(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - When the Boy Scouts of America celebrates its 115th anniversary in 2025, the organization will change its name to Scouting America.

This comes after a lot of changes over the last two decades, including lifting a ban on gay leaders, removing a restriction on denying membership to gay children, and allowing girls to join the Scouts.

Ben Blumenberg is the CEO of the W.D.

Boyce Council, which includes 14 Central Illinois counties.

Good to see you.

- You too, thanks for having me.

- We were talking before this, you're almost a lifelong Scout.

Tell us a little bit about your experiences.

- Yeah, so I joined Scouting in sixth grade.

I was looking for fun and adventure in the outdoors.

And my first activity was a high ropes course, which is a jungle gym 40 feet in the trees that ends with an angel rappel, which is a headfirst rappel, straight down.

From that moment on, I've been hooked.

- That's awesome.

And you've worked in different Scouting areas around the Midwest?

- I have, I have.

I started my Scouting career with the Greater St. Louis Area Council in St. Louis, Missouri.

I spent nine years on the staff there.

Had the awesome privilege of serving as a camp director at the S Bar F Scout Ranch, one of the best jobs I've ever had.

From there, I moved to the Lewis and Clark Council in Belleville, Illinois.

I spent seven years on the staff there.

Then I served for five years as Scout Executive and CEO of the Sagamore Council in Kokomo, Indiana.

And I've been here in Central Illinois for about two-and-a-half years now.

- And representing 14 counties.

And how many thousands of Scouts is that?

- Yeah, so there are about 4,000 Scouts on any given day that are actively engaged in Cub Scouting, Scouts BSA, Venturing and Exploring.

- Tell me about this name change that we're gonna see next year.

Why is the national organization doing this and what do you hope comes out of it?

- Yeah, great question.

When we opened up the program five years ago for girls to join what we called Boy Scouts, we knew we needed to rebrand that.

And so we changed the name of the Boy Scout program to Scouts BSA.

And when we did that, it was really to be open and inclusive and to let girls and everyone understand that our program's for everybody.

We've had girls in the programs of the Boy Scouts of America since 1969.

They've been involved in our Exploring program and our Venturing program, which are programs for 14 to 20 year olds, either adventure based or career based.

So this latest change, this change from the Boy Scouts of America to Scouting America, really puts us more in line with the Scouting movement around the world and is designed to remind girls and families that we want every youth, we want every family to be involved in Scouting.

- From the families and/or girls that you've talked to, are there things in Boy Scouts that they're maybe not getting in Girl Scouts or other aspects of their life?

- I think having a kid, a boy or a girl, in any youth-serving organization, any organization that's about character and values and teaching citizenship and leadership is priority number one.

Obviously, I'm passionate about the programs of the Boy Scouts of America and Scouting America, but we want a kid to be involved in anything.

What we hear from most girls who join our program, most often, they've not been involved in any other Scouting type program.

If they have, they came to our program because they were interested in more of the outdoor adventure.

It was interesting, the very first weekend that we allowed girls to join Scouts BSA, I was working in Kokomo, Indiana, and we had a brand new troop of girls that went camping.

And their scoutmaster sent me a photo Saturday morning, and it's a photo of this cute redhead, long hair in braids wielding an ax with the biggest smile you've ever seen.

And that for me, just captured the moment.

That's what girls wanted.

They wanted that experience, the experience they saw their dads and their brothers have of going off to the Philmont Scout Reservation and hiking 80 miles over seven days, living out of a backpack.

Or the experience at the Florida Sea Base where you live on a sailboat for a week in the Florida Keys.

They are looking for adventure and the outdoors.

- I was gonna say, that's gotta be terrible to know that 20, 30 years ago, just because you're a girl, you can't have the same opportunities and fun as your dad and your brother and your cousins.

- It's been interesting as we've gone through this evolution, I've heard countless stories of, "Well, my daughter was a tag along.

She went along with us on everything.

She just couldn't earn her Eagle Scout."

Or countless families that participated in Scouting as a family unit.

But again, the son would advance and earn badges and get to fully participate.

The daughters often had to sit there and watch.

- When I was a kid, we talked earlier about my disastrous Boy Scout experience because we just didn't have the leadership there.

But I think when people think about Boy Scouts, they think about camping, learning how to start fires, survival, things like that.

But tell us about some of the other aspects that you want the kids to learn in terms of being a good person.

- Yeah, I think the most important thing that Scouting teaches is character, citizenship, fitness, and leadership.

Those are the core things that we're after.

Camping is a way that we do that.

The outdoors is a way that we do that.

The advancement model that we use is a way that we do that.

It provides the structure to get at the goals we're after.

And those goals are very much so leadership and leadership with character.

- So, in 2024, how are you competing against the almighty tablet, cell phone, TV?

That's gotta be tough.

- Yeah, I think every organization that serves kids is competing against those.

And part of the problem is families are busier than they've ever been.

The percentage of kids that grow up in a single-parent household is higher than it's ever been.

And if they grow up in a dual-parent household, both parents work full-time, generally, which doesn't leave enough time for parents to be parents.

It doesn't leave enough time for them to engage with their kids.

And those devices, cell phones, tablets are addictive for kids.

I see it with my own kids.

I have a 12-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son.

They're both involved in Scouts BSA, they absolutely love camping.

But on Thursday, when we're starting to pack for a weekend camp out, I get the gripes.

"Do we have to go, do we have to go?"

The minute we get on the camp out, the minute they start setting up their tent, it's like the reptilian brain kicks in and they can breathe and their smiles' so much bigger and their eyes are brighter.

Kids need to be outside.

They need to be active and engaged with adults that care about them, that want to help them grow, and they need that adventure.

- From the parents' perspective, the cell phone, the screen time, whatever, may be an easy babysitter, if you wanna call it that, but are there other barriers that parents may face in terms of maybe not enrolling their boy or girl in the Boy Scouts?

- I think sometimes for parents it's a lack of understanding what the program's about.

It's easy if you are a parent that grew up in the Scouting program to understand the value and the benefit of it for your child.

If you aren't a legacy member, maybe you just don't understand.

You think it's a camping club.

And it's so much more than that.

So we wanna make sure that we eliminate every barrier.

If there's a financial barrier for a family, we're gonna eliminate it.

If it's a barrier of we don't have a group close enough to us, we wanna fix that.

We wanna have a Cub Scout Pack and a Scouts BSA troop in every community.

We don't want kids to have to travel far for this.

It's too important for them not to have the opportunities.

So I think any parent that doesn't understand why for them, they should certainly check out our website or check out bsscout.org.

- Over the years, there's been allegations and cases of Boy Scout leaders doing bad things to kids.

Is that still a stigma that you're trying to overcome?

Are parents as concerned about that these days?

- I think in today's day and age, parents need to be concerned about that everywhere.

We are heartbroken that people took advantage of the programs of the Boy Scouts of America to hurt kids.

Those same bad people took advantage of any opportunity they could to get access to youth.

Our programs have been safer, or they are safer now, than they've ever been.

Since the 1980s, we've had a youth protection program in place that has almost completely eradicated any instance of abuse of a child.

While any instance is way too many, we don't want any kids to be harmed in our program, I think any parent that really looks at what we do will find that the programs of the Boy Scouts of America, soon to be Scouting America, are safer than any other youth program they can put their kid in.

- When I was going over the National Boy Scouts website, it's commendable that they're not trying to hide from that issue.

They have different links on their pages about things that may have happened in the past and ways that they are trying to make sure that it doesn't happen again.

So it's commendable that they're out ahead of that.

Let's talk a little bit about present day.

Again, we said tablets and screens are competition.

How have you guys been since COVID?

Did you guys take a big hit there?

- COVID was disastrous for probably any organization that serve kids, but certainly for Scouting.

What we saw during the COVID pandemic, when schools shut down, the primary mechanism for kids to join Cub Scouts, which is our entry program, is through the school.

And so for two years we recruited virtually no kids into Cub Scouts.

That caused certainly a gap in our membership, but also it caused some of our Cub Scout Packs just to close up shop.

They didn't have enough new Cub Scouts and families coming in, so they folded up their tent and they packed it away.

So that's part of the process we're going through now, is going back into those communities where we don't have an active Cub Scout Pack or an active Scouts BSA troop, and working with parents who care about their kids' development to restart Cub Scouting, to restart Scouts BSA.

- I know you guys have a big camp coming up and you have a lot of different events going on through the area.

What are some of the bigger events that you guys have going on?

- Yeah, so starting this week, this week kind of kicks off our summer camp.

We have Cub Scout Day Camp going on right now.

We'll run day camps throughout our 14 councils for the next four weeks.

And then all through June and the first part of July, we run our Scouts BSA Resident Camp at the Ingersoll Scout Reservation in London Mills.

So we'll camp about a thousand people over the course of the summer there through the Scouts BSA program.

At the end of July, we have Cub Scout Resident Camp, and that program has just skyrocketed.

Three years ago, we had 30 Cub Scouts and their parents.

This year we're gonna have close to 200 who will come out and spend three nights at Cub Scout Resident Camp.

And then one of our neatest program that kind of wraps out the summer for us is called National Youth Leadership Training, or NYLT.

It's a week-long management leadership, conflict resolution, communications training for 13 to 18-year-old boys and girls.

Teaches 'em how to be great leaders, teaches them how to be great Scout leaders and leaders in their schools.

But we'll have about 80 participants in that program, and it's just phenomenal.

When kids leave NYLT, their parents routinely call us and say, "I don't know what in the world you've done, but this kid has a new spark.

He's on fire for Scouting, he's excited."

It's a life-changing week for them.

- How is your participation in areas like say maybe a poorer section of Peoria that's been traditionally a beaten down area, I mean, it would seem like it would be great to get kids who maybe are in danger of going down the wrong path into Scouts.

What kind of participation do you have in those areas around the area?

- Yeah, not nearly enough.

We run a couple programs.

We call it Scoutreach.

It's a Scouting option that's delivered, often during the school day or right after school, through a paid Scouting professional.

In areas like that, it's really hard to bring a group of parents together to lead.

That's when we're most successful.

I have a small staff of about a dozen people that serve 14 counties of Scouting.

We have a thousand volunteers that we work with.

That's how we're able to serve so many kids in such a great way.

And so in a community where we don't have those active volunteers, then it falls on us as a council to provide that program.

And it's staff intensive, it's dollar intensive, and post-COVID, we're really struggling there.

- Yeah.

- We're not doing as good a job as I'd like.

- It'd be great if somebody with a few extra bucks could give a grant to you guys and say, "Hey, I want you to take X amount of kids in this specific area.

Take 'em out to camp for a weekend, get 'em outta their environment and see what kind of an effect that has on them."

- Right, right.

I won't be satisfied until we have kids from the south side of Peoria that are becoming Eagle Scouts, boys and girls.

When we have the first girl earn her Eagle Scout from the south side of Peoria, I'll know we're starting to make a difference in that community.

- I was just thinking about some of those other barriers that parents may face.

Do you ever have to deal with a parent, a mom or dad, who's a "helicopter parent" and says, "Oh, maybe Scouts, but I don't want little Johnny to go off to camp and sprain his ankle," do you ever have to talk parents down on that?

- You know what, I think that's certainly a bigger issue than when you and I were growing up and- - Our parents wanted us to leave the house.

- They did, you're right, you're right.

One of the unique approaches that I think Scouting has is we ask all parents to be a part of it.

But we do that in a way that says, for us, when we're on a camp out, I'm Mr. Blumenberg to my kids.

I'm not dad.

If they've got a dad problem, it's gonna have to wait until we're home from the camp out.

If they've got another problem, there are other adults that help them.

So as adults, we try and take each other's kids and be that other voice.

We know that oftentimes you and I can deliver the same message to our kids.

My kids are gonna hear it from you like they won't hear it from me.

They just need that different voice and they need other adults in their life that care about them, that wanna see them succeed.

And in Scouting, we have a group of parents with the same values that want the same things for their kids that are essentially really kind of building the neighborhood community sense that we used to have that we've really kinda lost as a society.

- As far as parents and volunteers, how important is it for the Scouts to have volunteers and how are you doing in that area?

- It's critical.

We're okay, but we could always use more volunteers.

Our number one priority is to serve kids in Scouting.

But I think a very close second is serving parents.

Often, and especially in our Cub Scout program we see this, parents don't necessarily know how to parent, how to interact with their kid, how to play in a way that helps them develop.

The Cub Scout program in particular, and the Scouts BSA program for sure, but the Cub Scout program puts parents in a position where they can work with their individual kid.

It gives them a recipe or roadmap to work with their child to help them develop these character skills and leadership traits that we want through Scouting.

In the Scouts BSA program, parents almost get to participate parallel to their youth.

They're on the ropes course.

Our troop a couple of weeks ago went to Great Oaks Camp and did the high ropes course there.

Well, the adults did it too.

So in the Scouts BSA program, the Scouts get to see adults going through the same challenges that they go through.

They're almost watching their mentors do the Scouting program alongside of them.

- I was telling a friend the other day that we were gonna do this interview, and she wanted clarity on whether or not the Scouts was a "religious organization."

We talked earlier in the show in the intro about how the Scouts used to be, I would say, a conservative organization in terms of homosexuality and girls joining, things like that.

Now that's done a 180.

Do the Scouts formally teach religion or anything like that?

- We don't.

The Scouts have a requirement that a member believe in a power greater than themselves.

What that is, is up to a family and a pastor to help a Scout.

But we do believe in reverence.

It's the 12th point of the Scout Law.

It's just not a dictated policy.

- Okay, so no teaching religion or politics or anything like that?

- [Ben] No.

- That sounds perfect, actually.

- It's a beautiful thing.

- Kids get away with no religion, no politics, and just get to have fun.

How do you see the future of this organization, especially here locally?

- The future's bright, I think.

We've seen membership continue to grow year after year.

I think as well, coming out of COVID, parents realized that there are a lot of things they can invest their family time in, but not all of them pay a dividend.

And I think they focused in on the things that really do have a return for them and for their child.

The world isn't getting any easier.

It isn't easier for kids to be kids today than it was when I was a kid.

It's certainly getting harder.

And kids today don't have the same honorable, trusted community role models to look up to.

Parents have to find those for their kids now.

It's not an automatic that because that person's an elected official or because that person's a religious person that they're gonna be the role model for my kids.

I have to build that community for them.

So I think parents are seeing that and they're seeing the value of investing in the things that are most important.

We know that, and I hear routinely, grown men that are Eagle Scouts tell me, "Eagle Scout's still listed on my resume.

I'm 55 years old, Eagle Scout's still listed on my resume."

Anything that you can do at 13, 14, 15 years old that you list on your resume as a grown adult certainly carries a lot of value.

And that's what we want for all kids.

We want them to have that opportunity.

- That's a great point, especially with so much competition for the good jobs these days, that having that Eagle Scout or Boy Scout on your resume still means a lot.

What kind of a time commitment are the Scouts looking for from a child?

We talkin' stuff going on every other day of the week, once a week?

- Yeah, in general, Scouts meet once a week.

At the Scouts BSA level, at least our group, we meet every Monday night, and then we have one camp out a month.

We typically take a month off in the summer after summer camp.

And the camp outs might range from just a simple 10 camping outing, or could be a cave exploration or whitewater rafting, or a week at summer camp.

At the Cub Scout level, it's very similar.

The dens, grade groups of Cub Scouts, will typically meet once a week or every other week.

And then the Cub Scout Pack, which is the entire elementary school, meets once a month for an activity and to do some awards and recognition.

- Now, typically we talk about class size, but typically, how many Scouts are in each different group?

I mean, do you have like an average, like 10?

Are we talking 10, 12?

- Well, if I had it my way, it would be all of them.

All of the kids would be involved in Scouting.

Generally for a Cub Scout den, though, a grade specific, we recommend somewhere between six and 12.

Eight seems to be kind of a good number.

Scouts BSA troops, though, run the gamut.

The troop that my kids are affiliated with, our boy troop has about 56 boys.

Our girl troop's at about 16 girls.

There are some that are smaller, five, six, seven, kids.

Generally, what I like to say to the kids at least, is the more the better.

The more Scouts we get, the crazier it is, and we want it to be crazy exciting.

- Now, with the girls being allowed to join in, are they integrated and doing the exact same thing the boys are doing or are they certain activities separate for each group, how's that work?

- Yeah, so at the Scouts BSA level, what we used to call Boy Scouting, boys and girls are in separate troops.

And so in our case in Dunlap, the boy troop and the girl troop open the meeting together with their opening ceremony.

Generally, they have different agendas for the meeting.

The boys might be working on a skill over here.

The girls are working on a different skill over here.

And then they close the meeting together.

Some camp outs, both troops would go on, some camp outs are girl troop only, some camp outs are boy troop only.

It really depends on the community and what the families are looking for.

- Absolutely, and what's the best way, before we go, for people to find out more information?

- The best way is to go to beascout.org.

- Beascout.org.

And that'll have even local information on it?

- Yeah, beascout.org, you can punch in your zip code.

It'll show you the closest Cub Scout Pack or Scouts BSA troop to your community.

That's the best way to get involved.

- Ben Blumenberg is the CEO of the W.D.

Boyce Council, which includes 14 counties right here in Central Illinois.

Thanks for all the info.

- Thank you, appreciate it.

- Appreciate it.

Phil Luciano joins us now with a look at what's up next on "You Gotta See This."

- You know, I've been around Peoria 30 some years.

I thought I knew a lot of things.

Maybe I do, maybe I don't.

But one thing I did not know is that the Peoria Fire Department has a pair of arson dogs.

These are dogs that investigate arson.

This is really rare.

Chicago, kind of a big city, right?

You've heard of it?

- Yeah.

- No arson dogs.

Springfield, no arson dogs.

There's a few towns, few cities in Illinois that have them.

Peoria has two.

And it makes for a much more complete and easy investigation of fires to check out what happened, how'd this fire start?

Is there something afoul happening?

And we'll show you these two dogs, Rock and Molly, and how they do what they do.

It's really kind of cool to see 'em in action and how they, voom, hone in on these accelerants and whatnot.

- Wow, that's pretty cool.

And I understand we're gonna talk a little bit about roller derby.

- Kayla and Amy are videographers.

They went out to join the local roller derby practice, a team, at one of their practices.

And I don't know yet as we speak, how much they mixed it up a bit.

I think they did, but I wanna see if they end up on their hind ends.

I think they just might, they just might.

- Interesting.

I can't see either one of them roller skating or trying to knock people over on roller skates.

- They could be the new sensation, I don't know.

I am dying to see this myself.

And one other story, speaking of interesting athletes and feats of renown, there's a baseball player, you may or may not have heard of him, his name is Hoss Radbourn.

He was from Bloomington, he's buried in Bloomington.

And two things about him.

One, he's known at the National Baseball Hall of Fame as the greatest pitcher of the 19th century.

Okay, that's well and done.

He's one of those guys who would throw for literally 600 innings and won 60 games one year.

It's crazy.

But the reason he has a renaissance in renown and why people visit his grave now, people found out in more recent years, they looked at old photographs, and he was kind of a crafty, silly guy, sticking out one of his fingers in photographs, like team photos, there, it's popping out there.

Oh, it's popping out there.

And he's just smiling and whatnot.

And you see this and it's just hilarious.

He's now recognized as the first person to give that finger in a photograph.

- Interesting, alright.

- An odd achievement, but people go and see his graveyard just because of that.

- Alright, great episode, it sounds like, coming up of "You Gotta See This" starting in just a few minutes.

Thank you for joining us.

Check us out anytime at wtvp.org and on Facebook and Instagram.

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