Conservation projects and community service

[gwd-scouter]

During his BOR last year, one of our Scouts mentioned that one thing he would do to improve our Troop was to have more conservation/community service projects. He was correct, we didn't do many - scouting for food and litter pickup were it.

 

This past year we stepped up our projects. Along with scouting for food and litter clean up, we installed duck boxes around the lakes at our council camp, planted trees at a State Park for Arbor Day, and cleaned up and enhanced the landscaping around our local food bank. Other ideas the boys are working on are helping at the soup kitchen and making emergency kits at the Red Cross.

 

What kind of projects does your troop do?

 

[Lisabob]

We've done the odd clean up at an area where we were camping anyway but the short (and in my view, very unfortunate) answer is, we don't do conservation.

 

We do a fair number of community oriented service projects - helping various groups run their events for worthy causes. I don't know why we don't do more conservation. We have a couple of folks in the adult leadership with backgrounds in environmental science so it isn't like we don't have the depth of knowledge!

 

Good for you that your troop is moving more in this direction.

 

 

[CalicoPenn]

gwd-scouter - Wow - that's all I can say - Wow! You really are doing it right. That's exactly the response that should come out of a BOR. Congrats!!

 

CalicoPenn

[SueM]

One of the things that my boys do is...We had a new Veteran's Cemetery open in our area about 2 years ago after years of effort to get it here, and our chartered Org. made a specific effort to get in from the start to do flag placements on the gravesites on Memorial & Veterans Day, so they enlisted the troop boys to do that. It gives the boys a sense of patriotic duty to honor these veterans like this and we've also gotten a fair amount of publicity out of it as they generally always do an article for the local papers and we help our Chartered Org in the process too.

 

Sue M.

[ASM915]

When my 20y/o sat his EBOR, the District rep's were quite surprised and interested at the number of outdoor/nature related MB's, and that his Life and Eagle projects centered around nature and Native Culture. They stated that it was extremely rare to see such a grouping now a days.

 

Troop wise, last April on Earth Day, we tried to set up a weekend camping trip canoeing down our local river doing a cleanup as we went. It drew four scouts and two leaders. The weather delayed us one day, but on the second day we got started at 2PM. The first half of the trip turned up little. The first 200 yards after the confluence of a large creek (may have been a river), we had all three canoes literally overflowing with trash. To bad there wasn't more of a turnout, it was really needed. It just seems everyone thinks that conservation projects are to much work or not worth their time.

 

I feel that we need to really push stewardship early, during Cubs to really instill a sense of ownership and responsibility, then maybe it will carry over into Boy Scouting.

 

In May we place the flags on the graves of the Vet.'s for our CO, the VFW and march in the parade with them.

 

We also have helped the MS Foundation passing out H2O for the Marathon runners on the towpath on Sat. and then clean up the towpath during a hike on Sun, until the MSF moved everything south several miles.

 

We've helped the Food Cupboard at XMAS prepare and deliver food baskets to the needy.

 

Do any of your Councils have a Conservation Committee? If so how do they function, as their own committee or as a subcomm. of the Camping and Grounds Comm.? What activities or events do they offer?

[Lisabob]

"I feel that we need to really push stewardship early, during Cubs to really instill a sense of ownership and responsibility, then maybe it will carry over into Boy Scouting."

 

I agree. In fact one of my WB ticket items focused on helping our pack get moving in this direction. In the process what I discovered was that the boys had no problem with the idea of conservation and in fact that their rather absolute sense of justice made stewardship and conservation very easy for them to understand. Their parents, on the other hand, were a much tougher sell. We'd routinely have boys who wanted to participate and parents who weren't interested in even bringing the kids to the activity, let alone rolling up their sleeves. No wonder, then, that the boys slowly learn this same behavior. I found that to be quite frustrating.

 

[ASM915]

Lisa, so how do you work around the apathetic parents at the pack level and or troop level?

[Lisabob]

I wish I had the perfect answer to that question! I was probably a bit mean. Once I realized (at the pack level) that it was the parents, not the boys, I started "selling" the upcoming opportunities more directly to the boys and told THEM to let their parents know they wanted to help out with whatever project was up next. I also heavily promoted the world conservation award, again, directly to the boys. And I arranged to have the boys interact with wildlife experts, who could make the whole idea seem very exciting by talking about the impact that conservation activities have on animals. The people from the zoo and local nature center were especially helpful in this endeavor (they brought animals with them...) By the time I was done with them, the poor parents probably felt ambushed. Oh well. Even so, turn out for our actual conservation activities (not just the build up to them) tended to be less than half of the pack no matter what, where, or how the weather was that day.