Crew Spotlights :)

[Campfire Fairy]

Okay, so I kind of copied purcelce's topic from the Open Discussion forum, but I'm curious about the other Venture crews out there...

 

How many youth members does your crew have? Do you have any girls?

 

Age range/numbers of your youth?

 

How many adult advisors does your crew have?

 

How long have you been in existence?

 

What is your crew's concentration (i.e. outdoors, community service, religion, etc.)

 

What fundraisers, if any, does your crew do?

 

How do you recruit new members?

 

On average, how many activities/events does your crew have monthly?

 

What do you think your most successful outing/event was/is?

 

Have any of the youth in your crew earned their Bronze or Ranger awards, or any other recognitions?

 

And also... does your council have a council-wide, youth led leadership committee/board/whatever?(This message has been edited by Campfire Fairy)

[Campfire Fairy]

I'll be the first one to answer my own topic... just because I can answer for my own crew...

 

I would say there are about 20-25 members (OGE and OT can correct me if I'm off... I'm a horrible estimater. All I can tell you for sure is that we have about 8 or 9 active youth-- the rest are inactive because they're away at college... again, correct me if I'm wrong!) I would say close to half of our crew is made up of girls, and we're very proud of this fact.

 

We have a couple of young'uns, but for the most part, we're all in the 17-20 range. Which is great because we've got a pretty mature and responsible group, but bad because we need younger members to keep the crew going once we all get too old.

 

We have 3 excellent advisors who are very dedicated to the crew and who completely encourage youth leadership in our crew. They truly advise and do not lead. Sadly, we don't really have any regular female chaperones of our own... as a result, we like to steal female chaperones from other crews, unless one of the leaders can lure their wives to the outings.

 

Our crew has been around since 1999, if I am correct in my mathematical skills (and it's very likely that I'm not... you'll notice it's 1:12 AM, my time at least, and I'm not exactly at my peak:P).

 

Our crew focuses on high adventure and community service. We generally do a little bit of everything.

 

As far as fundraising, in the past we've done popcorn sales, and we worked a Coke/hot dog trailer outside the local Wal-mart once (maybe twice... not sure...), and we have dues of $3 a month or a lump of $30 for the year.

 

New members are recruited generally by word of mouth, which works great getting friends, but as I said, most of us are older scouts, and mostly recruit friends our age, thus getting more older scouts, and not really any younger ones. But lately we've became recruiting fiends and we're scouring our feeder boy scout troop and girl scout troop for eligible potential members, and we're working on a couple younger siblings.

 

During the warmer months, our crew can have an event scheduled for every weekend (a few single day events and maybe a weekend-long thing). In the winter we're not quite as active, but we meet the 2nd and 4rd Sundays of each month, and we usually have at least one, if not two, events planned each month.

 

Our most successful outing would be rock climbing, by far. While camping trips are always a lot of fun, we probably get the biggest turnout for climbing (usually indoor) because it's a 2-3 hour thing that isn't too expensive and it's a lot of fun.

 

We have several members (I want to say 3 or 4...?) who have earned their Bronze awards, in the Outdoors and Religious Life areas (again, OGE and OT, inform me if I'm leaving someone/a category out) and I know of at least 2 (myself included; if I can get my butt in gear, we can add Arts & Hobbies to the list:P) who are working on theirs.

 

Yes, our council created the Venture Executive Board, which is now in its second year of existence. Any member of any crew in the council is invited to attend this youth-organized and youth-run meeting. All the adults but one, the designated VEB Advisor, leave the room to have their own little pow-wow while the youth plan such activities as the now annual Rendezvous, a weekend camping extravaganza (haha) to which each crew in the council is invited to participate and mingle and get to know each other. This is different from the Venture Roundtables which our council is beginning, but for the life of me I'm not too sure what the difference is/will be between the Venture Executive Board and the Venture Roundtables (anyone want to answer, I don't mind at all if you hijack this thread to do so:))

 

Alas... I am a babbler, and that was a lot longer than I expected, but feel free to be even longer if you so desire. I get bored easily and this place is becoming one of my favorite online hangouts.

[DDHII]

Unfortunately my crew folded this year, so I'll answer on behalf of the crews I'm a unit commissioner for...

 

How many youth members does your crew have? Do you have any girls? The average is about 16 Venturers. Only one of my crews has girls, where 75% are girls.

 

Age range/numbers of your youth? In the male-only crews, the average age is 16-20. In the co-ed crew, the ages range from 14-18, most leave the crew when they leave for college.

 

How many adult advisors does your crew have? An average of 6-8

 

How long have you been in existence? 2000, 2001, 2001 (co-ed)

 

What is your crew's concentration (i.e. outdoors, community service, religion, etc.) All are outdoors

 

What fundraisers, if any, does your crew do? None of them do popcorn... The biggest money maker is car washes and fundraiser dinners/breakfests.

 

How do you recruit new members? Open house, word of mouth

 

On average, how many activities/events does your crew have monthly? The male only crews do one per month, and co-ed does at least two. One is an overnighter, and the other is a day outing. Usually, they have a movie night or a bowling night.

 

What do you think your most successful outing/event was/is? The most successful outing was last summer when one of the male-only crews went to Europe for 3 weeks for a backpacking trek. They stayed at Scout camps the whole time.

 

Have any of the youth in your crew earned their Bronze or Ranger awards, or any other recognitions? Two have earned the Ranger, about 5 have earned the Silver, and many have earned the Bronze

 

And also... does your council have a council-wide, youth led leadership committee/board/whatever? We have a VOA. Our website is http://www.ciec-voa.org/

 

As for Venturing Roundtables... those are at a District level, with a Venturing Roundtable Comissioner (adult) in charge... unless your district has a District Venturing President (youth)

 

VEC's, TLC, VOA, VEB... whatever you like to call them... are usually held at a council level, where you have a Council Venturing President (youth) who represents the Venturing youth at council committee meetings, and leads youth activities in council wide outings.

[OutdoorThinker]

CF: Awesome thread. A+.

 

We definately are growing in the 14ish age range, Beans is 14, so is his sidekick, CivilWarThinker (although not official is 14)

 

We do totally steal females from all over the place, haha! And actually, I think we have four adult advisors, because our oldest crew member turned 21.

 

Prior to becoming a crew we were a Venture Patrol, although, I am still sketchy about that whole business.

 

 

[Eamonn]

Ok so I'm cheating I don't belong to a crew but OJ does. They have ten members one of them a female.

Three active adults one a female.

Been around for eleven months.

They are a little lost as to what area they are in. Some of the adults think it is high adventure?

So far one car wash.

They try for a activity each month. So far their big thing was organizing a District Camporee with a pioneer days theme.

No awards to date.

Most of the members come from the Boy Scout troop but plans are in the works??

Todate the council is not doing anything but the District Chair is such a nice fellow!!

Eamonn

[k9gold-scout]

Our crew is 3 years old we have 17 (age 15-19) reg. scouts -15 eagle scouts -12 bronz awards so far - no female scouts 4 adults - 1 female. We meet 2x per month and try to have 1 outing per month - shooting seems to be most popular. We plan one high adventure trip for the summer. All are also active in their scout troop. Our council has had a program in the past but nothing now. We select life scout from our troop and friends to join.

www.crew746.com

[matuawarrior]

It takes to check every thread when I pop in and out every once in a while.

 

We have 20 members this year. A quarter of the membership are girls and they hold all the key leadership positions.

 

We have an age range 14-20 years. Average age is 17 years.

 

There is currently 1 advisor and 4 associate advisors with help from many friends of the unit helping out when needed.

 

We've been Chartered Since 1997 when we were first chartered as an Exploring Post.

 

Our main interest is High Adventure with an Emphasis on Search and Rescue. That may change.

 

We do the Annual Christmas Clean-up at a local park and several car washs.

 

We usually invite potential members by Word of Mouth of have an Open House 2x a year.

 

OThe Crew has 2 activities/month. Normally a Day event and a Campout.

 

Our most successful events are when the crew went Sailing and snorkeling above Blue Hole here in Guam; Last weekend when we roasted a pig

 

We currently have members who have earned 3 Bronzes, 2 Gold, and 2 Ranger Awards. Most of our members are not that interested in the Awards. Although, they are highly encouraged to work on them.

 

We're kind of behind the curve on a Council or rather District Wide Youth Leadership Committee. We Plan to start this year. Most units are on their own and prefer it that way.

 

Matua

 

 

[LovetoCamp]

Our Ship is one year old now. We're a competitive rifle team. We've set up an air rifle range in our American Legion, thanks to the NRA Foundation we were able to purchase all the gear for 4 positions. We have 4-6 shooters show up on Sunday evenings. The Civilian Marskmanship Program (CMP) conducts monthly matches where we shoot the match on our range, I score them, attest that the rules were followed and forward to the state director. We also shot the Venturing/NRA 3-P Air Junior Postal Match, the American Legion Junior 3-P Air Shooting Matches, the NRA Junior 3-P Air, and then we will travel to an NRA event, and lastly the Junior Olympics qualifier. 3-P Air is a sport where self disciple is a must. What I've enjoyed the most is seeing them taking their shooting more seriously each week. I tell them "Rifle is a sport for people who don't like to move." When one of our newer boys were firing for the first time on a prone position, he started complaining about his arm hurting. One of the experienced guys, tells him, "keep the sling tight, when your arm goes numb, it won't hurt anymore." They all laughed. I guess they were listening to me!

 

We've got a 50 mile backpacking trip planned over Easter Vacation, we're going to discover scuba, and we're going skiing in two weeks. We're traveling a bit, but we're taking our Boatswain and Boatswain's Mate to VLSC next month. I've got a sail boat lined up for some sailing on the big lake this summer. The boating is a crew idea. If they like the sailing. We'll start selling pancakes until we can get our own. The also want to shoot .22's and skeet this summer. I've found two places that couldn't say yes fast enough for us to shoot both events.

 

We'll add a couple active troop members to the ship after 8th grade graduation in the spring. But, we didn't pick up any non-scout high schoolers this year at all.

 

Why not?