly let my crew camp on the property, especially when there is a glut of timber to clear and burn. I would consider the time put in clearing deadfall as service hours if a scout needed it. But my youth have never made the trip. So the topic was never broached. At the end of the day, for me, it's what the boys think. If one thinks that his efforts were a payment in kind and doesn't want to count it, I wouldn't try to change his mind. If another youth was quite proud that he was able to serve his hosts, I'd support him. Maybe this reflects my disdain of tracking service hours at all. Different example, my favorite church activity was counseling at day camp. Lots of planning, preparation, and implementation involved for the week or two. Some guided by he youth pastor, some of my own initiative (more scripted in Jr. High, less in high school). Was that a service project, a good turn, duty to God? IMHO, a good turn writ large is a service project. And a service project of any worth is a form of duty to God and my country. So, attempts to deli oat them comes off as a little silly.

I make it clear that first class scouts do routine good turns and initiate service projects so often, that it would be an embarrassment if they could recall only six hours of service or only one initial project at their next conference. I am really trying to get my venturers to think in terms of five major projects (along the lines of Hornaday requirements), of which Eagle would merely be the first.

This is not an editorial, but a regurgitation of facts already in evidence. I.e., one girl with a special interest in obtaining a Boy Scout award. A worthy follow-on would have been, "since then our magazine has been recieving letters for girls and their parents ..." Or, "among the women in my circle of friends ..." Or even, "among famous women, only the greatest of those were in organization's whose target audience shifted from male to female." In other words, he has no evidence of slews of young women aspiring to Eagle like Sydney Ireland is. He has no evidence of a single woman not advancing in here career while a man with Eagle on his resume did. In short he has nothing but vacuous praise for an organization that he wants to revise because he likes special interests.

it's nice to know we breath different air.Jambos pitched nonstop at roundtable. Troops thrilled about "winning" the HA lotteries -- obligating them to months of payments and lots of conditioning. There is almost an expectation for half the scouts that they will be have one of these adventured of a lifetime. Nice attitude to have, until the economy tanked. Our poor camporee staff have had the dickens of a time getting our units on board. This year they actually did poll SPLs and line up a canoe trip than nobody signed up for. The units with the most enthusiastic boys raised safety issues, so they changed the theme of an event ... Which then became a non-starter. There's a lot to like about my district. This screwed up vision is not one of them. I think I'd like your district.