Newsletter for Scouting Alumni association Affiliates
alumni alive! WINTER 2014
What’s Inside Director’s Message.........................2 Alumni News.........................................4 Happenings..............................................6 Program...................................................8 Profiles.......................................................10
A Message From the Director We don’t expect a boy to break his leg. We teach him how to treat and transport a person with a broken leg. We don’t expect a boy to steal. We ask him to memorize and live by the Scout Law: “A Scout is trustworthy.” We hope that each boy becomes a responsible citizen. We require community service projects and three citizenship merit badges to qualify as an Eagle Scout. We don’t create a win/lose environment. We teach “Do Your Best” and all boys can win. We recognize a boy’s need to belong and achieve in a “gang.” We place boys in dens and patrols (gangs).
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We know that no boy is a born leader. We place boys in “real-life” leadership roles to gain experience, learn from their mistakes, and apply their wisdom to productive adult roles. So go tell the Scouting story, invite your Scouting friends and associates to become Hikers or Pathfinders in the SAA at BSAalumni.org, and remember: “Once a Scout, Always a Scout.”
Dustin Farris Director, Scouting Alumni Association
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alumni news New Scouting Alumni Association Director Named The Scouting Alumni Association has a new director. Dustin Farris assumed the role on Dec. 1, replacing Bill Steele, who retired from the BSA last summer after a 34-year career. Farris, an Eagle Scout, began his career as a district Scout executive with the Oregon Trail Council in Eugene, Oregon. After serving as a senior district executive and district director with the Ore-Ida Council in Boise, Idaho, he became Scout executive of the Northeast Iowa Council in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2007. For the past four years, Farris has worked as a major gifts director with the BSA Foundation. Farris is also part of an active Scouting family. His oldest son is an Eagle Scout, his daughter went through the Venturing program, and his younger son is a Scout in the troop where Farris serves as an assistant Scoutmaster. His wife, Cindy, has served as a den leader and Cubmaster, and many of the family’s vacations revolve around Scouting and the outdoors. Although he’s new to the Scouting Alumni Association, Farris is already thinking big. “I have a personal goal of us being the largest alumni association in America,” he said. Farris’s goal is not about bragging rights, however. It’s about harnessing the power of alumni to better serve Scouts, local councils, and the BSA as a whole. And that means identifying and engaging disconnected alumni. “I think it makes a lot of sense for the alumni association to be the cultivating arm of the Boy Scouts of America,” he said. That’s an area where Farris has plenty of experience. As a Scout executive, he enjoyed great success with identifying and helping to reconnect Scouting alumni through newsletters, email, and service opportunities at the unit, district, and council levels. Now, he’ll have the chance to do the same thing for councils across the country.
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Farris family
Pathfinder Members to Get Scouting Magazine If you’re a Pathfinder-level member of the Scouting Alumni Association, the new year will bring you a new benefit. Beginning in March, you’ll receive Scouting magazine automatically. Published five times a year, Scouting is the BSA’s flagship publication for Scouting volunteers. It includes the latest BSA news, features on high-profile Scouting events, and departments that cover everything from outdoor gear and wellness to parenting and advancement. “Scouting magazine’s mission is to support, instruct, and inspire the BSA’s adult leadership,” said Mike Goldman, editorial director for Boys’ Life, Scouting, and Eagles’ Call magazines. “We are excited now to be able to share this resource with our Scouting Alumni Association members. I can think of no better way to keep our dedicated Scouters and alumni engaged and in tune with our organization.” Pathfinder-level membership in the Scouting Alumni Association costs $35 per year. In addition to Scouting magazine, members receive an association card, window cling, luggage tag, lapel pin, and discounts from major national retailers. For more information, visit www.bsaalumni.org.
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Happenings Join the Order of the Arrow’s Big Birthday Celebration Before they joined college fraternities, before they became Lions or Kiwanis or Rotarians, before they were inducted into professional organizations or honor societies, millions of Scouts joined the Order of the Arrow. If you’re one of those Scouts, you’re invited to join in as the OA, Scouting’s national honor society, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2015. While the OA anniversary celebration will include plenty of elements aimed at current members— including, of course, the requisite commemorative patches—a major element is designed to connect with alumni and other community members. Dubbed ArrowTour, it will bring the OA experience to communities across the country.
campus that features history displays, videos, and activities ranging from silk-screening to belt branding to an inflatable obstacle course. Each stop will also include an evening show that celebrate the Order’s history and previews its future, as well as a service project that benefits the local community. The ArrowTour website—www.arrowtour.oa-bsa.org—will feature an interactive map once dates and locations are set. National Chief Nick Dannemiller sees ArrowTour as a great chance for OA alumni to find out what is happening in the OA today—and to share their stories of yesteryear. “I think there’s a ton of youth Arrowmen that would love to tell you about what they’re doing and why it’s important to them,” he said. “In exchange, you can always offer up yours. I think it’s a good conversation to have.” The ArrowTour caravans will converge on Michigan State University in August—as will 15,000 OA members from across the country. They’ll be there for the National Order of the Arrow Conference, a weeklong event that combines leadership seminars, competitions, and celebrations of all things OA. The biggest previous NOAC, held in 2006, attracted 8,003 Arrowmen, so there’s clearly plenty of interest in this once-in-a-lifetime event.
Nick Dannemiller
The party won’t end at Michigan State, however. After NOAC, the Order is planning a day-of-service program in councils across the country. Details are still being worked out; look for details in future issues of Alumni Alive.
During June and July, four teams of Arrowmen—one in each BSA region—will set off on tours of council camps, council offices, and Scouting events. At dozens of locations, they will set up a
For more information on the OA’s 100th anniversary and on how you can join the celebration, visit www.oa-bsa.org/pages/ category/category/100th-anniversary-celebration.
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Scouting Alumni Association Builds Infrastructure That’s important, since the BSA currently has nearly 300 local councils. “It is difficult to pick up the phone and call 280 councils,” Larson said.
In 1903, Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewall K. Crocker became the first people to drive a car across the United States. Their trip from San Francisco to New York City took them 63 days, 12 hours, and 30 minutes and often required them to haul their car across streams with a block and tackle.
The first order of business for the regional chairs has been identifying chairs for each of their areas, who will in turn make sure their local councils have alumni chairs in place. (A local council oversees the Scouting program in a defined geographical territory. For administrative purposes, councils are grouped into six to nine geographical areas per region.)
Today, the same trip would take just 42 hours, according to Google Maps, and a driver would have to leave the interstate only to refuel. The difference between those trips, aside from improvements in automotive technology, lies in infrastructure. Although infrastructure is admittedly boring—even the word itself seems more at home in a corporate-speak glossary than in a Scouting newsletter—it is vitally important, as Jackson and Crocker discovered.
Bill Johnston, the regional chair for the Northeast Region, has perhaps made the most progress. “I now have active chairs in each of the six areas within the Northeast Region,” he said. “We have periodic phone calls, and now they’re off getting each of their councils. It’s starting to get some traction.”
This year has been a year of infrastructure building for the Scouting Alumni Association. According to Associate Director Ryan Larson, the association now has volunteer chairs in place in all four BSA regions for the first time. They are Bill Johnston (Northeast Region), Kay Shipp (Southern Region), Bob Stuart (Central Region), and Rich Brenner (Western Region).
In fact, the Scouting Alumni Association as a whole is getting traction, with some 200,000 alumni now registered as members. “The growth has been exponential,” Larson said. If that growth means the association needs to build even more infrastructure, Larson doesn’t mind. “The Boy Scouts of America would not be able to serve the millions of youth registered in our programs without the 1 million volunteers working on our behalf. The Scouting Alumni Association is no different. We are excited to have additional volunteers come on board to augment our national team of four professionals to achieve our mission,” he said.
“These regional chairs will serve as a conduit between national and the local council. They will help us share best practices, as well as gather best practices from local councils,” he said.
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Program New Program Satisfies Scouts’ Need for Speed Scout camps feature all sorts of sounds: the report of rifles, the clang of dinner bells, the laughter of happy Scouts. Now, dozens of camps across the country are introducing another sound: the roar of all-terrain vehicles.
(www.treadlightly.org) and complete a trail-stewardship project. “We’re not spinning doughnuts or anything,” he said. “We put a lot of emphasis on showing them how to have a good time without utilizing the ATV like that.”
This year, the BSA formalized a 10-year agreement with Polaris to provide ATVs, side-by-sides, and safety equipment to local council camps and to the BSA’s national high-adventure bases. The goal is to help camps attract older Scouts—and to teach them to safely operate machines many of them are already using.
Halloran likes that the program lets Scouts access areas of his 3,100-acre camp that are otherwise inaccessible. More importantly, however, he likes that Scouts are getting safety training that could one day save their lives. He notes that swimming-related deaths plummeted decades ago when the BSA and the Red Cross worked to develop safe-swim programs. “Right now, the leading cause of serious injury in youth under driving age is ATVs and motorized vehicles,” he noted. “A big part of that is training. Hopefully we’ll start seeing results in increased training not just in Boy Scouts but outside.”
“As we work to keep our programs relevant to the youth of today and tomorrow, we are grateful for this opportunity to work closely with Polaris,” Chief Scout Executive Wayne Brock said. “We are excited that in the coming years, with the help of Polaris, we will be able to teach youth safe and responsible practices for the use of off-road vehicles.” The Polaris deal comes on the heels of pilot programs in the Northern Star Council (St. Paul, Minnesota) and the Northern Lights Council (Fargo, North Dakota). More than 900 Scouts participated in the pilots during 2012 and 2013. ATVs are now a key part of the Ride program at Tomahawk Scout Reservation in Wisconsin, which is operated by the Northern Star Council. During the weeklong program, Scouts who are 14 or older can experience mountain biking, mountain boarding, horseback riding, and ATV riding. According to Camp Director Brian Halloran, riding the program puts heavy emphasis on safety and stewardship. During their ATV day, Scouts complete a half-day of training before taking a two-hour trail ride on the camp’s back-access trails and security roads. Along the way, they learn the principles of Tread Lightly!
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Survey Program Gives Voice to Scouts its Pasadena headquarters. When the Monmouth Council saw that Boy Scouts wanted to be part of something bigger than themselves, it created a “Ten Commandments Hike” to help Scouts explore the 12th point of the Scout Law: “A Scout is reverent.”
Anyone who’s ever heard Cub Scouts cheering during a pinewood derby race or Boy Scouts talking in their tents long after lights out knows that Scouts have voices. Since 2012, the BSA has been letting Scouts—and their parents—use their voices to improve the Scouting experience. Through online surveys, the Voice of the Scout program gauges member satisfaction and zeroes in on areas of potential concern.
For more results from the spring 2014 Voice of the Scout survey, see www.scouting.org/filestore/mission/pdf/VOS_ Spring_2014_Infographic.pdf and www.scouting.org/filestore/ mission/pdf/VOS_Spring_2014_Exec_Summary.pdf.
Each March and October, the BSA invites all members (sometimes via their parents due to privacy laws), parents, council/district volunteers, and unit volunteers who’ve been registered for at least 120 days to discuss their experiences in Scouting. Scouts might be asked if they’re learning valuable skills or having fun. Adults might be asked if Scouting is a good value or if they fully understand their roles. Everyone is asked how likely they are to recommend Scouting to their friends or acquaintances, which leads to a Net Promoter Score. The idea is that people who would promote the program are more satisfied than those who wouldn’t. (In Net Promoter Score terms, someone can be a promoter, a detractor, or passively satisfied.) High-level Voice of the Scout results are posted at www.scouting.org/jte.aspx, while detailed reports go to leaders at the local-council level. Those reports are leading to concrete changes across the country. For example, the San Gabriel Valley Council realized it had a communication problem, so it restructured its leadership meetings and moved them out of
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profiles Zach Carson: Sustainability Scout Zach Carson was never a Scout, but he made up for lost time this past summer. As the BSA’s first sustainability consultant, Carson visited three dozen Scout camps across the country to see firsthand whether they are functioning sustainably and to share best practices on how they could improve. His broader goal: to spread the message that camps (and the rest of the BSA) should start focusing on the triple bottom line of people, planet, and prosperity.
But Carson also discovered that some camps are doing exciting things to reduce their impact on the environment while increasing their value to Scouting and the broader community. For example, Camp Guyasuta in suburban Pittsburgh added a LEED-certified conference center in 2005. Today, that building and the rest of the camp’s 175 acres are in constant use by Scouts, churches, school groups, inner-city nonprofits, corporations, and universities, contributing $50,000 to $60,000 to the council budget.
Carson quickly discovered that most of the BSA’s camps are decades old and weren’t built with energy efficiency in mind. “Part of what needs to happen is efficiencies and environmental retrofits to the majority of these camps,” he said. That could include everything from adding solar panels to installing lowflow toilets and faucets that shut off automatically.
Carson’s summer-camp tour was far from his first cross-country sustainability journey. After graduating from the University of Vermont in 2005, he converted a 24-foot bus to run on recycled vegetable oil and traveled across the country to highlight the problem of peak oil. From 2006 to 2013, he ran Sustainable Living Roadshow, where he produced more than 250 events and festivals aimed at sustainability education. His “eco-carney circus,” as he describes it, would set up at music festivals, college campuses, and community parks to empower communities and individuals to embrace sustainable-living strategies. Tired of life on the road, Carson shut down Sustainable Living Roadshow last year to pursue an MBA in sustainable management at San Francisco’s Presidio Graduate School. It was there that John Stewart, the BSA’s director of corporate engagement and sustainability, met him and convinced him to return to the road—at least for one summer—to help Scouting build on its heritage of environmental stewardship. To learn more about Carson’s Sustainable Camp Tour 2014, visit greentodeepgreen.org. At the site, you can also download the BSA’s first annual sustainability report and see videos from the 2014 Sustainability Summit.
Zach Carson
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Nick Dannemiller: National Order of the Arrow Chief Nick Dannemiller plans to work as a wildlife veterinarian someday. This year, however, the Colorado State University junior has spent a lot more time with people than with animals. A lot more time.
the Pacific Northwest. “Now that I was elected, we can say that a national chief was elected from basically every corner of the country,” he said.
As the Order of the Arrow’s national chief, Dannemiller has crisscrossed the country, attending countless OA conclaves, lodge meetings, and training courses as the 171,000-member group’s top youth leader. He’s spent even more time in nearly daily conservations with the Order’s other youth officers and adult advisors as they’ve rolled out new programs and finalized plans for next year’s celebration of the OA’s 100th anniversary.
Scouting, of course, has a strong emphasis on youth leadership, and that’s perhaps never more evident than in the Order of the Arrow. Dannemiller says having a seat at the table with adult advisors who are often decades older than him has been humbling. “I think that’s part of the OA’s success,” he said. “Since we’re so youth driven, a lot of the times our programs really resonate with the youth because all along we’ve been building them with their input.”
Oh yes, and he was one of the nine youth members who presented the BSA’s Report to the Nation to government leaders in Washington, D.C., last February. “It was a real honor to meet dignitaries and public servants across the three branches of government, to be able to tell them what the BSA accomplished in the past year and to see their support for the BSA and what it does for young people,” he said.
While Dannemiller’s term as chief will soon end, his service won’t. “They really do try to keep you involved for at least one more year as a sort of transition,” he said. “So part of it is supporting the newly elected national chief and advising him as a friend.”
An Eagle Scout from Tualatin, Oregon, Dannemiller was elected chief late last December from among the OA’s 48 section chiefs. (Each section chief oversees an assigned geographical area.) “The chiefs, assembled, seem to show great wisdom, well beyond their years in the election of our national youth leaders,” noted Ray Capp, chairman of the National Order of the Arrow Committee. “As we near the end of Nick’s term, that wisdom has been borne out in his neverwavering commitment, tireless devotion to the youngest members who rightly look up to him, and exceptional generosity in the cheerful service he provides as an example to all. Nick has been a great chief, and we continue to look to him for a bright future.”
He will also continue to inspire his fellow Scouts from the Pacific Northwest and beyond, many of whom will say, “Gee, I think I could get there one day, too.”
Dannemiller, a member of Boy Scout Troop 530 in Tualatin, had previously served as lodge chief of the Wauna La-Mon’tay Lodge in the Cascade Pacific Council. He’s the first national chief from
Nick Dannemiller
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