Friday, May 23, 2014

New Venturing Awards - what might they look like?.

Update: Bryan on scouting just posted on these awards at http://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2014/05/23/leave-your-feedback-on-these-venturing-award-prototypes/
Comments due May 28...

By now most everyone knows that Venturing has introduced four new awards to take the place of the Bronze, Gold, and Silver recognitions. The new awards are named Venturing, Discovery, Pathfinder and Summit. Here at the BSA National Annual Meeting, the folks at the Venturing booth were asking for feedback on some prototype awards on Thursday May 22 which I picture below.  I emphasize that these are concepts and that they have indicated that no decisions have yet been made and the awards might look completely different. For our "voting" we had three sets of patches A, B, and C and four medals to choose from. The patches were in three segments representing Venturing, Discovery and Pathfinder.  The summit award then would be a medal. 


If a medal was chosen for all four levels were chosen, they might look like the once in the picture below.

As to the voting, many expressed the desire to see more of a medal on a ribbon, especially for the Summit award.  We expressed our desire that the Summit be similar to the Silver and Eagle in that it would be a pendant on a ribbon on a bar that had the same type of clasps that the current Eagle medal has. The folks working the booth said that many had indicated something very similar and that they were certainly going to use our opinions. That is, the decision is certainly not made. Send in your comments to program.content@scouting.org this week only as a decision will be made "within 7 days."

they are under a lot of pressure to get the awards approved since this is the primary decision holding up the release of the 


  • Handbook for Venturers

  • Venturing Advisor Guidebook, and the 

  • Venturing Awards and Requirements Book
Official announcements are included in links on our Central Region Area 4 site.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Off to the BSA National Annual Meeting

Silver Antelope
Kimberly and I are heading to Nashville for the first time.  We will be staying in the Gaylord Opryland hotel with all of the other participants at the BSA National Annual Meetings. We are excited of course since this is the first time we have been to a National Annual Meeting. What got us to attend was two things. First our good friend and great scouter from the Great Trail Council and current Area 4 Membership VP, David Weyrick, is receiving the Silver Antelope
Venturing, BSA
and we are honored to be there with him for that. Secondly, the announcements of all the changes in the Venturing Program are being announced Friday Morning and we wanted to be there for that.

In the mean time I am trying to keep all of the changes posted for our Area 4 Central Region Venturing Councils at our Resources for Councils page.  Much has been released already and more will be forthcoming.  For our purposes in supporting the Area (me) and the Great Trail Council (Kimberly) we want to have a good one stop place as we try to understand and then report and train on these changes.

Here is what is on the Resources for Council page so far. I won't update the below, so check the link.

What's New in Venturing?

The Venturing Announcement will be made at the Venturing Spark Session of the BSA Annual Meeting Friday morning May 23, 2014 in Nashville, TN

Changes will be announced at 

New ALPS (Adventure, Leadership, Personal Growth, Service) Program Model and Requirements
Books - Drafts of books seen at the National Annual Meeting 
  • Handbook for Venturers
  • Venturing Advisor Guidebook
  • Venturing Awards and Requirement Book

    New Adult Training Materials: 

    Here are the documents from the 2013 New Program Announcement at Scouting.org/venturing