Boy Scouts trying to recruit more Latino kids amid changing demographics

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Boy Scouts trying to recruit more Latino kids amid changing demographics

Posted on 08 March 2010 by oscar

From: PE.com

When Phil Velez was growing up in Pico Rivera, his school was overwhelmingly Latino, but almost every Cub Scout and Boy Scout was white.

“We just thought it wasn’t for us,” Velez said. “There’s still an image of the scouts as a middle-class, white organization.”

Velez, 33, now an Inland scouting official, is part of a new effort by the Boy Scouts of America to change that perception. The organization has created a Hispanic Initiatives program that aims to double the number of Latino Scouts by the end of 2010, the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America.

Only 130,000 — or 4 percent — of the 2.9 million Scouts are Latino, said Marcos Nava, national director of Hispanic Initiatives. That’s up from 100,000 since early 2008, when the program began. The goal is 200,000 by the end of the year, Nava said.

For regions like the Inland area, the Latino outreach is a matter of survival. Nearly 60 percent of public school students are Latino, and that number is expected to rise. About 20 percent of Inland Scout parents who responded to a question on ethnicity identified their children as Hispanic.

The program faces challenges, including language barriers, the resemblance of Boy Scout uniforms to those of the Border Patrol’s, a shortage of Latino Scout employees and a lack of knowledge about Scouting.

Although the Scouts are an iconic institution in many suburban white, middle-class communities, the Boy Scouts are virtually unknown among some Latinos, especially immigrants.

“We have to do a better job of telling our story and telling people what Scouting is all about,” said Joseph Daniszewski, CEO of the California Inland Empire Council of the Boy Scouts. “We can’t assume that everyone knows what scouting is.”

Yolanda Bocanegra, 43, immigrated from Mexico a quarter century ago, but the Colton woman never knew about scouting until a few years ago, when she heard a police officer mention it on Spanish-language radio as a good way to keep kids out of trouble. Bocanegra later enrolled son Daniel, now 9, in Cub Scouts.

“I like it because they teach them good things, and they learn discipline,” Bocanegra said in Spanish.

Daniel said he enjoys Scouting because it’s fun.

“It’s really good,” Daniel said. “We’ve done all these activities: camping, archery, fishing, BB guns, rock-climbing, swimming, horseback riding.”

Bocanegra often accompanies her son to Scout meetings. She said she’d be lost if Leno Moreno, the leader of her son’s scout pack, didn’t translate parts of the meetings into Spanish.

Moreno, 40, is the type of scoutmaster whom the organization desperately needs: Latino, bilingual and well-respected in his community. Moreno persuaded friend Tammy Tabera to enroll her son Thomas, 7, in the Scouts, despite initial reservations. She said Scout leaders in the West Texas town where she grew up didn’t want Latino kids.

“To me, it was geared toward rich, white kids,” said Tabera, 32, of Colton. “They were the only ones they went after.”

Tabera wondered whether Scouting would be too expensive. Moreno tries to reduce costs by requiring the purchase only of a Scout shirt, rather than a full uniform, and not mandating hiking shoes, vests, hats and other items that can quickly add up to a few hundred dollars.

“If they can’t afford the shirt and the (Boy Scout) book, we’ll buy it for them,” he said.

The money comes from local fundraisers and from the ScoutReach program, which aims to recruit scouts from groups that have traditionally not been involved with Scouting in large numbers, including the Latino, black, Asian and low-income communities.

Velez heads ScoutReach for the Inland council. He said previous efforts to recruit Hispanic Scouts faltered in part because few of those doing the outreach were Latino.

“There’s an instant rapport between the individual delivering the message and the individual receiving the message,” said Velez, who, like other Scout officials, works closely with trusted Hispanic community organizations and churches to spread the Scouts’ message. “It’s all about relationship-building.”

Yet many Latino parents speak little or no English, and few Scout employees speak Spanish. In the Inland council, four of 19 employees speak Spanish, Daniszewski said. Nationally, only about 180 of 3,000 employees are Spanish-speakers, Nava said. Increasing that number is a key component of the Scouts’ Latino-outreach effort, he said.

Nava visited the Inland area in December to advise the local council and to share the experiences of a Fresno-based council that is one of six Hispanic Initiatives pilot sites for Latino outreach strategies.

That council has increased its percentage of Latino Scouts from 20 to 30 percent since early 2008 through intensive outreach that includes participation in Hispanic festivals, close collaboration with the area’s Catholic diocese, and Spanish-language billboard, radio and television ads, said John Richers, the council CEO.

The Inland council is planning to air Spanish-language radio ads later this year. It will soon receive the new, recently unveiled Spanish-language Boy Scout handbook. The Cub Scouts have had a Spanish-language handbook for a decade.

The Scouts do not require that parents or children are legal U.S. residents. But parents who want to volunteer as Scout leaders must fill out application forms that include a request for a Social Security number.

Nava said that requirement can be waived under a longtime national policy that allows background checks without the numbers. But some councils — including the California Inland Empire — maintain the requirement to ensure children’s safety, Daniszewski said.

Scout outreach workers sometimes learn as they go along what works and what doesn’t work in approaching undocumented immigrants.

Marcell Vargas, a district executive for the Scouts in the Coachella Valley, recalled his first attempt to tell immigrant migrant-worker parents about the Boy Scouts.

When he got out of his car in his tan Scout outfit, which looks a lot like a Border Patrol uniform, some panicked workers jumped in their cars and screeched off.

“I never saw so many cars get of a camp so quickly,” Vargas said with a laugh, recalling the incident 14 years ago at a migrant-worker site in Washington state. “It was an educational process for me. The next time I came back to the camp, I was not in uniform.”

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Categorized | Demographics, Latino Community, Latino News

Boy Scouts trying to recruit more Latino kids amid changing demographics

Posted on 08 March 2010 by oscar

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