Boy Scouts of America
Ben Fleury and Stephen Blake from the Boy Scouts of America made a presentation.
Have been discussing how to bring scouting into the SWP area.
Abigail: seems like schools and churches seem to be the strongest avenue for that. The community school coordinators at each school would be the best contact for setting up troops in schools.
Scouting provides young people–Boy Scouts now admits both boys and girls–with a number of great opportunities that young people in the city do not always get the chance to participate in.
The hurdles in making these opportunities available to every interested potential scout. There are challenges in finding places where there are scout units, scouting is expensive in America although the council does provide funding. There is also a need for leadership–leaders are volunteers which can limit the number of potential leaders available. Scouting can also benefit the larger community both through community service and the potential for community cohesion.
Looking to partner with local schools and potential parishes–interested in setting up Scout troop or Cub Scout packs.
Capacity to expand: dependent on the number of kids and parents that are interested in joining. The majority of the programming is done by the adult volunteers. Can provide training and support for new volunteers starting new troops/new packs. There are also district and council activities that troops can participate in.
Cub scouts are organized by age, Boy scouts are mixed ages between 6th grade and age 18
There are over 40 packs/troops in Baltimore. There has been a loss of packs/troops in West Baltimore. A need for scout troops on the west side–there’s only 3 or 4. There are 11 in East Baltimore.
The biggest hurdle is getting units set up and properly run and having volunteers interested in running them. Screening/background checks required for being a leader (there is a membership fee)–BSA pays for that. Also required to take youth protection training.
Minimum of 5 kids and at least 3 unit leaders/2 committee members (5 adults)
Education Committee’s Role in Advancing Racial Equity
The Committee has a number of options to advance racial equity–can do area-wide education and workshops (as done before), can do internal programming work (ie anti-racism training for individual community members) or work with program staff/community schools program, can advocate for organization wide changes to the SWP Board of Directors–if interested in advocating for changes suggest identifying issues and identifying action items.
The Committee discussed issues and solutions (see attached). Some are for the board and some are for the committee. The committee will ask the board to take the board related actions.
The Committee voted to ask the SWP to commit to a formal, facilitated racial equity assessment
Community Calls Update
Elizabeth shared a summary of the community calls that were done. Major needs identified were food and information about covid-19.
One option for sharing information is to print a directory of resources to be submitted to the neighbors
There does appear to be a need for an additional, more in depth, in person survey
