Encouraging Volunteers

[MattR]

Over in the politics forum there's a thread about the future of Boy Scouts. One issue I thought of is getting volunteers. I found an interesting paper about volunteering in 1974, 1989, and 2002-2006 (http://www2.illinois.gov/serve/Documents/Volunteering_America_Full_Report.pdf ). It was done using data from the census bureau. The big surprise for me is that the amount of volunteering is considerably higher now than in the 70's and 80's. At the same time it seems like scout units are having a harder time finding volunteers. If I tie this in with the fact that it seems like nobody outside of scouts has any idea what goes on inside of scouts, it seems to me that the BSA's problem is more a case of education than anything else.

 

​To me, there's a certain magic that scouting has that no other activity has. It's not sports and it's not school, but it's a mix of outdoors, adventure, service, leadership, and civics that just works. If it's hard to describe then it makes sense that many adults don't get involved because they don't understand it. There is the Methods of Scouting but that's very cursory. Does anyone dive into the methods any more than the usual?

[RememberSchiff]

Why do are adults volunteering more often for OTHER service groups? It's EASIER.

 

Over the years, I have been a volunteer for public and private schools, Little League, JOAD, 4-H, church, fire dept, Red Cross, local hospitals - all were a magnitude easier in training and PAPERWORK than BSA.

 

My $0.02

[Basementdweller]

Lets look at the size of the commitment when volunteering for the BSA....If you volunteer as tiger den leader you could be volunteering for 12 years or more.... weekly meetings, one weekend a month campout, one week of summer camp a year.......Then your taking boys who have, boy type judgement, so there is an element of risk .It is a huge commitment

 

Let me see little league, what 12 weeks maybe Volunteering with the parks...sure.

 

We are now dealing with the millenial parents....They expect atta boys for showing up and running the weekly den meeting, or helping with a trash pick up........Lets face it being a volunteer with the BSA won't get your picture in the paper or an invite to the local volunteer recongition banquet....

 

The other thing to keep in mind that many large corps now require volunteerism as a condition of employment....I have been to several events were corporate HR folks are holding sign ins and outs........

 

So while the numbers look good.....I am going to bet if we remove the forced corporate volunteers the numbers will go down.

 

The final problem.....How does one exit the BSA???? So do you just quit and hope someone steps in.....Or do you keep working till your replaced.....

[Twocubdad]

I think Schiff is correct in that other volunteer organizations are easier, but not because of the paperwork and training required of the BSA, but because other volunteer organizations are built around making life easy for the volunteers.

 

I think the nature of volunteering has changed. I was always surprised that I could get 100 volunteers to take a week off work and serve as "den leaders" at day camp. Basically all day camp DLs do is shepherd 12 kids from activity to activity for a week. But get two or three volunteers to be real den leaders and take responsibility for a den program for a year -- for get it.

 

Every job I've had in BSA has required commitment and taking responsibility. Like Scoutmaster, Cubmaster or CSDC director. Now, when you get to district and council committees, there seems to be a mix of people there to get something accomplished, those who believe the rest of us are in need of their wisdom and the ROMEOs (Retired Old Men Eating Out.)

 

When I was a kid, the volunteer stuff I remember my parents doing were roll-up-your sleeves volunteer jobs. My dad did a lot of fundraising for the Kiwanis Club, Chamber of Commerce and United Way. I'm sure he did stints as a worker bee, but I mostly remember him being campaign chairman and later board chairman of the UW and that sort of stuff. Mom did the typical June Cleaver stuff at church and the PTA, but at one time she and a couple friends created a program to teach under-privileged folks how to sew and make clothes for their families. When that caught on, she started shaking the bushes for people to donate used sewing machines to the program. I can remember delivering sewing machines to tar paper shacks where I though the machines would fall through the floor.

 

People now want to be drive-thru volunteers. They want to show up for the walk-a-thon, drink a couple glasses of wine with their friends, write a check and go home. Or show up at the local Habitat build with their new hammer and nail apron and get their picture in the paper. It's volunteering as entertainment. There aren't many jobs in Scouting like that.

 

But people try. My biggest issue with the volunteers in our troop is the lack of responsibility. I can ask someone this week to change the toilet paper roll in the Scout House and they are more than happy to do it. But next week the roll is empty again and I'm back to asking some to take care of it again.. Maybe my brain is just wired differently from other folks, When I get involved in an organization, I look for ways to contribute. If the TP is empty, I'll replace it. If I don't know where they keep the spare rolls, I'll find them. If there isn't any, I go buy it. it's really hard for me to understand folks who don't think that way. How can you walk past a full trashcan and not empty it?

[MattR]

I agree that the Boy Scout volunteers have a harder time getting involved. So the Habitat people have an entry level volunteer position that involves a hammer, 3 hours of time, and no learning curve to speak of. The new person, after having done that, can take some pride in saying they did something. Maybe they'll come back for more and eventually be responsible for building a house, which is no small responsibility. What are the entry level, no skill required jobs for the Boy Scouts? Honestly, changing the toilet paper roll is not going to feel like much progress for the volunteer. What are other tasks for the new parent that we should be pushing them towards?

[King Ding Dong]

Try table decorations for B&G. Can't even get them to do that.

[Cambridgeskip]

Do you have an equivalent of what we in the UK call a Troops (or Pack, or Unit) Assistant? We have SLs which is like an SM, ASLs which are like an ASM. But a troop assistant is rather different. They are basically there to turn up and be pointed in the right direction on a week to week basis. It's quite broad as well. Some chose to be uniformed some don't, some get involved in background planning, some don't. All in all it is a basic entry level position. If you don't have the equivalent it sounds like you could do with inventing one!

[Eagledad]

One of the differences of today is parents are a lot busier. Sure Den leaders are hard to find, they have been working all day long and we ask them to take on another dozen young boys for a couple of hours when they come home. Moms didn't work in the 70's and early 80's. The added complexity of running a pack over the last 30 years hasn't helped either. By adding the Tiger program, adults can see themselves stuck for five years. I'm personally amazed that we get as many adults as we do. I am a pretty good recruiter, but I do it by getting them to commit to just one small step and hope they get hooked for climbing the whole mountain. Climbing a mountain isn't so hard when you look at one step at a time. The problem I see with troops is adults have a hard time seeing their participation in the big picture and there is very little incentive to put out the effort. Unless they are one of three or four key leaders, they simply don't see how their time makes a difference. They either do way too little or sufficate the program with way too much. I've said before that 50% of my Scoutmastering was working with adults just trying to get them to see the mission and where they fit in that mission. Troop programs are attractive to narcissists who want full control of steering the program. You see a lot of them even here on the forum. Twocubdad and MattR types of leaders are rare.

[00Eagle]

Do you have an equivalent of what we in the UK call a Troops (or Pack' date=' or Unit) Assistant? We have SLs which is like an SM, ASLs which are like an ASM. But a troop assistant is rather different. They are basically there to turn up and be pointed in the right direction on a week to week basis. It's quite broad as well. Some chose to be uniformed some don't, some get involved in background planning, some don't. All in all it is a basic entry level position. If you don't have the equivalent it sounds like you could do with inventing one![/quote']

 

Skip, over here most leaders are parents of current scouts plus any younger alumni and parents of alumni you can hold on to.

 

At the troop level, the only positions were scoutmaster, assistant scoutmaster, and committee (support: fundraising, equipment management, advancement paperwork, transportation planning, event booking). Plus ScoutParent, a non registered position, intended for active parents.

 

With training becoming mandatory for quality awards (and even reregistration in some ares) some new positions have come about with in the past two years. The first was the 92U: Unit College Scouter Reserve (derived from 92, the position code for College Scouter Reserve, a seldom used district-level position). This position was intended for college-aged alumni (usually Eagles) who were previously registered as assistant scoutmasters and helped the troop during school breaks but did not have the time to complete the training. They only need the online youth protection course.

 

The ScoutParent designator is being phased out and another new position, 91U Unit Scouter Reserve (derived again from a rarely used distritct level 91) as a catchall registered, background-checked adult with no training required other than youth protection. This will probably develop to be similar to your sectional assistant position.

[aph5]

As a scout parent(not an official volunteer) and forum lurker, I wanted to comment on this topic. I’m sorry if this comes off as a rant, but this is a major irritation I have with the boy scouts. I want to emphasize that I would love to volunteer for my son’s scout troop or volunteered when he was in cub scouts. I am very involved with a number of activities which my children participate in and truly love the work I do in those programs. However, I have never volunteered with the boy scouts for one main reason: I absolutely refuse to give up my social security and driver’s license numbers for a volunteer position.

 

There are three main reasons for this stance. The first one is obviously the privacy issues and the possibility of identity theft from giving this very confidential information out. Second, I don’t believe background checks do very much; it’s simply a PR stunt that accomplishes very little. For example, Jerry Sandusky could have passed a background check well past his 60th birthday. The two-deep leadership rule(which I have always observed is followed and is my personal rule I follow when I volunteer) does far more to protect the boys involved with the BSA than any background check can every hope to accomplish. Finally, there are ways to do criminal background checks that do not require a social security number. As a scout parent, the two-deep rule is infinitely more reassuring to me than any criminal background check that a scout leader has passed.

[perdidochas]

Over in the politics forum there's a thread about the future of Boy Scouts. One issue I thought of is getting volunteers. I found an interesting paper about volunteering in 1974, 1989, and 2002-2006 (http://www2.illinois.gov/serve/Documents/Volunteering_America_Full_Report.pdf ). It was done using data from the census bureau. The big surprise for me is that the amount of volunteering is considerably higher now than in the 70's and 80's. At the same time it seems like scout units are having a harder time finding volunteers. If I tie this in with the fact that it seems like nobody outside of scouts has any idea what goes on inside of scouts, it seems to me that the BSA's problem is more a case of education than anything else.

 

​To me, there's a certain magic that scouting has that no other activity has. It's not sports and it's not school, but it's a mix of outdoors, adventure, service, leadership, and civics that just works. If it's hard to describe then it makes sense that many adults don't get involved because they don't understand it. There is the Methods of Scouting but that's very cursory. Does anyone dive into the methods any more than the usual?

 

Are Scout units having harder time finding volunteers? The majority of our Scout's parents are either ASMs or Committee members. Thankfully, most of them are MCs.

[Basementdweller]

One of the differences of today is parents are a lot busier. Sure Den leaders are hard to find, they have been working all day long and we ask them to take on another dozen young boys for a couple of hours when they come home. Moms didn't work in the 70's and early 80's. The added complexity of running a pack over the last 30 years hasn't helped either. By adding the Tiger program, adults can see themselves stuck for five years. I'm personally amazed that we get as many adults as we do. I am a pretty good recruiter, but I do it by getting them to commit to just one small step and hope they get hooked for climbing the whole mountain. Climbing a mountain isn't so hard when you look at one step at a time. The problem I see with troops is adults have a hard time seeing their participation in the big picture and there is very little incentive to put out the effort. Unless they are one of three or four key leaders, they simply don't see how their time makes a difference. They either do way too little or sufficate the program with way too much. I've said before that 50% of my Scoutmastering was working with adults just trying to get them to see the mission and where they fit in that mission. Troop programs are attractive to narcissists who want full control of steering the program. You see a lot of them even here on the forum. Twocubdad and MattR types of leaders are rare.

Locally the troop tends to take on the personality of the SM. We have the Parlor troop ran by the metrosexual. We have the high adventure SM who runs a trip to philmont, northern tier and Sea base on a rotational basis. And a lot of guys like me who try to get the boys out monthly.

 

So your sitting at the PLC planning meeting.....They are staring at the walls the ceiling, with blank looks....Do you start dropping crumbs and help them find their way or let them wander around in the dark.

 

I let them struggle a bit... then start dropping crumbs....It tends to be things I like to do.....So I do steer the program....I hope someday I can sit in the background and they do it all themselves.

[MattR]

My troop is doing ok. We tell all the families they have to help out somehow. We have signup parties. Most do. We have more than enough adults working on COH stuff, not quite enough that want to work with kids. Maybe hammering nails is easier than working with kids. My district is struggling. I was also thinking of the packs, as those are the units losing the most kids.

 

It seems like the ratio of families that help out to those that don't is roughly 1 in 3-4. If you have a troop with 14 scouts (the average size), that means 2 or 3 adults are going on every campout. That's stressful. With 8 scouts in a den, that means 2 adults are doing everything. After several years it's complete burn out. This is compounded by the fact that your average den leader is clueless. I certainly was. Then there's the problem that Webelos want to do something besides crafts, which places more burden on the adults. Some dens can get half the adults involved and they do great. But that's the exception and not normal. How much greater would it be if half the adults were regularly involved, jazzed, and enthusiastic? I like Eagledads idea of teaching the parents. I might get more adults to work with scouts.

[perdidochas]

My troop is doing ok. We tell all the families they have to help out somehow. We have signup parties. Most do. We have more than enough adults working on COH stuff, not quite enough that want to work with kids. Maybe hammering nails is easier than working with kids. My district is struggling. I was also thinking of the packs, as those are the units losing the most kids.

 

It seems like the ratio of families that help out to those that don't is roughly 1 in 3-4. If you have a troop with 14 scouts (the average size), that means 2 or 3 adults are going on every campout. That's stressful. With 8 scouts in a den, that means 2 adults are doing everything. After several years it's complete burn out. This is compounded by the fact that your average den leader is clueless. I certainly was. Then there's the problem that Webelos want to do something besides crafts, which places more burden on the adults. Some dens can get half the adults involved and they do great. But that's the exception and not normal. How much greater would it be if half the adults were regularly involved, jazzed, and enthusiastic? I like Eagledads idea of teaching the parents. I might get more adults to work with scouts.

 

 

Webelos doing something besides crafts is the joy of Webelos. As a DL, I punted on crafts--got parents to run that.

[perdidochas]

One thing I wish my Council would do to encourage volunteers is to not lose our paperwork. I've been trying for almost a year to be an official Merit Badge Counselor. The other thing is for the professionals to treat volunteer Scouters as customers instead of the help. Several of our professionals have been downright rude to me as a volunteer Scouter. Had I not been a true believer in scouting, I would have quit on the spot.