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Step 5. The Crew Advisors and Crew Committee Chairman conduct a Crew Officers Seminar: The Seminar is generally done as an overnight retreat.
They may use the training outline in the Leader Manual or use video tape from BSA Council. A seminar typically will cover: (1)duties of officers; (2)leadership skills: (3)preparation of yearly Crew calendar. The Crew Presidency may conduct the latter based on the VIS. If Crew does not yet have DDI or Code and Bylaws, these may be decided/developed (or assignment given to the Administrative VP to bring back recommendations at a later business meeting).
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(Chris) This year our Crew Officer’s Seminar was held at a ward member’s cabin in the mountains, early in September.
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We did it a little different than some years, in that all three Aaronic Priesthood scouting programs did their planning together. The young men’s leaders took responsibility for planning
this program.
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On Friday evening, after a Dutch oven dinner, our Venturers were in charge of doing some leadership training for the scouts and the Varsity guys. We trained them about 11 leadership skills
that we had learned in a Priests Leadership Conference put on by our stake and several nearby stakes.
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(J.D.)
In the morning, after breakfast, each of the three scouting programs went to their own planning session. To prepare to plan our program for the next year, we had done a PCI with help from our adult committee, and we also had the results of our Venturer Interest Survey. Also in preparation, our advisors had found 12 large calendar sheets, one for each month. They also obtained copies of the next year’s calendars for our High School, for the Stake, and for the Boy Scout Council and District. We wrote the dates for things like the Prom and Homecoming and next year’s Stake youth conference, on the calendar, so that we wouldn’t have scheduling conflicts with these activities. We started our planning year in September and built a calendar through next September.
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Our ward’s activity night is on Wednesdays. On the calendar sheets, we wrote in “YM-YW” for the third Wednesday of every month. We made plans to hold our monthly Crew Meeting on the
first Wednesday of each month.
That means that there were generally two open dates each month to hold our Venturing activities. For the open Wednesdays, we decided that we were going to rotate through the four Duty to God goal areas. So on the open dates we jotted down the names of the goal areas, in order.
1) Spiritual
2) Physical
3) Education/Personal/Career
4) Citizenship/Social
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Next we began to decide on specific activities to do on various dates.
We worked from the big newsprint sheet listing the top vote-getters from our VIS. We started from the top of the list. We decided which goal area each item would fit into best, then started plugging these items into the Wednesday night calendar spots for that goal.
When we had plugged all of the top vote-getters into the calendar, we had scheduled almost all of the activities that at least three of the guys wanted.
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(J.D.) Another part of our planning was to begin to consider our next summer’s superactivity. We took a few minutes to brainstorm different options and finally agree upon a backpacking
trip to the High Uintas, with plenty of fishing. We made tentative plans to do the Superactivity in third week in July.
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(Jay) At the Seminar, we also did some work to finish up our Crew’s Code and Bylaws and our DDI, and then voted on it to make them official. The Crew Officer’s Seminar is a good
time to work on Code and Bylaws if the Crew doesn’t already have them.
We had worked on a draft of our Code and Bylaws for several months. We started with a sample found in the Venturer Leader Handbook. The code, of course, is the Venturer code, plus our Stake’s Young Mens Theme.
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The bylaws are like a constitution for our Crew.
They tell the rules we agree upon about how our Crew is going to operate. I think its cool to have written our own constitution because it helps us prepare to be good citizens when we get old enough to vote.
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One of the things we wrote into our bylaws was a description of our DDI. DDI is Distinctive Dress Identity.
The younger scout programs don’t have much choice about their uniforms, but in Venturing we can design our own if we want to. The main requirements are: First, that they have some wording or logo that identifies us as being Venturers and second, that we vote to make their description part of our Crew’s official bylaws. When that happens, the DDI becomes our official uniform. One of the things that this means is that when we give the Pledge of Allegiance, we raise our right hand to our forehead, instead of placing it over our heart.
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The DDI we selected is a forest green golf shirt with a logo we designed ourselves. It uses a version of the Venturing Logo, but also has tells who we are and how we want our program to
run:
Venturing -- BSA, With Attittude, 9791
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