Word: scouting
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...Skills & Muscle." What needs help is Scouting itself. As the U.S. has urbanized, Scouting has continued to flourish in suburbs and middle-sized towns, and to languish in big-city slums where boys are often most troubled. One recent study showed that one out of three suburban boys belonged to the Scouts, compared with one out of seven boys in metropolitan poverty pockets. Not surprisingly, Scouting has been disproportionately white and middle class. According to another survey, 15% of all Scout-aged boys (8 to 17) came from families with less than $3,000 income; yet less than...
While membership has grown 38% in the past ten years (latest total: 4.2 million), Scouting still reaches only 25% of all Scout-aged boys. More discouraging was a survey revealing that among adults, 59% of the nation's poor knew little of the Boy Scouts; often they had never even heard of the organization. Among Negroes, the percentage was 64%. "What we have to do," says National Council (and IBM) President Thomas J. Watson Jr., "is adjust without changing fundamental Scouting aims." To Pittsburgh-bred Joseph A. Brunton Jr., 63, chief Scout executive for six years, this means developing...
Middle-Class Appeal. Some of that has already begun. In 1963 the national council sent a staff member to Miami to organize Scout groups among Cuban refugees. Today 1,044 young exiles are Boy Scouts. The national council last year dispatched 16 professional organizers, five of them Negroes, to organize new Scout groups in blighted big-city neighborhoods, as well as in three impoverished rural communities...
Generating interest among blasé slum kids-and their parents-has not been easy. An organizer in Newark had to go door to door and hold 25 public meetings to find enough adults to volunteer as Scout workers. In Philadelphia, confronted by parental apathy, an organizer learned that neighborhood youths had been swiping tools off Bell Telephone trucks. He staked out the company garage, caught several of them in the act, and made them the nucleus of a new troop...
Another objective of Scouting's new look has been to broaden the base of Scout sponsorship, long confined largely to churches and civic groups. Because of national council initiatives, Scout groups run by public-housing authorities have increased since 1960 from 210 to 704, those sponsored by settlement houses from 250 to 380. There are now 39 Scout groups at federal Job Corps camps, 14 at New Jersey's Camp Kilmer alone. As a "middleclass institution," says Job Corps Official David Gottlieb, Scouting appeals to Job Corps boys who "want to make...