Suggestions for Troop Stock of Old Patches

[Hunt]

My son's Troop has a stock of old patches of various sorts--out-of-date rank and MB patches, old summer camp patches, and various other things. I'm wondering what we can or should do with these. I suppose we could give them to any Scouts who would like to get into trading. Or we could try to trade them all for something the troop could use (or sell them, I guess). Or we could keep them forever--maybe start a Troop collection (although there are duplicates of many). Have others encountered this, and what did you do?

[scoutldr]

Depending on what you have and how old they are, some could be quite valuable to a collector. Suggest the first step should be to catalog them and look them up in a Scout Collectibles price guide to get an idea of what you have.

 

Another suggestion...at our OA Fall Fellowship every year, we have a patch auction of donated memorabilia.

[cyberscouter]

You can sell them on ebay as a fundraiser for the troop.

[blade1158]

We hold a 3 drawings at the end of each of our meetings, the prizes are patches, mugs, pins or whatever other Scout related goodies we have about. Every scout in attendance writes his name on a slip of paper and puts in into the can. At the meeting close three names are drawn out. The catch is the person whose name is drawn must be in full uniform with his fellow scouts conducting the inspection. The boys really enjoy the drawing and it helps them remember to wear all their uniform parts.

 

As for the rank and merit badges, as scoutldr pointed out, these are collectible. Whatever you do with these, make sure you get a value from a collector you can trust or consult a good price guide.

[kraut-60]

Our troop has some older event patches that have become "suplus" for a variety of reasons, scout left troop, didnt want patch,etc... Our solution to avoiding clutter of old event patches is to divide them up among whichever scout or scouts the troop has going to the next jamboree where said patches become trading material. As for the out of date MB's and rank patches, we hang on to them. So far what we have is basically the older "technicolor" rank and position patches that technically could still be used, in fact earlier this year a new scout was presented with the older scout rank (brown FDL on orange) and he loved it, didnt want to turn it in when a current issue scout rank was obtained for him. In fact some older position patches command a good price among collectors, would it hurt to post such patches on a trading site and put the profits back in the troop treasury?

[Trevorum]

Often, miscellaneous activity patches (camporees, etc) and surplus rank and position patches don't have too much intrinsic value (unless they're really old - 1970s and before). Don't be surprised if there isn't much interest on eBay. At tradorees, you can often find these patches in the "50 cent buckets". They are great for new traders however, who don't care about rarity - they like variety, colors, shapes, e

[amouse]

My troop just started in upstate new york. We would be grateful to take these patches into our loving home. We would like to start patch trading and such but have nothing to work with.