I know it has been awhile since my last post, but I had a quiet summer. With the start of the Scouting year here I am going to try and post weekly about the Pack and Cub Scouting in this general area.
To start I will talk about our recruitment efforts from this summer. As I have talked about in earlier posts we held a few recruitment events that gave some results, but not the big amount we had hoped for. This past week the local Primary and Elementary schools held their Meet and Greet event and invited the 3 local Packs to attend. The Wolf den leader Nick Calvetti came along with me, we both started in scouting together about 25 years ago. We had set up our paper air plane launcher and our target. Luckily Nick knows how to build a paper airplane because he was able to help the boys with it. We used the Pack's flyer as the paper for the boys, this way they take the flyer home with them. As the boys would pass by I would ask them if they want to make and plane and shoot it, from there Nick would take over and work with the boys while I spoke to the parents. My thing with the parents is finding common ground then use that to establish a bond with the parent. I had the pack's calendar with me and made sure to hand that to the parent along with a youth application for each of their child. I know that Nick and I did a great job, when every boy left our table they talked about how much they now wanted to join Cub Scouts and most of the parents had a similar thought.
This brings me to planning our first meeting which is in a few days. I have run into a small, but good problem. Last week I was going to have 2 maybe 3 smalls dens to start. I thought this is good it will give us time to get up to speed with the new program. The problem is now I have a very good chance of having 5 full dens, like I said a good problem. Since I only had 3 dens I did not recruit a Webelos den leader. I should have thought ahead, but luckily I have made a lot of friends in the last 25 years. I called in some favors and now have some people able to help until I can find a den leader. Since most of the boys in the pack will be new to scouting we are going to have a few games for the boys to get to know each other and also work on the Bobcat Badge. With the new requirements we will have to teach all the boys the Scout Oath and Law. I want to shows the boys that we have fun in Scouts and also learn.
I feel the most important part of running the pack is making sure that the program has tons of opportunities to get the boys outside and active while they learn. In the first 2 months we have 4 different events for the boys. Too many times have I seen a Pack promise a program to the boys and not deliver on it. The only way to keep the boys in scouting is to give them experiences they cannot get somewhere else.
Please feel free to let me know what ideas you have used for your pack and any you are waiting to try.
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