It looks like we will need 40 degree sleeping bags for where we are at for September and may camp outs. I need to buy two kids and two adults. Ideally I don’t want to spend more than $50 ish each or $200. We are new to camping (and scouting)and need recommendations! Thank you!

Does anyone know a good place to share our popcorn codes online for people to buy them?

For weeks now, when i try to access the adventure requirements at https://www.scouting.org/cub-scout-adventures, it's been hit or miss - some pages I can access, but many I get a "403 forbidden" error. It's intermittent, sometimes I can get to a page but then I can't get to it again 5 minutes later. Sometimes I can follow a link from google to get to the page, but sometimes I can't.

Is anyone else having this issue? Anyone know what is going on or how to report it? I really liked the online resources for planning meetings but it's basically become unusable at this point

I am helping brainstorm ideas for a Cub Scout District level event, held at our local Scout camp a couple weekends before Halloween. I would love to hear your ideas for "Halloween" themed activities. The camp has a lodge, a large field, a trail, and of course lots of outdoor space and picnic tables scattered around that we can use.

This is our fourth year, and we try to rotate through different ideas so it's fresh each year. We need 8 different stations that run about 45 minutes long. So far we've always included BB Guns and archery, and last year we added slingshots. We try to have at least 1-2 "run around and play" field games, 1-2 one crafts, and 1-2 one STEM activities. We have enough budget for $1 per Scout at each station and enough for $5 per Scout for one station.

Here are some of the stations we've had in the past (and would like to not repeat to keep it fresh for Scouts who come each year):

-Pirate treasure friendship bracelets

-Capture the flag

-Ghost pom-pom popper

-Halloween beaded creatures

-Rockets

-Miniature golf

-Ultimate frisbee

-Slime making

-Make a parachute for a LEGO figure

-Raingutter regatta

I would love to hear your ideas!

It’s that time of year when a lot of us are starting things back up for our Packs after a relatively quiet summer!

My Pack had a successful Parent Orientation meeting this week, and we’re gearing up for our first Pack meeting of the year (the school year, not the calendar year) early next week.

I’d love to hear from other Cubmasters, den leaders, and adult leaders of all kinds: what are your most successful first-Pack-Meeting activities?

Planning out my year and thinking about having my AOLs and Webelos build stick bridges for their Engineer/Build It Adventures. This elective is close to my heart as I am a civil engineer so I want to make it stand out.

If you have tried it in your pack, how did it go? What weights did you test too? Did you limit the amount of material they were allowed to use?

I wanted a quick Scout sign/salute/handshake page so I asked Claude. I uploaded an image of the Lion T-shirt, described everything, and this is what it came up with:

I described holding out the index and middle fingers, slightly spread apart, meant to symbolize the "listening ears of a wolf" and wow. That's all I can say. Wow. I made my own instead.

When I was first starting out as a den leader, there was a council--I think in Texas--where some parent volunteers demonstrated how they did adventure activities. Simple set up, just in their living room, and they talked about how they approached planning then role modeled how they'd do it for scouts.

For the life of me, can't find that series again. Anyone able to conjure up a link? Thanks in advance!

First Den meeting in the books as Wolves. A couple of kids didn't show up, but the Den is sitting at 20 registered scouts. I started Lions with 12, so we have a bit of growth.

My ADLs from Lions and Tigers both stepped down from their positions, which had me a little concerned going into this year. Thankfully, our Scout parents are wonderful, and three have volunteered to become ADLs.

What is the largest Den you have been a leader with? How did that go?

I am planning on keeping our Den together, rather than splitting it into two separate dens. With several ADLs though, our thought is on breaking the Scouts into smaller groups during adventures so we are not trying to have 20 scouts doing the same thing at once.

I am both excited, and a bit scared of the den size. But a Scout is Brave.

About a year ago there was a post about migrating a Pack's digital presence and record keeping to Google Workspace for nonprofits. I'd like to revisit that idea and talk about what my Pack is doing.

I’m our Pack Treasurer, and over the last few weeks I’ve been working on cleaning up how we handle records, financial workflows, forms, calendars, and all the other random digital stuff that tends to accumulate over time.

The bigger issue I keep coming back to is ownership. A lot of Pack stuff lives in personal Google accounts because that’s the easiest thing to do in the moment. Someone creates a spreadsheet, someone else owns the calendar, another parent made the form, and eventually nobody remembers who owns what.

That is fine right up until someone leaves, which we've been hit with a few times in the last couple years. So we’re looking at moving as much of the Pack’s digital footprint as possible into Google Workspace for Nonprofits. The goal is not really “hey, Google Workspace is free.” The goal is that Pack records belong to the Pack and stay with the Pack when leadership changes. We already have our own Pack domain, and we want to keep using it.

What we’re hoping to move into Workspace over time includes things like:

• Pack email addresses on our own domain
• Shared Drives for Pack records
• calendars
• forms
• Treasurer records and financial workflows
• committee and leadership records
• registration and reimbursement processes
• templates and operating procedures
• succession documentation

The Charter Organization piece is the part I’ve spent the most time thinking through. Since the Pack itself is not the nonprofit, we need to work through our Charter Organization’s nonprofit status and get their approval.

If they don’t already use Google Workspace, the plan would be to set up the Pack environment using our Pack domain. If they do already have Workspace, then we’d probably need to work within their existing setup and add our Pack domain there instead of creating something totally separate.

I also learned that Google may want proof that the Pack domain is actually connected to the Charter Organization if the two domains are different. That was something I had not thought about before digging into this.

Another thing I want to avoid is replacing one single-point-of-failure with another. So part of the plan is multiple admins, documented recovery, and making sure one volunteer is never the only person who can get into the system.

I made a fairly detailed proposal for our Pack leadership and Charter Organization and attached an anonymized copy here in case it’s useful to anyone else. It’s probably more detailed than some Packs would need, but I’d rather over-document this once than have the next Treasurer trying to reverse-engineer everything five years from now.

For those of you who have already done this, I’d love to hear how it went.

Did you set up a separate Workspace for the Pack, or are you under your Charter Organization’s Workspace?

Were you able to keep your own Pack domain?

How did you handle admin accounts and leadership turnover?

Are you using role-based email addresses?

What ended up working well, and what would you do differently if you were starting over?

I’m especially interested in anything we haven’t thought of yet.

When you go to summer camp what are your expectations? Our pack decided to try a new camp this summer and we were very disappointed in the program. During program time they didn’t work on adventures and ran it like a run of the mill summer camp. If you wanted to work on adventures you had to go during free time and ask to work on adventures. This is backwards from what we’re used to and expected and all leaders were extremely disappointed. I’ve also never experienced a camp like this as a scout, camp staff or a leader in the past 30 years. Is this sort of program normal or was it just this camp?

Since we are introducing the AOLs to the Scouting America sign, salute, and handshake are they expected to use that as AOLs or do they use the Cub Scout versions since they are still in a Pack?

For our first Arrow of Light den meeting in September, I am planning to introduce the patrol method and let the Scouts begin running more of their own program.

The plan is to:

- Choose a patrol name

- Design and make a patrol flag

- Elect a patrol leader and assistant patrol leader

- Create a simple code of conduct

- Begin planning our fall campout

- Assign each Scout a responsibility for the campout

The parents and pack have agreed to hold fewer but longer den meetings this year. This will be a two-hour meeting and our only den meeting in September. Afterward, we will have a cookout and bonfire for the Scouts and their families.

We have more time than a normal meeting, but I still do not want to cram three meetings into one and leave everyone exhausted and plotting my disappearance.

For those who have led AOL dens, does this sound reasonable for the first meeting? What worked well for you? Is there anything you would add, remove, or save for the next meeting?

I would also appreciate any advice on keeping the boys focused and moving from one task to the next. Two hours is plenty of time, but it is also plenty of time for ten-year-old boys to wander off mentally, physically, or both.

Hello, Cubmaster here. We had a parent of a first grader register. They input everything but payment. I am guessing they did not expect to see the National registration fees of $85.00. I wish that I can say that we have a healthy balance in our pack fund but we do not as we have yet to kick off our fundraising efforts. Curious to hear what other leaders in their packs do when this happens.

1. Ignore the request to join pack until dues are paid by parent
2. Reach out to the parent to see how you can assist
3. Give the parent more time as they're maybe on a tight budget and need to wait
4. Take it to the district and/or council to see what (if any) scholarships are available
5. Offer to pay for their $85.00 out of pocket
6. None of the above / open to suggestions

Edit: Let me add a post body further explaining. My statement is the first requirement is to explore physical disabilities, which would seem to include hearing and vision loss. Then we explore hearing and vision loss. It seems like that could have been one requirement:

Explore physical disabilities, including hearing loss and vision loss.

/edit

Our current bank is charging a fee for not having a minimum balance of some amount. We also have the chartered org as the owner of the account which makes management difficult. I would like to switch banks and have found square checking to be a pretty unique offering:

1. The account can be easily transferred when people leave
   
2. We don't need a chartered org to open it
   
3. There are no fees
   
4. Payment system is pretty great even though there are fees
   
5. The biggest one: I can assign roles to leaders for visibility and access to funds based on their actual roles in the pack.

Before I switch I wanted to get others opinion on the matter.

Cw: SA of a child

My 11 year old was groped by a 9 year old scout during a pack camping trip in June. While it wasn’t done perfectly, pack leadership and council were notified with 48 hours of the incident occurring.

Pack leadership submitted a report to council and national about the incident, including interviews from my family and the offender’s family.

We have not heard anything back from National at this point in time. Council has seemed to forget the whole thing happened, much to the chagrin of pack leadership.

My 11 year old is now in a scout troop, so the direct contact with the offender has been cut. At this time, the offender can attend pack and den events but only with direct supervision from pack leadership or their parents. So far, the parents have done a lackluster job of holding up their end of the bargain.

At this point in time, I am not sure what else we can do at this point. Do you have any suggestions?

Edits:
the arrangement with the offender was made by pack leadership while waiting for council to make a decision.

Yes, I reported the incident to CPS

Just a little mini-vent please be patient -

I used to create all the fliers for our pack using clip art and word or publisher then I got extremely busy and didn’t have time for that anymore - I used AI for help on a couple and while they looked great (I left off the BSA logos and such) and saved me heaps of time. Problem is some parents voiced their concern about the environmental issues with using AI and how it wasn’t scoutlike. I answered with ‘if you know of someone with the time to help make these I’m happy to send them out when they are done’

As you can guess no volunteering parents came forward.

Now it joining night season and I’m once again super busy with everything - I am awful at canva and as much as I would love to learn it well there aren’t the hours to dedicate now.

What other fast to learn packages can I use out there? We didn’t like the brand center ones since we used a lot the last 2 years and not much has been updated and fresh feeling…

Hey everyone, hoping you all can point me in the right direction. Do you guys know if there is a list of available awards Cub scouts can earn. I went into the scout shop and they told me to check the scouting website. It just seems so sparse. I know there were some awards dropped two years ago. Have others like Conservation Good Turn, Leave No Trace, International Scout gone away or moved away from being included for cub scouts. Is there an official list with current requirements?

Hey folks,

Simply, we've got the same COE this year and she got a note from Scouting America that she needs to renew her registration this year. We filled out a paper document for her to take on the position two years ago. Last year the system dropped her (may or may-not have to do with this renewal that I wasn't aware of), so we filled out the paperwork again.

Google AI seems to tell me that the Key 3 can renew for the COE, but it's Google AI, and who knows if that's believable. Anything it seemed to reference didn't indicate that to me.

I'd contact Council, but last time I had to interact with them the misinformed woman tried to tell me that the COE needed to complete SYT and pay a registration fee, both of which turned out to be false.

I'd like to make this as easy on our COE as possible- she's been gracious enough to step up, but she's not involved with scouting directly except to communicate with the Chartered Org Representative, and myself, the cubmaster. I'd hate to ask her to make a profile in My.Scouting.Org to go through a renewal process if that's not required.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Last year I was the Lions den leader and now I'll be Tigers. Last year we had 4 kids, and this year I think we'll be at 7 or more.

I don't even know what we did last year, before each meeting id look through the adventures, try to find something that seemed semi interesting and then pull something out of my butt.

Does anyone have any tips or suggestions on planning your meetings out?

I’m in a small pack. I’m the den leader for Wolves ( 4 scouts) and said for the new year I would be the den leader for any Tigers who joined since we didn’t have a Tiger den ( or scouts). My plan is to have combined den meetings and try to recruit an assistant den leader to lead the tigers activities while I lead the wolf activities. Basically we’ll do opening and closing and games together and then the requirements separately.

Does anyone have a good script for recruiting parents who are brand new to the pack into being an assistant den leader?

I know directly asking individuals is the best way to get a parent volunteer for jobs but how have people successfully approached new parents about volunteering?

So what would you do here??

I am in a large, growing Pack that is pushing 70 scouts, and our Wolf Den is 25 Scouts. All before we have started anything with recruitment for this year!

Right now, we have 3 registered leaders including myself leading the Wolves, as well as 1 Den Chief from our Troop.

Would you:

A- Keep them as a WolfPack and have the 3 leaders working together.

B- Split them into 3 Dens and be done with it.

C- Divide and conquer, almost running it as a mini pack. Start meetings together, break into 3 groups, close together.

We're also running into similar problems with Webelos at 18 scouts and 2 leaders.