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Using a TLC to energize Venturing

Using a Teen Leaders Council (or VOA) to energize Venturing

Organizing a Teen Leaders Council (TLC, sometimes called a Venturer Officers Association or VOA) might be a helpful strategy when trying to enhance the overall quality of Venturing programs, in BSA councils or districts or even in LDS stakes.  In fact, the current BSA manual on implementing Venturing locally makes this very point emphatically:

    "The Teen Leaders' Council is a council or district-wide group of Venturing youth officers... [that] plans district and/or council-wide Venturing activities...  The Teen Leaders' Council opens doors for Venturing. It is critical in any comprehensive plan for strengthening Venturing [italics ours] in a local council...The Teen Leaders' Council is central in providing a link between crews and the district/council. The Teen Leaders' Council should serve as a catalyst to promote, sustain and support Venturing...
    (Here's Venturing: A Guide to Implementing Venturing in a District and Council, Boy Scouts of America, 2003, p. 57)

Our personal experience is that a TLC can not only be a great blessing and opportunity for individual young men to broaden their leadership experience, but also can be a catalyst and model to assist individual crews to begin to reach their potential for helping LDS priests achieve Aaronic Priesthood purposes.

In the pages that follow, two strategies for organizing TLCs in BSA districts are described, both with a focus on LDS programs. 

    1) Stakes call representatives

     In the first example, eight stakes in the Taylorsville, Utah, area (Great Salt Lake Council, Olde English Fort District) facilitated the development of a TLC by each calling a young man as their stake representative. Much of the initiative for having a TLC came from an LDS relationships committee made up of Stake Presidents' Counselors in an area in which all of the chartered Venturing Crews were sponsored by LDS wards.  The district formed the leadership for the TLC by identifying four other young men to serve as the TLC cabinet.  For details of this process, see Diary: Developing a District TLC.  Other materials are also included are Stake representative job description, TLC Officer's Seminar Itinerary, TLC Code and Bylaws, 2005-2006 district Venturer Interest Survey, and 2005-2006 District Venturing Calendar.

    A strength in this approach was to be able to move relatively quickly to establish the numbers needed to initiate a functioning TLC.  Even at that, there was an abortive start and it took a second try and about a 12-18 month period to get the process to begin to work.

    A limitation of this approach is that the stake representatives did not necessarily have good linkages to individual crews/priests quorums.  One of the stakes had developed a Stake TLC to provide this linkage, but for the most part, the ability of individual stake representatives to communicate with crews in the wards of that stake was not very well developed. Nor was there a direct method to influence ward crews to improve the quality of their programs.

    2) Participation by "Model" Crews.

    A different strategy* for creating a TLC has been approved by district officials and the Executive Committee (also made up of Stake Presidents' Counselors) in the area of Spanish Fork and Salem, Utah (Utah National Parks Council, Palmyra District, also an area in which all registered crews are LDS).  This approach has both a narrower and a broader scope than the Taylorsville method, in that it initially limits representation in the TLC to crews that are willing to upgrade their programs to the district's definition of a "Model Crew", but by so doing, creates a means to influence over time the way that many crews are functioning. See Promoting and Strengthening Venturing in a Utah BSA District.  Development of this approach is ongoing, so we will add updates as time goes on.

     

We would welcome information about other attempts and strategies, successful and unsuccessful, to create TLCs in stakes, districts, and councils. Also, how would you adapt these ideas for the organizing of stake TLCs?  What about for districts/councils in which LDS crews do not predominate? Please share your ideas and experiences with us. We think this sharing could have a great benefit to all who are trying to make Venturing work as the activity arm of Priests quorums

 

*Much credit for this plan goes to Kim Christensen and Gordon Lowe.