My first year in Cub Scouts...

[zippie2223]

I joined Cub Scouts last year at round up. I got home and read everything that I could get my hands on. I got trained and started having meetings. I don't know what I expected when we went to our first pack meeting, but the pack was really small. We only had three dens at the pack meeting with a total of 15-20 boys. The meeting was boring for the boy and no one did skits or anything.

The next month I showed up at the committee meeting and ask a hundred questions. One of the committee member seemed to get annoyed whenever the subject of money came up (I found out later that the pack had had money trouble the year before). I found out that we were the only den that started meeting after round up. The other three dens that were recruited never started meeting. So we started calling on these guys but by this time it had been two months since they had heard anything from cub scouts. No one was interested in meeting by this time.

Well by January I had started to lose scouts. I lose three and when we showed up at the pack meeting I found out that one of the three den that we had had dissolved, the one that the CM ran. So now the pack was without a CM and was down two dens, with a total of 3 boys in my Tigers den and 5 in the Webelo 1s.

I talked with the new CM, the leader of the Webelos, and talked about giving up. He said that he would be willing to give it his best and ask me to do the same for one year, and if things did not work out then I could leave with no regrets (this is about the time I joined this board).

Then things started to turn around. I started taking every training that came down (expect wood badge, that was out of my price range at the time). We developed a summertime program and I picked up three new scouts during the summer. We had a great round up this October (it was scheduled for September but Hurricane Ivan ruined that, then the public schools had testing the week after they came back to school). The new CM and I basically spoon feed the new dens. We did the first meeting for them then handed them a program book. We offered to show up to the next few meetings and to go with the new leader to training. Our pack has grown from a low of about 8 cubbies to now over 30 cubbies.

 

Last week I found out that the year before I joined the pack, the pack had a big falling out. The old CM was accused of miss using pack funds and the person accusing her quit scouting. The old CM then got mad and quit the pack. All the pack stuff was at the CM house, and then the old CM moved to Florida over the summer. From my understanding we had tents, a pine wood derby track, and a bunch of other stuff. Now wonder that guy on the committee got annoyed when I showed up asking all kinds of questions. He probably though "Here we go again."

 

Well I just wanted to say thanks to this Forum.

Without you guys I would have given up, or at least moved to some other pack. This pack has been a labor of love and to see it starting to flourish feels great. Thank you guys/girls again.

 

 

[dsteele]

Zippie:

 

Thank YOU for not giving up and going the extra mile to help save your pack.

 

Like so many other volunteer operated things, once the train falls of the tracks, it is a labor of love to get it back on-line. Once it is on-line, things run pretty smoothly.

 

Keep doing what you're doing and best of luck!

 

Unc.

[zippie2223]

After we get the new leaders trained and the new committee members trained and appointed to thier new positions I will feel a lot better. In May I move up to CM as the webelos den leader moves up to Boy Scouts. He now has 8 Cubbies to try to start a new troop at our CO. I'm looking forward to having only two roles in our pack, CM and Web master. I'm even thinking about given up as den leader so that I can be a better CM.(but I have not found anyone to take it yet)

[Grumpy]

What a GREAT story! Thanks for sharing.