Over the last week, national leadership met at Camp Currie in Camas, WA to discuss our challenges and aspirations for the future. I want to take this opportunity to share some of the highlights coming out of this past week’s Headquarters Retreat.

To start, I’d like to sincerely thank our new Emeritus Chief, Richard Sowdon, for his service throughout his tenure. During this time, his calm and steady leadership has helped our organization pick up and dust itself off in the wake of the turmoil wrought by the pandemic.

Chief Sowdon set in motion training initiatives, including online Quick Start (the evolution of VOLT) and our new Advanced Leadership Training which was piloted this weekend. He followed through with our name change and presided over drafting new bylaws that emphasize organizational discipline and continuity. All of this while traveling the breadth of the country to scout with many groups, including completion of the longest single day paddle distance in OSG history… during a heat wave!

We owe much of our continued progress to Chief Sowdon. It is with great honor and humility that, following his decision to step back, I accepted the post of Chief Guide through election by the Board of Directors on Monday, February 26th, 2024. With your support, I hope we will continue the best of the service rendered by so many scouts and guides preceding us in building a principled and valued pillar within the worldwide scouting movement to which we belong.

Taking my place as Secretary is Michelle Windey, known to many of you as the well-traveled Midwest Training Commissioner. Jillian Tate, having resigned her Board seat expiring in 2025 to focus on continued excellence through her leadership of the Northeast region and NYC, is being replaced by Richard Sowdon for the remainder of her term. Richard will serve as Chairperson. Donathan Dedolph remains on the Board as Treasurer, as does Carrie Davis, our National Training Commissioner, and Ethan Jewett, our new Provost Commissioner.

It should not go without mentioning that the Board deeply appreciates the advisory support of two additional Rovers. Our General Counsel Nick Provenzo, also serving as South Commissioner and GSM of the 107th Dogwood, brushes aside many thorns along our path. Also our dear friend, long-time Quartermaster, railway rambler and steadfast Lone Scout, Rover Scott Hudson out of Arlington, TX. He considers our each and every need, brings invaluable mentorship to our table, and would give you the shirt off his back. Or mail you one.

Notice will soon be sent by the election committee with a call for nominations to fill Richard’s original Board seat vacancy as of the end of this month, and also to interview at least one – and as many as two – Pathfinders to join the Board as youth members.

Other noteworthy organizational changes include the following new posts:

• Appointment of Provost Commissioner, Ethan Jewett, also serving as West Commissioner and GSM of the 55th Cascadia. Ethan will lead our Regional teams’ administrative and onboarding activities, curate GSM collateral, and generally help steer the ship.
• Appointment of Adventure Commissioner, Doug Taylor, also serving as interim Southwest Commissioner and GSM of the 100th Sun Mountain. Doug will lead a new effort to organize, publicize and realize camping and adventure opportunities for Guides across the nation.
• Appointment of a Racial Equity Initiative Team Lead, Chun-Yin Chong, also serving as Midwest Commissioner and GSM of the 6th Woodrunners. Chun-Yin will work closely with our DEI committee, as well as on parallel efforts to enhance the resonance of Outdoor Service Guides within the BIPOC community.
• Establishment of the Emeritus Chief position, a respected, honorary advisor role bestowed at their own request by any former Chief Guide remaining in good standing with the organization. This is to support continued service and historical continuity for as long as those individuals remain willing and able.

We have also committed to the establishment of the OSG Foundation, a separate nonprofit entity dedicated to fellowship and fundraising to support the activities of Outdoor Service Guides. Details of this entity are still being worked out. If you have a background in grant writing, fundraising, endowments, partnerships or outreach with organizations that share ideals compatible with our own, please reach out to me directly.

Several other initiatives are in the incubation phase, including:

• Implementation of internal tools to facilitate communication between groups and leadership nationally
• Availability of resources, from section leadership guides to ready-made meeting outlines to marketing materials directly from our intranet
• Revitalization of the Lone Scout program
• Expanded effort to bring Outdoor Service Guides to population centers throughout the nation
• Renewed commitment to equity, inclusion and representation of all genders, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities through demonstrable action
• Refreshed offerings through the Quartermaster Store

As you can see, we have a wildly ambitious agenda with relatively few volunteer resources wearing several hats. If you want to dip your oar into national waters, now would be an excellent time to raise a hand!

As Rover Doug routinely reminds me, scouting together – being together in the outdoors – is probably the first and most important thing we can be doing with this movement. I believe that we can always improve our outreach, in particular to members of communities who aren’t truly aware that scouting and guiding are options for them. OSG national, our upcoming Foundation, the DEI committee and Chun-Yin with the Racial Equity Initiative specifically are looking eagerly for Rovers with passion and motivation for taking action to bring inclusive scouting into these communities through service, partnership and spreading awareness on the ground.

This is not just rhetoric. We are committed not only to putting our resources into action but also actively seeking funding to support these vital endeavors. We are ready to invest in the right projects and initiatives that align with our mission.

More details about organizational changes and initiatives will be shared by their respective commissioners and project owners over the coming days, and I’m certain that our national training committee will be excited to share the success stories we have and future plans coming out of Advanced Leadership Training.

At this point, Akela may accuse me of using ink as if purchased “by the barrel,” so I will wrap it up with this sentiment: thank you for the opportunity to serve, and also for everything you do in whatever capacity you are able.

Yours in Scouting and Guiding,
Rover Shane Heroux

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Rovers,

We have completed the election process for this year.  It was perhaps more complicated that we would have hoped, but we are happy to announce we have a full board that represents the best of OSG.  Thanks again to Nick and Mark on the election committee for making this happen.  Under the new bylaws one or more Board seats are up for election each year.

One of the complications this cycle was that after we announced the nomination period in email, we did not receive enough nominations to fill the vacancies.  We clearly did not do enough to get the word out and this is something we will do much better next year.  To address the situation, we made a second call for nominations so the Board could engage the membership and gather input while using the process in the bylaws for filling vacancies outside an election.

To try to provide clarity here is current Board, how they got on the Board and when they are up for election again. Presented in order of Board tenure:

Richard Sowdon

• Elected under previous bylaws.
• Assigned to election cycle B, current bylaws.
• Term ends 2024 election.

Jillian Tate

• Original three-person Board voted to create 2 new seats to better represent membership.
• Appointed by Board vote to newly created cycle C seat.
• Term ends 2025 election.

Shane Heroux

• Elected to Board by 2023 election to the second newly created Board seat.
• 2023 election was for cycle A seats.
• Term ends 2026 election.

Carrie Davis

• Appointed by Board vote to cycle A seat not filled in election.
• Incumbent Mathias Neuber did not seek re-election and seat was not filled during election due to lack of nominations.
• Mathias continued to serve via the holdover provision in the bylaws until the seat could be filled.
• Term ends 2026 election.

Ethan Jewett

• Incumbent was elected under previous bylaws but has had to step away for personal reasons.
• Appointed by Board vote to remainder of cycle C term.
• Term ends 2025 election.

Separately the Board appoints officers to conduct the day-to-day affairs of OSG.  The Board may replace officers by vote at any time. Officers may be, but are not required to, be Board members. Below are the current officers and appointment dates:

Chief Commissioner

• Richard Sowdon, February 2022

Secretary

• Shane Heroux, March 2023

Treasurer

• Donathan Dedolph, April 2023

We are excited to welcome Carrie, Ethan, and Donathan to their new roles.  Please offer them your support as they continue to serve OSG.  Please contact Richard or any Board member with questions.

OSG Board of Directors

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Updates From the Board

The OSG board has had some turnover.  Jillian Tate joined the board over the winter, after a unanimous vote by the board to bring her on. Her position was added as a 3-year commitment, and once that is over, she will be up for re-election by the community.

Our current secretary and treasurer are stepping down and new faces are stepping up. Shane Heroux from Colorado has joined the board, after working as registrar for the last year. He will now be our secretary! You can contact Shane at secretary@osg-us.org and he can help you with any issues you have with registration, charters, and background checks.

As a result of the Treasurer stepping down for personal reasons, the board is seeking another individual to join the board. To nominate someone, please reach out to HQ@osg-us.org with a nomination.

As a reminder, each seat on the board can be appointed by the board if needed, with term limits and elections that are voted on by our GSMs annually. Each year, our board should have members rotating on and off the board as a way to keep institutional knowledge present, but also bring in new members often. This will hopefully help prevent burnout by our volunteers.

Financial Update

Last year was possibly our most expensive year ever as an organization. The work of the name change resulted in the need to purchase new patches, badges, and other items in bulk. Historically, these purchases have been spread out and done slowly. However, rebranding with our new name was an important step forward for us all. So, we committed to the work. Making purchases through the QM store can help us pay for those purchases.

Unfortunately, due to Covid, our membership numbers have dropped and are still recovering. As a result, our income is also down, as membership dues are a primary source of income for our organization. If your group is scouting with us, please make sure to pay your membership and charter dues. These help us keep running our barebones, all-volunteer organization.

As a reminder, no members of OSG are paid for their work. So, where does the money go? Our most important expense is paying for background checks for all of our adult members. We use funds to provide training, including paying for volunteer trainers to travel outside of their own regions so we can help groups get started in new locations. We have fees for our websites and servers. We pay to keep our store stocked with badges, uniforms, and hats, even when sales are down. We don’t want our groups to be unable to get those essential items. We also have costs associated with our handbooks. These handbooks are offered to our membership for free as PDFs but are not entirely free to create. Fees for editing and artwork have been necessary with the new versions of the Pathfinder and Timberwolf handbooks. While the vast majority of work on those was done by volunteers, having some professional help to make a professional-looking product was necessary.

Registration Changes

To make registration more straightforward and easier for our members and GSMs, we will be making changes to our registration policies. Historically, if you registered with OSG, your membership was good for one calendar year. This meant that if members joined your group in February, their membership every year needed renewed in February even if the rest of your group was registered in September. For groups where the group GSM or quartermaster did all the registrations for the group, it could lead to needing to check registrations monthly instead of annually after a few years of having a group. We have realized that this can cause unnecessary stress on our GSMs, our registrars, and secretary. Thus, we are making a change.

As of this fall, all group charters and individual memberships must be renewed by November 1st of each scouting year. This will allow time for groups to get started in the fall after school starts, and hopefully get their charter work done once a year with all renewals happening at a single time. If you prefer to do your group sooner in the fall, there is no penalty, and those registering their group in August of 2023, for example, will have their membership renewal date still be Nov. 1 of 2024. This gives you a single, regular date that you can check and rely on.

This change is consistent with other organizations that have annual registrations. We sincerely hope it makes it possible for our groups to reduce stress and get their registrations done on time. This will also mean less work for secretaries and registrars who have had to hunt down delinquent groups and let them know that their group all needed to be renewed on some random date.  If you have questions, please send them to secretary@osg-us.org.

BTC3 Events

The Training Committee has planned three BTC leader training events for this spring! You can see below the list of upcoming training. Please contact your regional commissioner to attend a training and be sure to fill out the sign-up forms! Signing up is very important so that we can be sure there is enough food at the event. No one enjoys camping hungry! The event coordinators appreciate early sign-ups so that they can plan the best possible event.

• Pacific North West: April 28th to May 1
• NE Region- May 6-7th
• Midwest- Minnesota- May 19-21

In addition to those, the training committee has been working on developing a new version of VOLT. VOLT stands for Virtual Onboarding Leadership Training and was first developed in 2020, as people wanted to start groups, but in-person BTCs were at a standstill for safety reasons. We have found that there is still interest in having training online. The interest is fueled primarily by those still nervous about travel and getting together in large groups. However, working to expand the ways we can offer training so that more groups can join our organization is a goal we wish to meet.

If you would like to know more about the updated VOLT program, please reach out to our training committee.

West Coast Fun

The North West Region is planning some amazing events for this summer! If you are a Rover or Pathfinder who wants to do some canoeing, you’re in luck! Please reach out to Ethan Jewett for more information about the paddle events, or to sign up for hullaballoo!

• Paddle Camp for Pathfinders June 19-22
• Hullabaloo- June 22-25
• Paddlepalooza – 100 MILES in A Canoe- July 9-15

The post Spring Updates appeared first on Outdoor Service Guides.

Our quarterly campfire falls right in the middle of the holiday season. And while I am developing a resemblance to Santa Claus in a red necker, you all have more festive things to do than be on a zoom with me. I give you all the gift of time and we will skip straight to blog version of the Campfire. If anyone has any questions you would like to chat about I am always available at HQ@OSG-US.org.

Updates

Rover Proficiency Badges

Last Campfire we announced we were looking at ways to improve the Rover Program to provide more options for young Rovers. Through the process we learned surprisingly that young Rovers are not that different than old Rovers. The young Rovers that participated in the process conveyed they wanted to be fully included in the bigger Rover community. Their ask was for there to be special proficiencies similar to Pathfinders to give them some more structured goals to work on and develop their skills while they ponder what quests they may want to take and their path to becoming a Rover Knight. It turns out this idea sounded really good to a lot to older Rovers as well. You can find the badges and requirements on the website. QM has the newest purple Rover badges, and they should be available at the QM store soon. The ones that are shared with the Pathfinder program are already available as Senior Pathfinder Badges. We are open to adding more badges in the future that align with our program.

These badges are intended to supplement the existing Rover program; not replace any aspect of the current Handbook. Also as previously announced, Sue is working on a more holistic review of the Rover program to among other thing ensure the program is as inclusive as possible.

Policies

Unfortunately, you all voted to have a professional bureaucrat as Chief. One of the goals I have asked HQ to work on is distilling our core beliefs in to written policies. This does two important things: One, it helps keep as all on the same page as an organization and gives new groups with less tribal knowledge more framework to establish their groups, and two, it communicates to the outside world want we believe and hold ourselves to. While our beliefs may appear clear, we get a good amount of questions and concerns. Recently the Board approved the Scouting Accommodations Policy which formalizes our long-standing practices and promulgates the OSG Guide for Accessibility and Adaptive Scouting.

I hope to have more polices to announce soon because I like using the word promulgate.

Board News

To better reflect the membership and try to ensure a diversity of thought the Board voted to create two new Board seats, for a total of five, per the process laid out in the updated bylaws. The Board requested that Jillian Tate serve in one of the new positions and she has accepted. Jillian is well known, well respected, and fierce in her support of our mission. The Board wanted to move quickly to add a person to help ensure we could achieve the organizational stability that was one of the goals of the bylaws updated.

As a reminder on how the new bylaws work:

• All Board seats are elected by membership, excepting the provision that allows the Board to fill a vacant seat
• Board seats are three-year terms, divided into three groups to attempt to avoid complete turnover in Board membership
• Cycle A, Term ends 2023:  Mathias and the vacant fifth seat
• Cycle B, Term ends 2024:  Richard
• Cycle C, Term ends 2025: Aislinn and Jillian

The Board’s thinking was to add the fourth seat (Jillian) to “C” for stability and add the fifth to “A” so it would be voted on in the next election cycle to ensure the Board is accountable to membership. If the Board expands in the future the next seat will be assigned to “B”. The Chief, Secretary, Treasurer, and any other officers the Board may see the need to create in the future are no longer elected positions. Officers are appointed by the Board and may be dismissed by the Board at any time. Additionally, officers may be, but are not required to be elected Board members.

All that said, you may have noted we are due to have an election soon. The plan is to have the election in February as is traditional. Please start considering anyone you would like to nominate to be on the ballot (any member may make a nomination, per by-laws). More to come on the process when we start the official nominations.

A Scout is Courteous

This has been a busy year of coming out of Covid hibernation. I want to thank everyone that is still with us for persevering. We also have had many new people volunteer to help the headquarters team, which I am very grateful for. One of my goals is spread out the work of running the organization to more folks doing smaller more manageable jobs. Overall, I think this is going well. The downside to this approach is it puts a high demand on communication which as we all know is and has been a challenge for the organization.

I believe the communication challenge comes down to we are all volunteers doing our best to give what we can give to OSG. We all have families, home Groups, and life in general competing for our attention. It is okay to not be able to be all things for OSG at all times. I know I cannot be. My ask is for us to be purposeful in our commitments and communications; think of it as New Year’s resolution. If you are committed to attending a meeting, please put it on your calendar, set an alarm on you phone, do what whatever you do to keep up with things. If a conflict comes up, please send a quick note to the organizer to let them know. To be clear, this is also a growth opportunity for me too.

I titled this section a” Scout is Courteous”. As well-meaning as we are having aspirational goals of getting to everything, when a Rover hosts a meeting and folks don’t attend it is very demoralizing. If you cannot take something on, it is okay and courteous to say no. Please be courteous to your fellow Rovers by letting them know what to expect from you. If something comes up, just let folks know; we all understand life happens.

Happy Holidays to all of you!

~ Richard Sowdon, Chief Commissioner, OSG

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