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We've registered as a Venturing Crew and have activities every week, but...
How can I tell if its really Venturing?
Its Venturing, if you can answer "Yes" to most all of these questions:
- Does your Crew have at least these officers:
- President
- Administrative Vice-President
- Program Vice-President
- Does your Crew have an annual calendar which they prepared using these Venturing tools:
- Program capability inventory
- Venturing activity interest survey
- Officers seminar?
- Does the crew manage its business, especially the approval of plans for activities and activity evaluation, through a crew meeting:
- Held at least monthly
- Conducted by the Crew Presidency using Robert's Rules of Order?
- Are the Venturing Oath and Venturing Code recited regularly in Crew meetings?
- Are the weekly activities planned and led by individual Venturers, with help from Consultants supplied by the Crew Committee, as needed?
- Is an agreed-upon uniform (Distinctive Dress Identity or DDI) worn to activities by most of the Crew?
- Does the Crew have its own Code and Bylaws?
- Are the majority of the Crew members working toward or achieving Venturing Bronze, Gold, or Silver awards, and/or Ranger, Quest, or Trust?
- Does your Crew send a representative to a Venturing Teen Leader Council (TLC)?
Do you have an adult-run activity program?
- Adults can plan great activities, because of their greater experience.
- Often, however, young men become dissatisfied with and will not support an adult-run program
- Even more important, much of the learning and benefit to youths can come through having the major responsibility for planning and leading their activities. A wise man
observed that in youth programs the process is more important than the product, that most of the growth available through youth activities derives from learning how to develop and carry off an activity rather
than attending an activity. Adult run activity programs deny young men the greatest benefits of these programs.
Is your Varsity or Venturing program operating as an appendage to the Scout Troop?
- Some wards may try to do this, mistakenly identifying the achieving the Eagle rank as the major purpose of all of the scouting programs, and keep older boys attached to the
troop. (The overall purpose or aim of all of the scouting programs is to help young men grow in character, citizenship, and fitness.
The various recognition programs, including Eagle, are one among several methods used to achieve these aims. Young Men in Varsity and Venturing programs can continue to work on the Eagle rank along with awards specific to these older-boy programs.)
- Varsity and Venturing have been designed to meet the special needs for the Teachers and Priests age groups (which are known to be among the young men most at risk in the Church),
and when implemented expertly are much more apt to appeal to the total group of young men in these two Aaronic Priesthood quorums than the regular scouting program which in the Church we use for 11-13 year
olds.
- Varsity and Venturing are the activity programs designated for use with the Teachers and the Priests quorums, as clearly specified by the Scouting and Young Mens handbooks and in
current instruction from the Young Mens General Presidency of the Church.
Are you trying to run a "Duty to God" activity program, rather than using the scouting program for that age group?
Is your activity program for Teacher or Priest age young men based on the Spalding Theory of Youth Leadership?
- This theory holds that if a young man bounces a basketball 10,000 times while in the young mens program, he is certain to go on a mission.
- The best available evidence is that the Spalding theory is not true.
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