Big Rocks are the items that are most important. In scouting your big rocks include membership, leadership, program and fundraising. Each Scouting topic is discussed in turn and their relationship to each other and the program.
Transcript:
Big Rocks are important items that are the most important items for your program. While each unit can have their own big rocks, the typical big rocks include membership, program, leadership, and fundraising, and I will take each in turn.
Membership refers to the scouts you have in your program, but more importantly than the continuous group of scouts you have in the program, is the ones that you lose and the ones that come into the program as new scouts. If your unit is lucky, this is not a big rock topic for you. If you bring in about the same number of scouts that leave the overall running total of scouts is consistent. If it’s not it can be a big problem. Scouts age out naturally, but if your attrition is higher or your incoming class is low it can mean bad things for your unit.
Program, is one of the best ways to keep scouts interested, and keep them from dropping out. While scouts will drop for many reasons, a robust program is one that keeps scouts interested giving them a reason to stay.
For some units, if they are really organized and been around for a while might not be a big rock for them. While you might tweak it, if you have found the sweet spot of program and activity that keeps the scouts coming back year of year you might be a unit that may need to focus on other rocks.
But for example if you see scouts are not camping, or avoid certain trips or activities, you might want to focus more on this rock.
Leadership is usually the Achilles heel of a unit’s big rocks. If yours is not, congratulations, as this is one that can be totally dependent on the folks in your unit, something you really have little control over.
It’s always a shame when activities need to be canceled because you don’t have the right leaders in place. In it’s worst case, units can fold if they don’t have leaders to run their programs.
As a big rock the best you can do is to recruit out of your unit, get one of the new adults to take on the position of new member coordinator, it’s a great opportunity to grow your unit in a low impact way.
Our last big rock is fundraising. The size of this rock is really dependent on the goals of the unit. In some units, they have fundraising goals that include raising all the funds for all trips and activities, and in some units, they look at it in the opposite vein, that a unit’s responsibility is to run program, and the costs of the unit are shouldered by it’s members solely.
Most units however are somewhere in the middle, as fundraising can be a good opportunity for growth for a scout, and have them understand there is a cost to things and they should pay part of their own way.
As you can see, it’s pretty unusual for all four of these to be the biggest rocks, and this can be dependent on the makeup of your unit. As you can also see is that many of these are interconnected. As rocks go, the smaller you can make your rocks, the easier and better your program will be.
Take what you like and leave the rest, and as we say in Woodbadge, feedback is a gift, leave yours below in the comments, with the hope we can all learn together.
I’m Scoutmaster Dave, and this was a bit on big rocks.
