You have the future of Venturing in your hands and it is yours to build.

I never thought I would admit it but I'm stumped! I don't know what else to try, where else to go, what else to do to attract kids to the Venturing program. If you cornered me (and some of you have) and asked me what to do to find and recruit kids for your Venture Crew I would give you a list of things to do, everyone of which I've tried.

My wife the Crew Adviser and myself followed to the letter the BSA format for holding an open house, but not one person showed up. We advertised in the local newspaper, our home owners association newsletter, announced it at Roundtable, and went to several different Troop meetings plus I sent out dozens of e-Mails including to NorthStar-L all to no avail. We told boys they could bring electronics to camp outs, we told them they could bring their girl friends. We told girls they could be the leaders of the crew, they could do the things Girl Scouts didn't let them do, they could climb mountains, scuba dive, shoot guns, whatever they wanted to do they could do. Not one girl showed up.

The National BSA program has been pretty set on stopping up the hole where we lose Cub Scouts namely between the ranks of Bear and Webelos and they have done a pretty good job of doing it. But during this time they have completely ignored the other programs, the "older boy" programs of Boy Scouts and Venturing. Now that Cub Scouts seems to be doing OK maybe we can divert some of that energy to these programs and stop up this hole. To do that we need some ideas, we need thought leaders to step up and give us their best ideas, their thoughts on how to stop the loss and maybe more importantly how to recruit these older kids.

Wikipedia defines a thought leader as a buzzword or article of jargon used to describe a futurist or person who is recognized among their peer mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights (thinklets). If we have ever needed your "thinklets" we need them now.

Soon some of us will be meeting to talk about the problems of recruiting and retaining older boys and girls in the BSA programs. I would like to collect your "thinklets" so they can be presented to the professionals who will define the programs we need to help these programs. If you have any kind of wild idea, any kind of thoughts on the subject then I encourage you to become a 'thought leader' and share it with us. Send them to me, or to Jon Geiger or Matt Armstrong so we can consider and take action on them.

To paraphrase a quote I heard not too long ago, you have the future of Venturing in your hands and it is yours to build. Send your ideas and thoughts to;

Keith Kaiser
Jon Geiger
Matt Armstrong