Fellow commissioners, we have a unique opportunity to serve Scouting at a historic time of change!
I personally am thrilled that through Scouting we will be serving the whole family. Through visiting two of our council’s Vietnamese long-standing Family Scouting groups, I have seen a vision of the future, and it looks fantastic! At the Vietnamese Scouting groups, I saw boys, girls, and entire families (including grandparents) at a Scouting meeting where they shared fellowship, prepared young people to live by the Scout Oath and Law, and had separate but linked programs by age and gender where appropriate. I do not view family Scouting as accepting girls into Scouting – rather, I view it as serving the whole family.
The most recent issue of The Commissioner, the national newsletter for commissioners and professionals (http://bit.ly/2tUJ1VC), contains several excellent articles on commissioner service and Family Scouting.
While commissioners will continue to serve units and Scouters as we always have, we need to be ready to support growth in our movement. Specifically, this means:
Working closely with district membership teams to form sustainable new units based on the processes described in the Unit Performance Guide (http://bit.ly/2Nt5Zvm)
Working closely with district training teams and our roundtable commissioner staff to get our Scouters the training they need to succeed
Continuing our traditional role as “agents of change” by keeping up with the latest information available at www.Scouting.org/FamilyScouting and communicating that to our districts and units
Commissioners, as friends and mentors, will play a crucial role in family Scouting’s success. As the national newsletter notes, “If the trend holds true from what we have seen in the early adopter program, many of these new families will not have a background in Scouting, making the presence of the unit commissioners who will follow these units through their first two charter renewal cycles more important than ever.”
This is a time of change. We have the opportunity to make a real difference in Scouting by serving the whole family. We need to be ready and set to go!
