We recently held a very successful Open House recruiting event for Webelos II / Arrow of Light Cub Scouts who are shopping for a Boy Scout troop to cross over to in early 2019. This event was no small endeavor, but it went off without a hitch due to the planning of our Recruiting Chair and our Patrol Leaders Council (PLC) members.
A recruiting event may not seem like a sound basis for a philosophical or thought-provoking blog post (which is my goal for each of these), but go with me on this. As we were preparing for the Open House, our Senior Patrol Leader (SPL) was becoming increasingly nervous about the troop’s ability to have a successful event for the ~50 Webelos who would show up. There was one other thing causing him some trepidation, though – I had asked him to speak to the parents of the Webelos for a few minutes. Nothing exotic or overly lengthy – just a few words about who he is, why he enjoys Scouting in general & Troop 58 in particular, and what other activities he is involved with outside of Scouting (so the parents would come away with the sense that their kids don’t have to be solely focused on Scouting). My goal was simple – offer a shared view of the troop from both the adult AND scout leader perspectives, and cause a sense of “I want my scout to be like him” within the parents’ hearts and minds. Full disclosure – our SPL is a tall, moderately good-looking (yes – I’m biased), generally coherent (when speaking) young man who has all sorts of Scouting patches on his uniform. 🙂
About a week after the Open House, I was at a community event and I was stopped by a woman who had apparently attended the Open House. She was extremely excited about her son becoming a Boy Scout – in Troop 58! She literally could not stop talking about how great a job the Scouts did with the Webelos, the awesome presentation our Assistant Scoutmasters (ASMs) had shared with the parents, and how she wanted to do everything she could for her son to be “…just like him” – and she pointed across the room to our SPL. I think often about how much Scouting has meant to me during my upbringing as a youth and throughout my adult life, but that moment was a poignant reminder of just how impactful to parents the promise of turning boys into solid young (and eventually, old) men who will be competent and confident members of society is.
Hats off to our scouts for what they did this month to secure Troop 58’s future, but more so – what they do every day to secure the future of society!