Diary: Developing a District TLC

This is a summary of personal notes about organizing a district TLC in the Olde English Fort District of the Great Salt Lake BSA Council in 2003-2005. This district covers approximately the city of Taylorsville in Salt Lake County and also corresponds to the area covered by nine Taylorsville and Bennion LDS stakes.  During this period of time, all of the registered Venturing units in the district were LDS (about 50).

Since about 1985-86, this district had been intermittently successful in sponsoring a Venturing TLC (or its predecessor titles Explorer Presidents Association/EPA, Explorer Officers Association/EOA, and Venturer Officers Association/VOA).  Success was probably dependent on the level of interest and effort of the persons in charge of district Exploring/Venturing at various times.  By 2003, it had been several years since an active VOA/TLC had existed in the District.  At that point, a revitalized LDS Relationships Committee, made up of nine Stake Presidents counselors, challenged the scouting district to provide more supports for the Venturing program in the stakes and wards.  One of the targets of this effort was to reinitiate an active VOA*.  Members of the Relationships Committee determined that each of their stakes would call a young man to be their representative to the VOA to form the foundation for this group.

I was recruited to be the VOA advisor at this time.  I had been involved with district scouting in various capacities for a number of years, but with a hiatus to serve as a Bishop starting 1998.  When I came back into the Venturing picture in September 2003, the District Key Three were trying to work with the Stakes to get the youth representatives identified.  Some progress was made during the next three months, so we scheduled an initial VOA meeting in connection with the January 2004 Roundtable and made plans for an Officer's seminar for the end of February. Working with other district volunteers interested in Venturing, we planned the seminar to define with these young men their roles as stake representatives, to put a leadership structure in place, and to decide upon a strategy for creating a district Venturing activity calendar for the next year.

We held the seminar at a large and beautiful private recreational home in the mountains east of Salt Lake City, made available to us by its owner.  Everything went well with the seminar except that only five of the stakes had called representatives in time for the young men to attend and two of the five had conflicts.  Therefore we held the seminar with three young men. We did the planned training, and the young men elected one of the group as an interim chairman, pending the writing of Code and Bylaws. The group also laid plans to conduct an interest survey among the youth of the nine stakes, preparatory to the creation of a district Venturing activity calendar for September 2004-2005.

For the next two months the TLC used Roundtable meetings to prepare the interest survey and work on Code and Bylaws. We were still hampered by the smallness of the group (three or four young men participating at most) with several of the stakes still not providing representatives.

At that point, family problems stopped my participation with the TLC.  My wife was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, underwent chemotherapy without much success, and passed away in July.  I was not able to help again with TLC until about October.  At that time, I found the advisor role still waiting for me and not much having happened during the interim.

I returned with some new strategies. First, concerned about the slowness of some of the stakes to provide the promised representatives and also being dissatisfied that some of the young men who had been called were not interested in the assignments, and having had difficulty in communicating with the stakes about these problems, I determined that I needed to deal directly with the Relationships Committee. I got agreement from the Key Three to make presentations about the TLC in the Relationships Committee meeting and to meet directly with the Chairman of the Committee. I found him very responsive, and willing to follow up personally on these issues, and quickly we had representatives called from eight of the nine stakes. (The other stake made a choice to not participate at all in Venturing.)

The second strategy was a different approach as to how to organize the TLC leadership. We were dissatisfied with relying on an election at an organizational meeting with whichever representatives attended selecting some of their number without prior preparation. We discussed this with the Key Three and others interested in Venturing and came to believe that for the type of TLC we were trying to organize, what we have called elsewhere a "Slate of Candidates" method might work better.  In this method a slate of candidates for the TLC cabinet/presidency is pre-selected and presented at a TLC meeting, with other nominations allowed from the floor, and officers elected either by acclamation or by vote.

Advantages of this approach seemed to be 1) that since the TLC Cabinet would be made up of different persons than the representatives, we would have more young men guaranteed to be a part of the TLC, and 2) the cabinet members would have their allegiance more to the district where the representatives would be concerned about the needs of their individual stake.  (Click here to see more discussion about TLC election options.)

Almost exactly a year after the initial Officer's seminar, in February 2005, another seminar was held with nine young men attending. The group fine-tuned the TLC Code and Bylaws, approved the slate of officers presented to them, and revised an interest survey for distribution throughout the district.  At TLC meetings held over the next three months, the group finalized and ratified its code and bylaws, conducted the interest survey, compiling results from over 200 Venturers who responded and created a proposed 2005-2006 calendar with five activities on the schedule, identifying Stake assignments to lead particular activities..

Here are materials developed by and for the TLC:

     Stake representative job description

     TLC Officer's Seminar Itinerary

     TLC Code and Bylaws

     2005-2006 Olde English Fort Venturer Interest Survey

     2005-2006 Olde English Fort District Venturing Calendar

*At that time, VOA was the title used in the Great Salt Lake Council.  Eventually the title was switched to TLC to be consistent with new national BSA terminology.