Problems at other youth groups?

[evmori]

I thought the CO choose the leaders? But because there are poor leaders chosen it's the unit's fault? That makes no sense.

 

Actually, if the BSA demanded more (and enforced)from the CO's they would probably be more involved in the leader selection process and these type of problems should decrease.

 

Ed Mori

Troop 1

1 Peter 4:10

[Bob White]

Ed how can you serve as a commissioner and not understand the 'Charter concept' and the 'shared responsibilities' of scouting? You are trained, you have been a trainer, you are now a commissioner. How can you serve units if you do not understand these basics yet?

 

Ed writes "Actually, if the BSA demanded more (and enforced)from the CO's they would probably be more involved in the leader selection process and these type of problems should decrease."

 

And there my friends is the problem in a nut shell!

 

The council CAN greatly influence the understanding of the CO. It's done by having council/district representatives meet face to face with IHs, CRs, and CCs. We call these people COMMISSIONERS.

 

YOU ED are one of the people who is supposed to be out there fixing the problem. YOU as a commissioner are supposed to be out there doing that work, but instead you are complaining that the BSA should be doing it.

 

Do you see now how we got into this problem...and why it still exists. Everyone has to do their own job and stop wanting others to it it for them.

[evmori]

I understand fine, Bob. But your statements

Your charter organization is responsible for you being a unit leader NOT the BSA.

If a person with poor character is in your unit it is because your unit picked them and signed them-up. contradict themselves. And we want to be accurate in our statements, don't we.

 

Maybe the BSA should get out of the CO "owning" the charter. That might help eliminate problems.

 

And the units I am a commissioner for are doing very well, thank you. As a matter of fact, I helped revive one of my units that was on the verge of extinction!

 

Ed Mori

Troop 1

1 Peter 4:10(This message has been edited by evmori)(This message has been edited by evmori)

[Bob White]

Certainly as a trained, experienced scouter, and commissioner, you realize that the CO does no OWN a charter as you stated. The charter is the proof of ownership held by the CO that shows it has entered into the "shared responsibiliteis" agreement with the BSA council.

 

The charter says the the BSA has agreed to let the CO operate a scouting unit and that the CO has agreed to use the scouting program.

 

Each year in you recharter process the IH or CR signs the agreement of shared responsibilities that is also signed by a council representative (often a Commissioner). This contract is what generates the Charter being given.

 

All the responsibilities in the agreement are not the BSA's. The CO has some as well that they agree to. Among them, they agree to select and recruit their unit leaders.

 

 

 

 

[evmori]

Certainly as a trained, experienced scouter, and commissioner, you realize that the CO does no OWN a charter as you stated. The charter is the proof of ownership held by the CO that shows it has entered into the "shared responsibilities" agreement with the BSA council.

 

I'm gonna guess "does no" should be "does not".

 

Couple questions.

 

1) If the CO doesn't own the charter, why the big stink with the ACLU over the CO owning the charter?

 

2) If the CO doesn't own the charter, why does the CO hold the charter as proof of ownership?

 

And lastly from http://www.scouting.org/factsheets/02-507.html

 

To support approximately 124,000 Scouting units owned and operated by chartered organizations

 

 

Ed Mori

Troop 1

1 Peter 4:10

(This message has been edited by evmori)

[Bob White]

You will have to ask the ACLU why they make that error, I cannot answer for them.

 

Look at the very quote you ended with..read it carefully and you will see that it says exactly what I explained to you.... "Scouting units owned and operated by chartered organizations"

 

Owned and operated by the CO, NOT by the BSA. The BSA OWNS the program, they do not operate units. Leadership selection is not the BSA's responsibility. If your IH,CR, CC selected poor leaders shame on them. That was their mistake not the BSA's.

 

I really do not know how anyone can make this any clearer to you.

[NJCubScouter]

Ed, I am pretty sure that the ACLU's challenge to government entities as CO's is based on the fact that the CO owns the unit. Can you point to a document where the ACLU refers to ownership of the "charter"? And even if you can, it sounds like a meaningless semantic argument to me. I can understand someone referring to a CO as "owning" the charter because, after, the charter is "granted" to the CO by the BSA. It is part of a contract that gives each party (BSA and CO) legal rights and responsibilities, and it expires after one year unless it is renewed. So, yes, the CO can be said to "own" a charter but that ownership carries with it only the rights that the CO has under the agreement itself.

 

As exemplified in this thread, "ownership" is a concept that is often misunderstood. On the first day of law school, upon venturing into "Property" class, most law school students are taught to think of "ownership" as being a "bundle of rights," and that the entire bundle may be owned by one person, or different people may "own" different rights in the bundle. For example, because there is a mortgage on my house, both the bank and I "own" some of the rights to my house. In my state, I am considered the "owner" of my house, and I own the "legal title," but that is not true in all states. In addition to that, I "own" the right to possess and use my house, but I do not have the right to sell it or demolish it (without the bank's consent.) Both the bank and I own "equitable interests" in the house, represented in the bank's case by the dollar amount remaining due on the loan, and in my case by the difference between market value and the amount due (which is why it is called "equity.") Of course, anyone familiar with their mortgage knows that there are even more complications than that, but that's the point: "Ownership" can be a complex concept, and a home mortgage is one of the simpler applications. If we were to start discussing a condominium in which a person "owns" a unit that is part of a multi-unit building, the "bundle of rights" gets broken down into even smaller pieces, with at least one more "owner of rights" (the condo association) getting in on the act.

 

What I'm trying to show here is that discussing the CO as "owner of the charter" is sort of pointless. What the CO really owns is a set of rights under a contract with the BSA, as well as the unit itself (and even that is not without some complexity, but that's for a different thread.)

 

 

[Prairie_Scouter]

Sorry, Bob, I meant the "you" in that statement to be the "generic" you, not you in particular.

 

And there's no problem understanding that the CO has responsibility for selecting unit leaders. I didn't say that there was. My point was that there is a perceived liability when these "bad" leaders get caught and are connected, however tenuously, to the BSA. The general public doesn't understand that; all they see is "BSA leader gets caught, etc.". BSA sees a need to protect themselves from that, and with their assets that is a legitimate concern. So, as I wrote, there are 2 potential reasons that BSA delegates responsibilities for unit leaders to the CO, and they are the difficulty in actually taking responsibility for so many leaders, and the need to protect BSA from liability as much as they can.

 

Now, if there's a problem with recruiting bad unit leaders, responsibility does fall on the CO. However, BSA provides the rules that the COs use to select leaders. If those rules aren't working well enough, BSA needs to review this and see if changes are needed. Maybe it's the CO not following the rules, in which case better enforcement and oversight might be needed. If the CO is having some difficulty, for whatever reason, following the rules, BSA should review this as well. It may be a simple communications problem, but BSA provides the rules and is responsible for communicating them effectively. If 99% of the units are doing well with the current rules, I'd give the benefit of the doubt to the BSA. But BSA still needs to follow up effectively when there's a problem; that's the responsible thing to do. I'm not saying that they DON'T do that, just that they should be.

[evmori]

OK enough with the semantics. So I guess we need to know how the BSA was run in 1916 to figure out if there really is a reason the BSA couldn't go the franchise route. It would seem to make more sense & isn't really a whole lot different than the way things are done now. If the BSA owned the units, then the ACLU couldn't complain about public schools & the government sponsoring them. That would get rid of one problem. And the BSA could demand manditory training for all leaders! Sounds like a win all around.

 

Ed Mori

Troop 1

1 Peter 4:10

[Bob White]

Prairie

Even the generic "you" never made the comment you did. You made it up and you attributted it being said by someone else, the fact is it was your statement and it was inaccurate.

 

What the public percieves is largely out of all of our hands. As Ed showed us with his comment on Catholics and abuse, the general public seems willing to believe whatever the media tells them nowdays.

 

What we can control is how we act in our roles in the program, and the fact is that whatever poor leadership we have was invited in by the CO's and until they take their responsibilities seriously we will continue to be hampered by their poor selections.

 

Ed, I don't know where to begin with your post other than recommend you return to basic training and get caught up to where scouting is today, which by the way in the case of charters is pretty much exactly how it was done in 1916. Why it has taken 89 years for you to hear about it is a mystery.

 

Whether the BSA owns the units or the COs it would have no effect on what the ACLU complained about, only WHO they complained about.

 

What in the world makes you think that if the BSA owned the units that the ACLU wouldn't still be making efforts to restrict scouting anyway they could. Don't you get it? It's Duty to God that the ACLU is fighting, not who owns the unit.

 

Your job as commissioner is to represent the BSA in your community, not alter it. But to do that job you have to know and understand the progran you are representing. Your lack of understanding in this basic information is frightening. I would expect this of an untrained volunteer, but you have had ample opportunity and exposure to this information. That you want others to be responsible for your job is unfortunate to say the least.

 

It is that same attitude within unit leaders that have caused much of todays headlines.

 

 

 

 

[Prairie_Scouter]

Bob White said...

>Even the generic "you" never made the comment you did. You made it >up and you attributted it being said by someone else, the fact is it >was your statement and it was inaccurate.

 

Bob, that is just a load of B.S (and I don't mean Boy Scouts). In your mission to denigrate anyone who you don't agree with, you've kinda lost it. Here is what I said......

 

>You can look at these things a number of ways. You can say that BSA >gives responsibility to the CO and unit for recruiting leaders >because there are too many for BSA National to manage effectively. >That sounds reasonable. Or, you can say that BSA is distancing >itself from the recruiting of local leaders to try and minimize its >liability if something goes wrong. I suspect it's probably a >combination of both. They have a lot of assets, it'd be nuts for >them not to consider that.

 

I "made it up"??? Well, yeah, I wrote it, didn't I, so I suppose you could say I "made it up". From that standpoint, you "make up" everything you write as well (unless you have some ghostwriter working for you).

 

And I NEVER tried to attribute it to someone else. I was hypothesizing what a reasonable person might think when assessing the situation.

 

Which part of my statements are inaccurate???

 

Do you think it's unreasonable that one possibility as to why BSA doesn't take responsibility for unit leaders is that there are too many of them to effectively manage and track? You think that that's incorrect, so what's the alternative? BSA IS capable of managing all of the unit leaders? You actually think that's a reasonable possibility?

 

Do you think it's unreasonable that BSA might be looking at potential liability when they consider taking responsibility for all of the unit leaders? That's not possible? If they're not considering that, then they're worse leaders than some posters around here think.

 

You may think that what people think about BSA is out of our control. I don't. You may think that we should stay in our little cubby hole of responsibility and just keep our mouths shut. I don't. I think it is the responsibility of anyone involved in any kind of organization to help that organization be the best that it can be. That doesn't stop with whatever you happen to be doing at the moment. I think one person can make a difference. Sitting around and saying "not my job" when you see things happening that you consider to be wrong just doesn't cut it.

 

[Bob White]

The fact remains that none beside syou attributed it to too many leaders. And it simply is not true.

 

It has nothing to do with the number of people because when the charter concept it was first instituted over 80 years ago there weren't as many leaders in the program as there are today.

 

It is done precisely to protect the parent organization from any liability caused by the local council, unit, or volunteer. It was a very smart decision. If a local unit is not going to select good leadership why should the program be placed at risk for the rest of us?

 

Prairie you and a few others take endless opportunities to berate and criticize a program that many of us, tens of thousands of us, have enjoyed for years. If 6 or 8 of you can take cheap shots at the BSA as often as you like then I can defend it with equal glee that you use to rake it over the coals.

 

You and a few others want to keep making up phantom problems I am more than happy to share some actual information. We can let the readers do some rerearch if they are interested and find who was accurate and who wasn't.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Prairie_Scouter]

You can spin this any way you want, but the fact remains, I DID NOT attribute it to "too many leaders". I simply said that it was a reasonable possibility. The other possibility that I mentioned was the potential liability. The fact that too many leaders wasn't a problem in 1916 doesn't mean that it's not a potential problem today.

 

The name of this forum is "Issues and Politics", not "make a happy circle and smile at each other". This is the place to bring up items of concern and opinions about those items. The other forums don't deal in topics like here. I would hazard a guess that everyone here who brings up problems in BSA enjoys the organization. I've said many times that BSA is, for the most part, a very good organization. At the same time, I have brought up issues that I think would be interesting to discuss. So, it's really not fair to try and paint everyone as some sort of BSA hater who does nothing but complain, because that is not accurate. If the problems being brought up at the Councils are accurate, they have the potential to damage the whole organization. I know you don't believe that, thinking that they are somehow isolated from the rest of BSA. But, public opinion does affect us and people see BSA as BSA, not as the Atlanta Council, an independent organization simply chartered by BSA. That may be technically true, but the general public does not see it that way.

 

So, if you want to think that people who bring up problems with BSA are just whiners and complainers who want to bring down BSA, you go right ahead, but the truth is far from that. I want to fix the things in BSA that need fixing and I want the organization to be leading youth, not hiding behind political agendas. Now, whether I'm right about the things that need to be fixed is certainly open to discussion. And that's the interesting part about bringing them up here.

[Bob White]

As you point out this is a issues board. Do not expect it to be simply a rant forum. Be prepared to be challenged with some facts.

 

How can you want to fix things when you don't really know what's broken. If you want to fix things then why do you never ask how things actually work? Who is actually responsible for a specific problem? What is the actual procedure? You never ask, you only complain.s jkhny and a few other are cut of the same cloth. How do you see fact-free ranting as an avenue to fix anything?

 

As a small example you were given 7 BSA resources explaining the responsibilities of the CO and you STILL question it's evidence.

How will that kind of approach put you in any position to instigate change?

 

The volunteers who serve beyond the unit level are not complainers, First they are people who have done their job successfully, then they learn about other areas, they investigate, they talk to people who have more knowledge or greater successes. They don't complain they learn. They they get invited to take what they learned and try to improve on them. Its a process, not a whine, that creates change.

 

No one in the BSA or even at the council level takes complainers seriously. You are background noise to the people who actual do things. If you sincerely want to make change then you have to understand the program and you need to change yourself before you will ever get the opportunity to change scouting.

 

 

 

[madkins007]

Wow- The Walgreen's "Town of Perfect's" Boy Scout program!

 

If I took the whiners, complainers, and the 'lumps' out of our group of district and council volunteers, we'd have much smaller meetings! While the ideal world WOULD promote hard working, knowledgeable people up the ladder- paid or volunteer, the reality is that oftimes they just need warm bodies, and/or use the 'good old boy' network- at least here.

 

I will freely admit that most of them dearly love Scouting, I can't say as I've seen most of the rest of BW's description in action hereabouts. Most of them are just decent people trying to help. Not supermen or Wonder Women. I have always suspected that a group of them are there because their units volunteered them just to get rid of them! ;-)

 

 

 

On a differnet tack...

 

Whining does in fact change things. Not for the better necessarily, but a million lawsuits and policy changes instituted because of whines proves that it works. For that matter, violence solves a lot of things as well- no matter what the old saying says.

 

However, what I see here much of the time is less whining and more sharing of thoughts and opinions. Positive change requires at least some identification of the problem, some options on resolving it, and some consensus on the best way to go.

 

Corporations stifle this process with concepts like 'don't bring me a problem without offering a solution', 'there are no problems, only opportunities' and other happy-talk. Nothing wrong with those ideas per se, but for the best brainstorming, people have to feel that they can bring up ANYTHING. Even the most left-field suggestions and thoughts can have real power in them.

 

We here may (and probably won't) ever agree on a single thing, or be asked to serve on a National Committee to change something, etc., but we CAN and do share data that helps us clarify oour thoughts or show us WHY an idea might not work the way we think it could, etc.

 

 

 

Just as a last thought- sometimes the WORST thing any organization can do is to pay too much attention to the people who think the same way the company does. Billy Graham employed a guy whose main function was to regularly shout "Bull..." at meetings to make sure that things never fell into groupthink mode.