AUGUST PROGRAM PLANNING Music Full then Under GARFIELD: Hello and welcome to the August ExploringCast. I m Garfield Murden, Senior Boy Scouting Specialist. And I m Kristen Falatko, Senior Exploring Program Specialist. August means it s time for Exploring Program Planning. If you re not familiar with it, Program Planning sounds a little daunting, doesn t it? And if you are familiar, well, you might be feeling pretty overwhelmed. GARFIELD: We ve all been there, but planning your Exploring program year will only make your Advisor or Sponsor experience so much more enjoyable. And we re here to help make the process of planning your program not so overwhelming. So let s started. Music Fades GARFIELD: We re going to discuss the planning process for both Exploring clubs and posts because I m guessing there are some differences there. So here to help us with the Exploring clubs Program Planning is Ruthe Holmberg who joined the Lincoln Heritage Council in Louisville, Kentucky in 2004 as a District Executive and has been the council s Learning for Life Director for three years, with a focus on growing the middle school Exploring clubs. And, yes, there are some differences between clubs and post. Clubs are for middle-school-aged young men and women, ten years old and not yet 14. Explorer Post are from 14 and not yet 20 years old; the high school range. And so, along with Ruthe, also joining us for her expertise with 1
Exploring Post Program Planning is Tiffanie Ruppright. Tiffanie has been the Exploring Executive for the Black Swamp Area Council in Findlay, Ohio, for a little over a year now, but in that short time she has hit the positive year-end growth number while still adding four new Exploring Posts. GARFIELD: But whether you have new clubs or posts or one that have already been established for a while, they all need Program Planning, so ladies, welcome to ExploringCast! Thank you. Thank you. GARFIELD: So let s start off with Tiffanie. What exactly is Program Planning? Program Planning is the process of deciding what you want to put on the calendar for the entire year. For the post side of that, if you have a Medical Post you can decide exactly what type of different categories you want to go into. Say you have some students that want to learn about being a nurse or some that want to learn about being in ER, or even some that want to be a doctor, you have the option to mix and match those different careers. GARFIELD: So, Ruthe, what is Program Planning for clubs? 2
Program planning on the club side is a little different. Exploring Clubs have only been with us nationally for about three years, and we are exploring a variety of careers. So, after a lot of trial and error over the last two years, my advisors and my board and I have all found that the best way to do Program Planning is to let our club members be our lead because we don t want to focus on a career that no one in the club has an interest in and then to have the students be a part of the entire planning for that year. Thank you, Ruthe. Now, Tiffanie, let s go back to you. Tell us a little bit about why Program Planning for posts is so important? Program Planning is so important because it s sets a precedent on what will be done throughout the whole entire year. That way when you have the first introductory meeting at the beginning of the year, you can hand out calendars to all of the youth and their parents. This helps field a lot of calls that the parents will be asking, If you have that all at the beginning of the year, they won t ask those questions. GARFIELD: Ladies, who in the post or club is responsible for this process of Program Planning? Who would like to begin, Tiffanie? Sure. For us, the main people is the advisors in the post. They have the most access to multiple facilities, multiple connections. They ve met with people during networking so that they can get the different ideas out there. Say you have Explorers that want to go to a cadaver lab. Well, there is not very many cadaver labs throughout your area, so to have someone that has that knowledge on how to get into a cadaver lab to get that hands-on experience is very beneficial to those students. 3
GARFIELD: And Ruthe, when it comes to clubs, who is responsible for that process? We work with what in Kentucky is called a Youth Service Center Director. The equivalent in other states may be the social worker within the school or possibly a guidance counselor. At that point we discuss what it is that they are hoping as an outcome might be, and if they would be the advisor, if they have a parent that would be a great advisor, or if there is a teacher within the building that might be an appropriate advisor. So, it allows for the students to have a hand in that planning, but the leader is almost always one of the school either teachers, the social worker, the counselor or hopefully a parent. Now, Ruthe, we ve talked about the importance about Program Planning. Tell us a little bit about the steps for the clubs the Program Planning process? Always attend the first club meeting with the advisors. And our first day we talk with the students, find out where their interests are and what they re interested in doing. Afterwards I then meet with the advisor one-on-one and we brainstorm. We have built a speakers bureau of about 50 people, and if we have some of those careers listed within our speaker s bureau, we may begin to call and schedule them. But I also always like the teacher or parent, or counselor administrator to reach out to the parents within the school and the teachers spouses within the schools. That is just a gold mine. They always think it s really neat if Mrs. Smith s husband comes in to talk to them about what he does. 4
Also, another thing that I think makes it a little easier for us is that we go to the open houses or the registration prior to the start of school with the middle schools that we re working with or the ones that we ve targeted. A parent s got to be there with them so we can get that application filled out with the parent right there and hopefully the fee paid. And then when we have our first meeting, all of that paperwork is done and we can start right in with planning. We also use the curriculum for the sixth, seventh and eighth grade club that s online on the Learning for Life website. Our teachers and our advisors have found that they d like to maybe merge some of those together or they like to break some of them apart and make them go longer if they feel like it s a really important lesson that they want to learn. Right. So after we have determined what they want to do, we have also been building in team-building activities maybe for a week or two. We usually like to end the year with maybe a vision board. Some of the schools talk about a career fair and open it maybe to one particular grade with the Explorer club being our planners and our host for the day of the career fair. So we sit down and compile the entire calendar for the year depending on what we re being told from the students, and it s worked really well. Okay. Now, Tiffanie, this may look a little bit different for the posts, so can you explain and describe what the steps are like in the Program Planning process for the Exploring post? 5
Absolutely. So, getting a Program Planning meeting is one of the most crucial steps and it s always the hardest part. You have business leaders who are trying to take time out of their busy calendars to make time to meet with everyone, so you have at least four people s calendars that you working with. You always want to know what their school calendar is. Usually you can find that on their websites, but you want to make sure your meetings set up around their time. Say there s a big basketball game or a football game. You re not going to have very much attendance by your Explorers because they re (going to) want to be supporting their school so, it s very important to have that school calendar. But once you get everyone together the first thing is, if it s a previous post, discuss all of meetings from the previous year and decide what went well and what didn t go well, what to keep and what to get rid of. If it s a new post, give them lots and lots of different ideas of what other posts have done for their meetings. The next thing to do would be know what to do to get extra hands-on experience for them. We do a Medical Post at a local hospital, they know that the last two meetings of every school year is going to be the local cadaver lab and the local physicians assistants lab. Then the next step would be to make a list of interesting professionals that you think your youth would want to meet with throughout the year that could help provide resources, make the meetings better. Also, it would behoove them to make sure that they get all the permissions to tour any local facilities at this time. They may need the approval months in advance. During the planning session write out a calendar and make sure you leave a few meetings open towards the end of the year. Also, make sure every 6
Exploring meeting you leave a little wiggle room to and make time for questions. If I could just interject a couple of things to build on what Tiffanie said. Something we are also finding with middle school Exploring club, is that this is a great way for us to identify and feed into the post or possibly create a post. If you ve had students show that they re all very interested in pharmacy, for instance, that makes it a lot easier to go to either a pharmacist and say, Look, I ve got these kids that are excited, they really want to learn about pharmacy as a career, to then create that post. GARFIELD: This has been very informative, but I do have a question for you. I know that our listeners, especially advisors and sponsors, are very intrigued to know where can advisors and sponsors find more information about the Program Planning process? The Learning for Life website within MyBSA has got a wealth of information for both clubs and posts. Those are great resources for the professional staff to use. If you don t have access to that because you are not a professional staff, utilize your professional staff. They are there to help you with that. But one of the biggest resources is exploring.org. There s a really great tool that they now have on there. It s the Activity Library. You can get a lot of different activities and it breaks it down for each career field. So, you may be stuck on what to do and you can just go online to exploring.org and there is tons and tons of great activities. There is testimonials of different advisors and Explorers who have been there and have been in your place. 7
You guys really sound like you are experts of the Program Planning process, so Tiffanie, I m going to ask this question to you. When should an annual program conference or annual program meeting take place? It is best to have a planning session in about late July, early August. That way it s before school starts and the professionals have the Exploring career surveys results cleaned up by now at that point. If you have a new post, I would suggest doing this more towards the beginning of July just because you re going to have more questions come up. I have a couple new posts that I started last year. One of them was through a local homebuilders association so you have a lot of different fields for your advisors that you want to be able to cover, so you need to have extra time built into those meetings. I have another post that is through Whirlpool, and they are partnered with a local community college so their schedule has to be formed around the college s schedule because they do about four meetings a year at the local college. Okay, thank you, Tiffanie. Now, Ruthe, I m (going) switch it back over to you. There may be some similarities, but when should that annual program meeting or conference take place for the middle school clubs? What we found to be very effective is to gather all of the advisors together after school has concluded, within that first week before people leave for vacation, and say, Okay, what worked for you? What did you try? What didn t work for you? and give everybody a chance to share with each other since they are so really individualized. We are also in partnership with our Metro Parks Department and the community centers. This is a 8
relatively new program for us, only the last few months, but we brought them into this focus group, if you will, right after school so that they could hear what other people were doing with the whole club opportunity. That really seems to have sparked a lot of great ideas and then we communicate through the summer by email. Then that advisor for each school, we will get together anywhere from a month to a week prior to the start of school. GARFIELD: Ladies, once again, this is a great session and we really do enjoy the time we re spending together here. Now, is there anything else that we haven t talked about that you think our listeners would like to know? I ll go ahead and jump in there. So, very first thing is get to know your guidance counselors. They will be your best friend throughout the school year and you can give them all the information for the career surveys and the open houses. Another thing I would like to advise is plan time for job shadowing, whether it be over the summer or throughout the year. Your Explorers will thank you for that. GARFIELD: All right. Ruthe? I would echo what Tiffanie said. I go to our educator monthly meetings whenever I can. Our principals meet every other month, our counselors monthly, and our Youth Service Centers meet on a monthly basis. And I completely agree. The counselor is absolutely your best friend. So is the secretary at the school. And if you can get a relationship going with her, that just opens doors like you wouldn't believe. It s all about relationship building. And I know we all know that but it, it does pay off immensely. 9
GARFIELD: You know, this kind of reminds me of that quote by Ben Franklin that goes, By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Ruthe, Tiffanie, thanks for being on ExploringCast and making it sound so easy. No problem. Now, besides this podcast, there are lots of other ways for you to stay connected to the Exploring Program. Just go to exploring.org where you can sign up for the monthly newsletter, follow us on Facebook, and hey, there s even an Exploring YouTube channel! GARFIELD: So if you want your finger on the pulse of the Exploring program, be sure to check out those resources. Another great resource is the FUSE livestream events. In case you hadn t heard, FUSE stands for Find Your Success in Exploring and you can find the latest FUSE Event at livestream.com/bsa/nationalcouncil. GARFIELD: You may have to scroll down the page a bit to find it, but these events are packed with what trends are happening with posts and clubs across the nation. We will also have another event in October and we ll have updates in future Exploringcast episodes. As a reminder to our Exploring Executives who are listening: Do you have your Career Interest Surveys ordered yet? Or do you have them but you 10
just don t know the best way to get them to the students? Well, please, do not worry. Just go back to the July episode of this podcast for everything, and I mean everything, you need to know about the Career Interest Survey. BEGIN MUSIC UNDER But, sadly, the August episode of ExploringCast has come to an end, folks. Thanks to our guests, Ruthe Holmberg and Tiffanie Ruppright, for joining us. GARFIELD: And thank you for listening, but don't keep all the fun to yourself. Be sure your fellow leaders are tuning in as well. Join us next month as we discuss all the nuts and bolts needed for building an Exploring Open House. Are there other tops you guys would like to hear about? Let us know by sending us an email to exploringcast@scouting.org, or send us a tweet to @exploringcast. With that, I m Kristen Falatko. GARFIELD: And I m Garfield Murden. The clock is ticking, so start your program planning now. Music Full to Finish 11