Cambridgeskip

A perspective from outside the USA... putting side the specific rules and regs of BSA for a moment the thing that struck me from your original post is when you commented that every time your son gets something wrong he gets yelled at. Your son is 12. Frankly.... Ye Gods! As someone else said, this sounds toxic. Scouts, wherever you are in the world, is about learning by doing. Kids are deliberately allowed to get things wrong. That’s the whole idea of the movement. It’s not school. It’s not about getting the highest grade. You try, you get it wrong, you sit down with your PL or an adult and figure out where you went wrong and then try again. Hopefully this time doing better! That’s how it works. Sounds like the SM has no idea how things are meant to work. Ive been an SL (what you call an SM) for coming up to 9 years. Other than having a natural fog horn of a voice I literally can’t remember the last time I raised my voice to a scout. I vaguely recall barking at a couple of scouts to step away from a faulty gas stove that was leaking gas everywhere so I could deal with it but that’s it. As others have said, time to look elsewhere I think.

I find it interesting the way on your side of the pond you are quite flexible in terms of changing your necker. Over here once a troop has adopted colours for their necker it’s pretty rare to change it and I seem to recall you need permission from district or county or something. Anyway the kids can get quite tribal about their neckers and swapping them with someone you’ve met on camp from another troop or unit is often seen as a big act of friendship. From an adults perspective the biggest use I find for them is identifying my scouts at long range on big events. We go to a weekend jamboree type camp each January at Gilwell. About 2500 people in 130 acres. It’s pretty crowded! Having the scouts wear their neckers visible (except if it’s raining, they’re cotton unfortunately) at all times makes it a lot easier to keep track of them.

Do be fare he elaborated on this when prompted elsewhere, can't remember if it was on this thread or another. Click on his username and you'll be able to track it down

Seeing as I've chimed in on other threads I thought I may as well give my own background. Not excited by BSA changing, not really my place as an "outsider", but I am curious to see how it works out for you. So anyway, I am from the UK. Joined Cubs, when it was still boys only in 1986, moved up to scouts 1989ish. Was still all boys then but went coed on a local option basis in 1991. My troop stayed all boys while I was there. I think only one troop of the eight in my district had any girls. Moved up to Venture scouts 1994, that unit was coed but only 1 girl actually there. By the time aged out it was about a third girls. As an adult I started as an ACSL (what you call an ACSM) with cubs in 1997. Initially all boys but went coed while I was there and it all went smoothly. Moved to a new town in 2000, became ACSL at a pack that was all boys. Became CSL 2003. Went coed 2006. Again very smooth. Moved to being SL, what you would call SM, 2009 at an already coed troop. All gone smoothly to date.

Kind of! As our constitution is unwritten and has evolved rather than been created that is not a straight forward question to answer. It is true in so far that England and Wales have an established church in the form of The Church of England and Scotland has an established church in the form of The Church of Scotland. The monarch is the official head of both but in the same way that they have no actual power within the state they have no actual power within either church. Don't even ask about religion in Norther Ireland. You'll disappear down a rabbit hole of insanity that will need you in need of a large drink, a dark room and cold compress round your head to recover from. Both churches have some official privileges the most important being senior bishops sitting in the House of Lords. It's not true in that no one is expected to be a member of either church and neither does being a member afford anyone any kind of right.

Urban myth that one! It is true that in the last census a number of people put variations of Jedi down as their religion. However for statistical purposes this was put down as "no religion". Presumably as those putting it down were taking the proverbial! Data is available to download from here. Being shown on stats output doesn't make a religion "official", it's just an official recognition by the government that it exists and is taken into account for setting policy. Actually I found a scan through that sheet quite instructive. While it doesn't have the numbers on it for each entry it does show the staggering number of religions and sub divisions of each that exist in what is one relatively small country.

Back in the 90s my venture scout unit used to brew its own beer and wine for the Christmas party. Ah the memories! (It was disgusting stuff)

Sorry to see you go John. While we've not always agreed on everything you've said you have always made your point with courtersy. You will be missed from these parts by those on every side of every debate. Its my belief that your most recent posts were no reason to ban you, they were, at worst, satirical and if satire has now become a reason to ban users then we live in sad times indeed. Your treatment has been heavy handed indeed. Im sure we'll stay in touch and debate offline but I wanted to make my thoughts publicly.

OK, but I'm curious as to what specifics put you off? To lead you a bit if TSA were to say they like the look of BSA and are going to remodel on you I can think of things that I think would work and would be an improvement and things I don't think would work. Things I'd welcome Your uniforms. (with the exception of the badge sash) Your shirts look much better than ours. Particularly the blue one for cubs. Bigger emphasis on the patrol system, would like to see it used more in the explorer section in particular Things I'd not welcome. Combining scouts and explorers to run to 18. Not sure it works with natural peer groups here. Chartering organisations. I wouldn't want to see scouting controlled by other bodies. Albeit we already have a small number of "closed" groups. Those are purely examples and not exhaustive. It's just a prompt more than anything! I'm certainly not trying to provoke an argument. I'm just curious as to what you see, whether it's actually accurate and what you like and dislike about it.

I hope you don't mind me asking but why is that?

First to say thanks to Matt and Mrs Matt for swinging by last week. It's always nice to have visitors! The necker you gave us is now hung up in our HQ alongside others from foreign visitors. Secondly Matt is completely right. While looking at how other countries do things is good in terms of getting fresh ideas and seeing things from a different perspective whatever BSA comes up with has to work for BSA. It's no good pointing at any one country and saying "lets do that" because it may not work for you. It should be a case of saying, country X has age ranges that work like this, why does it fit that country and are there enough parallels that it works for us? If the answer is no move on to countries X, Z and so on. Same for the award scheme, same for summer camp etc. The other side of that coin is to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water. You've got well over 2 million members. Second biggest in WOSM if I remember right. Clearly you are doing something right! Whatever that is be careful not to ditch it. When TSA had its big shake up it wasn't done quickly. I was a venture scout when they were piloting it. They did an awful lot of research first. I remember taking part in it. They then piloted the proposed changes in a number of places round the country. By district was one of them and moved to the explorers/network model in 1996. We tried it, gave feedback and what eventually fell out it in 2002 when it went nation wide had a lot of what we'd tried but also had been tweeked and further adapted. It took time. You need to take your time as well. As I've said before though I don't think you should consider the current round of changes to be the last. I suspect more will come in due course. Just on the point of summer camp, to clarify what Matt said, we do have summer camp, just not the same way you do with the same set program. Our summer camps are typically for about a week and are just like another camp but longer. Typically camping in patrols, cooking for themselves, usually on a scout owned campsite doing a mix of on site and off site activities. We don't have dining halls (although a limited amount of indoor accomodation is typically available, it doesn't come cheap though) or fixed booking periods. You just book for the days you want to be there.

Hadn't appreciated you were Surrey Ian! I was the out of county member of the selection panel for Surrey Heath district. Don't know if that involved any of your lot. It was a tough decision to make.

I honestly don't know how that works. I'd be interested to know though. Jamborees don't come cheap to run. What I do know is some recent jamborees (Japan, UK, Netherlands) used the normal venue for music festivals and because they came with existing infrastructure it saved quite a lot of money. The UK venue is the site of the V music festival. Many of the jamboree infrastructure costs were met by Virgin who run the festival. I guess you don't have that advantage.

BSA can indeed influence but it can't dictate. Numbers wise BSA makes up approx 7% of members. Probably more financially but ultimately has only a certain amount of leverage. In addition the management of the jamboree isn't purely BSA. There are three host nations and WOSM involved. It's not a BSA event that the world is invited to, it's a WOSM event at a BSA site. There are a lot of parallels with hosting the Olympics. The host country only has so much wriggle room. IOC rules sit at the top. I imagine that BSA have signed all kinds of legal contracts with WOSM to host this and simply refusing to play by their rules now will land them in massive legal and financial problems. I think it's also worth putting yourself in WOSM's shoes for the moment. They cover scouting in nearly every country, culture and religion on the planet. That will mean a myriad of different beliefs on every subject you can imagine, including sex. Across the world the age of consent varies between 11 in Nigeria and 20 in Korea. Attitudes vary between countries where sex is only legal in marriage to others where sex is pretty casual. You have national scout organisations where it's not permitted to even acknowledge sex exists to those, particularly from Africa which HIV is a massive problem, where sex education is part and parcel of the scout program. Through that massive raft of differences WOSM has to strike a balance and choose a policy. Individual national contingents are welcome to impose their own expectations on their own contingents, but WOSM, when setting central policy, has to get something that everyone can live with and I think that having them available via medical facilities is about right.

17 years of working in government here quickly killed off any thoughts of conspiracy in the corridors of power. I suspect the same is true of many other large organisations

I think you over estimate the news worthiness of stories about scouts. WSJ held abroad isn't a story. On home soil it is. Same for every country. With you chaps it's got the added bonus for the media of the membership changes but the the rule still stands. The home soil press will go looking for jamboree related stories the rest of the world generally won't.

The "offensive weapons" part is a legal term. That is what that policy is getting at. It's not saying the scout association says it, it means the law says it. Like it or not the law defines knives as such and as an organisation we have to work within the law. So unless the knife falls within certain parameters (3 inches or less in length, folds away and does not lock) the law says you need to have a reason for having it about your person. My point is that the scout policy makes sense when seen in the context of working within that. It doesn't meant you can't have and use one. I'll be hiking in a remote part of scotland next month. I will certainly have it about me then. I will probably walk to the local shop tomorrow. I won't have it with me then. Why would I? The policy (and it is guidance by the way, not a set rule) does not prevent scouts using knives, they certainly do, but part of it is not just training them in how to use them in their hand but also to get into habits that mean they don't get arrested. We had a survival skills camp back in March. They had them in their pockets then because the nature of the program meant they were using them a lot. We had a camp earlier this month as part of the national archery tournament. The scouts took knives but left them in their tents for the most part. As I say, it's partly about training them not to fall foul of the law.

Not among the scout fratternity because the laws that govern this didn't just come out the blue. There had been increasing restrictions on the use and ownership of knives over many years so it was a bit of a salami slice effect. Besides for the most part it's common sense. In the same way I don't carry my torch or my first aid kit or mess tins around with me all the time I don't have my knife about me all the time on camp and neither would I expect the scouts to. It's a case of you get it when you need it. The Daily Mail though.... when it found this out when into an editorial hissy fit. But as Ian mentioned, that's what the Daily Mail does. Think Fox News on steroids.

It's all about balance I think. When it stops being fun, or becomes too stressful, or life away from scouting is suffering then it is time to take a step back. Whether than means standing down altogether or just dropping some of what you are doing. I went through a phase where I took on too much. It didn't do me any good at all. I made a conscious effort to step back and delegate. In other circumstances I may have stood down altogether. For the OP I'd say take a step back, pause for breath and be ready to say no to things. And take it from there. With regard to age I think a spread of ages works best. I have a 19 year old ASL who the kids look up to as a young role model. She is a teenager just like them and knows exactly what is going on in their lives because its happening to her as well.. I also have 74 year old ASL who the kids look up to as an older role model. He has children and grand children and knows whats going on in the scouts lives because he's seen it three times over! He also loves The Big Bang Theory and most scout nights start with him comparing notes with kids who are fans on the latest episode. Both bring different things to the troop. The 19 year old can swing her rucksack onto her back one handed and run like the wind. My 74 year old is physically slowing down but has a 65 year back catalogue of experience, wisdom and fantasically funny stories to tell. There's a place for everyone in this game.

My group has done most of its rebranding (website, facebook, twitter) but haven't done our youtube channel yet. I like how it looks on the website, I think it makes it look cleaner and more straight forward. I'm not quite convinced though on facebook or twitter as the new "12th" logo on the profile photo doesn't quite say who we are. Youtube still has the old branding and by comparing the two I think you can see that for profile photos on social media the old one is definitely better. Unless we can do some more tinkering.!

I'll play devils advocate here.... bear in mind I am completely pro LGBT inclusion.... However..... while I would agree with you that its was enforcing certain denomination's beliefs at the end of that policy you don't have to go back very many years to a time where, while it was perfectly legal to be gay, it was still looked upon by the majoirty of the population, regarldless of their religous faith or lack their of, as still imoral. At that time, say go back to the 1970s, BSA was simply enforcing what was a widely held moral belief, ie that being gay was imoral, because at that time that is what most people thought. I look back on my teenage years, the early to mid 90s, and the idea that anyone could have come out as openly gay and not been subjected to a torent of abuse and all kinds of difficulty is ludicrous. It just wouldn't have happened. Speak to any 14 or 15 year old now and they all have friends who are openly gay or bi. Most schools have LGBT societies. I have an 18 year old Assistant Scout Leader who is openly bi. Our district commissioner is openly gay. None of that would have been possible 25 years ago. Now they are. Things have moved on in a massive way. Things changed from the mid 90s onwards this side of the pond, from what I understand they did likewise your side as well. At some point in that time I'd argue that BSA went from using establish morals as part of their code to those of certain denominations.

It's often not even as straight forward as believing or not believing. Often it's a case of looking at it differently. One of the best sermons I ever heard was a priest who said that if anyone stands in front of you and claims to understand every word of the bible and have all the answers they are lying either to themselves or to you. I am a Christian. I do though understand that the bible as we know it today is a collection of 68 texts, written by many different people, some where the author is unknown or unclear. They were created over thousands of years in multiple languages that were in turn translated into Latin then into Medieval English and finally modern English. They were written for different purposes and for different audiences. There are books of history, poetry, law and prophecy. There are letters to individuals and letters to populations. With some exceptions, such as the gospels and the first 5 books of the Old Testament, very few were intended as holy texts. whats more different churches recognise different texts as belonging to the bible. A Catholic bible has quite a few differences to a Protestant one. An orthodox bible looks different again and so it goes. With all that in mind I don't think an individual who accepts the basics of Christianity, of God coming to earth in human form, living a blameless life, dying and rising again, but on the other hands asks questions of or even disagrees with how elements of the bible are applied to modern life is being disingenuous. They are simply applying their intellect to an incredibly complex text and coming up with a different answer.

To be honest I'm ambivalent, but then Im no artist! The previous logo was difficult to manipulate online although equally I'm not sure why something techie couldn't have been done to cure that. I do like that it's simple so a Beaver could draw it. I also recognise that things like branding have to move forward otherwise you look dated. On the other side of the coin it looks closer to the 1908 logo than the last one! Writing this on a phone so can't figure out how to embed that so go look it up if you're curious. Its all part of a wider new 5 year strategy that we've all got say in our inboxes this morning http://scouts.org.uk/about-us/strategy/vision-for-2023 ive only skim read it so far but the two things that stand out good and bad are; Good - blink and you'd miss it but changes to the leader training program to bring in more practical scout skills. RESULT! The current leader training program is terrible and needs more practical skills. Bad - Scouting in schools. Not a fan. Part of what makes scouts special is the relationship between the adults and kids. We are not parents, police, teachers or social workers. We are something different. We are the nearest most kids will ever have to an adult sibling. Moving into schools will, I fear, risk that special relationship if leaders get put in the same bracket as teachers in kids minds.

Don't forget that the role of the monarch under the Uk constitution is to do precisely nothing. Have you ever heard the current Queen offer an opinion on any political matter? No. Because she's not allowed to express one. That was all part of the deal when the monarch was re established following Cromwell's period as Lord Protector or whatever he called himself. The monarch theoretically appoints the Prime Minister but is required to appoint the member of parliament most likely to command a majority in the House of Commons. In practice that means the leader of the party with the largest number of seats. If there is any uncertainty on the matter such as with a hung parliament and no coalition being formed she in theory needs to make a choice but would do so on the advice of the privy council. Thats a long winded way of saying no one gave or gives a monkey's if the monarch is a man or woman because they don't do anything.

I think a big thing to consider as well is both population density and population concentration. As well as the country as a whole having a much higher population density than the USA within the UK we are a much more urban population generally. The majoirty of our population is concentrated in a small number of very densly populated areas. Broadly London and surrounding dormitory towns English South Coast Welsh South Coast/Bristol West Midlands English central belt Scottish central belt And within each of those urban areas everything is smaller. Our houses are smaller, gardens smaller, roads narrower etc, bringing everything together that much closer. It not only makes for a different culture but makes running scouts easier. If I find myself short on adults I can phone a neighbouring group and borrow an adult for the evening and they just have to walk round the corner, not get in their car. It also means that most of my scouts live within 10 minutes walk of our building and walk or cycle there, certainly in summer its rare to have any parents picking up or dropping off. I couldn't agree with Ian more. It took an awful lot to turn the boat around and equally an awful lot that got that boat into trouble in the first place. Anyone that looks to the UK and says that going coed, on its own, caused membership losses or membership increases is massively overly simplifying things. A huge amount of changes were needed, all Ian says and more. The important thing is though, and I think this is massively important, is that the core doesn't reallyt look that different to what it did when I was a scout before the changes. Kids getting together, working in small groups, taking part in outdoor adventure and fun, with the added elements of a uniform, self discipline and community service is still there. What my lot did on Thursday, a wide games night out in the woods, looks pretty similar to what I was doing aged 12 on a Tuesday night. It's just in slightly different looking packaging. A thought that just occured to me is that it's like a man's suit. The cut is different to what it was in 1907, the fabric different, the cuff links different and you may see more women wear them than before but at it's core it hasn't changed. It just looks a bit different. Does that make sense?