Friends of Scouting (FOS) Campaign – Feb 15th
Dear Cub Scout Parent,
We hope that you and your family will be able to join us at our Blue & Gold Banquet scheduled for February 15th at 5:30pm at the Coyote Creek MPR. We are very proud of all the boy’s achievements and extremely appreciative of all the parental involvement.
During the banquet, we will be making a brief presentation of the annual Friends of Scouting (FOS) campaign and then asking for your pledges to support our Pack’s FOS effort. The FOS program helps underwrite the cost of Scouting for our district, the Mt. Diablo Silverado Council. We thought it might be beneficial to send out this letter in advance for your information.
Each year, our Scout parents are asked to support some of the hidden costs of Scouting. The Mt. Diablo Silverado Council, which serves almost 17,000 youths, provides numerous benefits to all of our boys and adult volunteers. A few of these benefits include subsidized Cub Day Camp and Cub Family Camps, maintaining facilities such as Camp Herms and Wolfeboro, as well as youth and leadership training.
FOS provides these benefits to our Scouts throughout the bay area. The district’s goal is to raise $120,000 for this year. In the past, parents have contributed gifts ranging from $10 to $1,000. The Scouting organization annually spends about $200 per boy while the registration fee is only $15. The Council hopes that each family will give enough to offset the spending cost for each boy, but if your family cannot contribute to this extent, please know that any amount is welcome. Participation by every family, at any level, is the goal.
If you believe that the Scouting program has had a positive impact on your family, I urge you to join me in this effort to keep the Scout program the dynamic experience for the youth in our area.
Yuji Yamada
Committee Chair
BSA Updated Statement on Membership Policy
From BSA:
For 103 years, the Boy Scouts of America has been a part of the fabric of this nation, providing its youth program of character development and values-based leadership training. In the past two weeks, Scouting has received an outpouring of feedback from the American public. It reinforces how deeply people care about Scouting and how passionate they are about the organization.
After careful consideration and extensive dialogue within the Scouting family, along with comments from those outside the organization, the volunteer officers of the Boy Scouts of America’s National Executive Board concluded that due to the complexity of this issue, the organization needs time for a more deliberate review of its membership policy.
To that end, the National Executive Board directed its committees to further engage representatives of Scouting’s membership and listen to their perspectives and concerns. This will assist the officers’ work on a resolution on membership standards. The approximately 1,400 voting members of the National Council will take action on the resolution at the National Annual Meeting in May 2013.
