Originally I thought they’d done their photo the same way, but I was wrong. They “borrowed” a few thousand merit badges and constructed it by hand. Here’s the video:

The scouting group renews its charter every year here in the US, and the local Boy Scout council issues a charter to the sponsoring community organization, called the charterd organization.

The local commissioner is a volunteer who visits individual scouting groups on behalf of the local council. Commissioners are usually organized into districts and communities, and take care of packs, troops, crews, etc., in their own neighborhoods. Charter renewal gives the commissioner an annual opportunity to meet with a chartered organization’s leadership, report on the benefits produced by their scouting units, and thank them for their sponsorship.

So, here are my thoughts on how to present a charter.

Chartered Organizations

The first “scout troops” organized themselves around LTG Robert Baden-Powell’s earlier book Aids to Scouting (1899). The book uses the term “scouting” in its classic sense: a soldier who “scouts” the local terrain and enemy positions. B-P wrote the book for military professionals who needed to train others how to travel across enemy country, blend in to the local population, and spy on the enemy.

Following its publication, several schools organized groups of their students to study and practice the skills in B-P’s manual. Many young teens may have also organized scouting groups on their own. BP spoke with organizers of other youth movements (like the YMCA and the “Boy’s Brigade”) and decided to establish a “scouting” program that was “sponsored” by these existing organizations. These sponsors became the first chartered organizations.

This led to the “Browsea” experiment – the first Boy Scout camp – in 1907, and the publication of Scouting for Boys in 1908. Two years later, an official scouting movement arose in the US with the incorporation of the Boy Scouts of America. Here, the Boy Scouts organized their troops around chartered organizations, which served as sponsors of a sort and at least provided the troop with meeting and storage space.

Chartered organizations may be any community organization that wants to promote youth. When I was a kid, our Cub Scout pack was chartered by the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) in my grade school. My Boy Scout troop was chartered by a church. The church we attended actually chartered a different troop – location and boy membership (i.e. friends) being more important than religious affiliation, at least when Scouting is concerned.

Charter Presentation

When I was a unit commissioner and had to present charters, I struggled a bit. I found suggestions for charter presentations that involved 30-minute, highly-scripted ceremonies. I doubted many chartered organizations really wanted to sit and wait through all that, especially if we repeat it every year. So I looked closer and focused on what was really required:

1. Explain briefly what the charter indicates: it’s permission from the local and national councils to operate the scouting program in their organization. The district and council volunteers provide guidance and help, but the main responsibility rests with the chartered organization, and the unit leaders they appoint.
2. Bring representatives from the pack, troop, or whatever, to summarize the good things resulting from the unit’s existence – number of youth served, major advancements (especially Eagle Scouts), and service activities performed. If they’re all busy, you can report for them, but it’s best to have a live representative (adult, youth, and preferably some of both).
3. Thank the unit representatives for the service of their adult leaders.
4. Thank the Chartered Organization Representative, whether present or not, for serving as the representative of the unit at the district and council level.
5. Thank the chartered organization members (or their representatives) for their previous support of this scouting unit.
6. Present the charter to the leader or lead representative of the chartered organization. For a religious group this may be a priest or pastor. For veteran organizations this may be the post commander. For most other organizations it is a president or chief executive officer.

The whole process may take 5 minutes or less, especially if the unit representatives keep their reports short and to the point.

When I do a charter presentation like this, I don’t like to use a fixed script. I sketch the role of chartered organizations and chartering in general terms. I speak directly to the audience to convey that I mean what I say about their important role in supporting Scouting. I don’t read from a script because it dilutes the importance I want to give what I say.

The Actual Presentation

When I finally present the charter, though, I try to give it extra weight by saying something formal (a.k.a. pompous). This is a 1-2 sentence presentation speech that I actually memorize. I must say it directly to the organization’s chief instead of reading it from a card. I replace the underlined parts below with the appropriate names, titles, unit numbers, and so on.

Titled name of organization’s chief, in acknowledgment of the support of the scouting program by Chartered Organization’s name, and on behalf of the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America, I present you the charter for the units identified by type and number (i.e. Pack 123 and Troop 456), and I pledge the cooperation and support of the Name of Scout Council and our Name of Local District volunteers. Thank you.

Every commissioner is different, and the individual words aren’t as important as the heart and enthusiasm that drives most scouting volunteers. If this doesn’t capture the spirit you want, then rewrite it. In any case, copy out the words you need to say, substitute the proper names, titles, and numbers, and be able to recite it from memory.

The Script

When I first put together this charter presentation I created an actual script. Since I know some people will feel more comfortable with specific words instead of making up their own, I include the recharter script here in Microsoft Word’s more-or-less portable RTF format.

Feel free to use, modify, and distribute the script as you see fit.

By the way, other ideas

Here are links to other charter presentation ideas:

• A typical – and lengthy – presentation ceremony is posted here and there.
• Grand Teton Council has posted a couple of concise and interesting pack-oriented charter presentations.

This article by Rick Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

It’s impossible to 100% prevent such incidents, just as it’s impossible to prevent death and injury during scouting events. Scouts are specifically taught how to identify and deal with potential abuse situations. Leaders are taught to avoid situations that might enable abuse. For example, individual leaders are never supposed to be alone with individual scouts. We call this “two deep leadership.”

Kent York published a statement by the Northern Star Council about the incident. Kent provides the Official Word, of course. My own comments are as an individual volunteer.

The Boy Scouts of America takes the threat of abuse very, very seriously. The BSA established a whole suite of training to protect scouts against abuse. Scouts receive training on how to identify potential abusive situations and how to deal with inappropriate behavior. Leaders are taught how to deliver the scouting program without putting kids at risk. Leaders are supposed to retake the “Youth Protection” training every other year. If all leaders follow the rules, then kids are never at risk.

Here’s the problem: it’s sometimes inconvenient or annoying to follow the rules. As a merit badge counselor, I meet with individual scouts. The venue is always at a public event, like a troop meeting. You never need to meet privately with a scout. On the other hand, scouts occasionally request a private meeting at a different time. For example, a scout might be coming close to a deadline, and need to finish things before the next meeting.

When I was a kid, it was routine to go to a counselor’s house to do a merit badge. Today, a scout must bring a buddy to such a meeting, and/or we need another adult present. That’s harder to arrange, but it’s the rule.

Some people routinely bend the rules. If the leader is a family friend, then it seems OK to meet privately with a scout. Or, if you’re a friend of a friend. Or, if the leader seems to be a “really great guy.” And so on. Once you start bending the rules, where do you stop?

When the “good guys” allow the rules to bend, we enable the bad guys.

The BSA has put a lot of effort into the youth protection training. Like any sensible security training, it starts by describing the threat: the process by which abusers attack children. Then it explains the rules for leaders, and how those rules interfere with the abuse process.

The good news in this horrible bit of reportage is that such abuse is rare in Scouting. The bad news is that the youth protection training failed those three Scouts.

Scouting is a bit different out there. We may have deserts and exotic locales here, but it’s something different out there. They’ve camped in everything from the endless desert to 12,000 foot mountains among wild baboons. Local rules send most of the older boys away, so most in the troop are younger Scouts. Regardless, my friend had just finished submitting a batch of Eagle applications before leaving for the States, so we know this is still the Boy Scouts of America.

Being overseas has had its upsides and downsides. Being in the Mideast, it’s hard to get to US High Adventure bases. But the troop managed to do it, helped by a priority granted by the National Council to direct service troops. Travel isn’t always a chore, though: to get to summer camp in Germany on year, “the company” lent the troop its private 737 to fly there.

The 12,000 foot trip was interesting. The site was along the Red Sea, and the troop had to climb up there and set camp among a population of wild baboons. But we’re talking about Scouts, after all. So the setting of camp was somewhat delayed while the Scouts went wild, chasing wild baboons. Can you say altitude sickness?

Eagle Requirements Overseas

Eagle projects are tricky to arrange when there’s not as much community to serve. But they still have the same basic elements: planning the project, securing outside approval, leading a team to produce the result, and performing a service. One project brought sporting equipment to a local girls’ orphanage. Arabic traditions didn’t allow the Scouts to teach the girls how to use the equipment, so instead they produced a DVD.

Every Eagle candidate must go through a Board of Review, and the Board is supposed to be arranged by the troop’s District. Since there’s no district, the troop constructs the Board from local adults, generally former Eagle Scouts, who aren’t active in the troop.

Pyromania

And, what would scouting be without pyromania? Being surrounded by desert, there’s not always a lot of choice for a low-overhead camping trip. But also, there’s not much risk of spreading fire. So the troop would occasionally do a “pyromania campout.”

The scouts and leaders creates a huge bonfire on the far side of a large earthen berm. The Scouts were allowed to construct their own “devices” to try to explode: cans of hairspray, boxes of flammables taped to more flammables, and so on. Each Scout submits his ‘offering,’ and a leader tosses it over the berm and into the fire, to await the anticipated ‘boom.’

It may be hard for a fire to spread in the desert, where it’s mostly sand, but it’s pretty easy to start a fire. Just about everything that isn’t flammable to start with, will become so after baking in the desert sun for a few weeks.

While carpooling the Scouts to a camp out, the troop stopped at a roadside station. Individual boys are discouraged from carrying matches and lighters, but one of them bought a lighter during the stop. Just as the leaders were calling the boys back to the car, there was a loud “whoomp.”

Off to the side of the station, an abandoned car was enveloped in flames. It looked as if it had been doused in gasoline. In fact, the boy had simply lit the dessicated interior on fire.

So I’m taking some time here to write down my thoughts on how to organize a district web site. These observations take a particular eye towards using Dot Net Nuke as the host platform.

I think the district web site represents a fairly generic sort of web design problem faced by lots of volunteer organizations, both in scouting and out of it. I always like to start with a statement of objectives:

1. The main users are volunteers or youth members looking for details about something that’s unique to our district, like a district event or district-specific procedures.
2. The users need to know how to contact district leadership
3. The events schedule should be easy to find and navigate
4. There shall be up to date information on all upcoming events.
5. If there is a computer file (a flier, list of rules, planning guide, registration form) related to an event, that file is posted on the web site, too.
6. We want to be able to distribute the responsibility for keeping the site up to date.

Given that we’re going to get rid of one web site and replace it with this one, my focus is to ensure that we don’t lose anything we had on the old one.

District-specific information

OK, what types of events do we have?

• Roundtable, a monthly get-together
• Training events – it seems like there are 2-4 every month.
• District committee meetings, also monthly, but nobody attends them except committee members
• 2-3 outdoor youth events: Camporee, Klondike, and Expo. We may add more, especially for cubs.
• Scouting for Food
• Kickoff cornfeed every fall, district dinner every spring
• Order of the Arrow – elections, Conclave, monthly meetings @ Roundtable

What other things are specific to our district that we need to post here?

• Process for approving an Eagle project – the rules say the District has to approve it, and this tells scouts what to do to seek approval
• Process for Eagle Board of Review – again, the rules involve the District, and this explains how we implement the rules
• District boundaries – it’s good to tell people what our geographic boundaries are.

Given that we want to share the work – have more than one or two volunteers typing in updates – then we need to be sure we can give them update rights without having to give them full administrator rights. So there are questions as to how much a person can modify if we give them the right to modify a page. I’m assuming that if someone has edit privileges, then that person can change the page name as well as its contents.

Home Page

I think it’s best to do a home page similar to what we have now. The page will be dominated by lists of links that are sorted according to audience:

• Scouts
• Parents
• Volunteer Leaders

We should also have an “Announcements” feed, which I hope can include links to other content on the site. The Announcements feed should highlight updated information about upcoming events.

Top Level Menu

Here is a cut at the top level menu:

• Home – it has to be there, of course
• About the District – this can have contact info and administrative details.
• Events – this would be the main listing of district-sponsored events, with one entry per event. For each event, the submenu would include links to fliers, planning brochures, registration forms, etc. (Should OA Conclave be here?)
• Roundtable – schedule and map and, if the info is available ahead of time, a schedule of events.
• Training – this would include a list of upcoming training events, and links to fliers about them. The training committee is pretty good about creating MS Word fliers. We can post them, or look at other approaches.
• For Units – this is for other district operations, like recruitment, FOS, or unit assistance through the commissioner staff. I th ink this will serve as a catch-all for information people need that doesn’t fall under other headings.
• For Scouts – a place to capture youth-specific things like OA and Path to Eagle. This is different from the “For Scouts” listing on the home page, since this menu won’t link to youth events.

Next-Level Menus

Here are how I see some of those menus above working out at the next level. The main page for each event should include things like what, where, when, who to contact, and what unit is organizing it.

• Events
  • Kickoff/Corn Feed
    • Kickoff Overview (link back)
    • Kickoff Flier (link to PDF with registration form)
  • Camporee
    • Camporee Overview (link back)
    • Camporee Flier (link to PDF)
    • Camporee Guide (link to PDF)
• For Units
  • Unit Problems? (how to contact your commissioner)
  • Fall Youth Roundup
    • Roundup Overview
    • Critical dates
    • Planning Guide
    • Whatever Linda Needs
  • Friends of Scouting
    • FOS Overview
    • Critical Dates
    • Unit Planning Guide
    • Community FOS (links back elsewhere in site)
• For Scouts
  • Order of the Arrow
    • OA Overview
    • Conclave Flier
  • Path to Eagle
    • Path to Eagle Overview
    • Eagle Projects
    • Eagle Board of Review

Open Issues

• We need to talk to the Training people to figure out how to organize the Training section. There are a couple dozen training events every year. At some level we should have a menu entry for each event. Maybe we organize by month after that, or by type of training.
• It would be nice to have page that listed which units had organized which district events – a sort of Roll of Honor.
• I’m inclined to suggest we include the date (year) in event names (i.e. “2008 Camporee”) so we can keep track of which pages have been updated. If we have undated page names, then visitors aren’t going to know if the information is up to date or not.
• I’m not sure if it really does make sense to have year-specific folders for documents after all. It might be enough to follow Clint’s suggestion and just prefix the yyyy-mm-dd on the front of each file name. Visitors don’t see the file names anyway.