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Christine Rolka Director of Education |
Scouting for future conservationists
As a young girl growing up in the boroughs of New York, my link to the outdoors was through Girl Scouts. I still carry memories of picking string beans for the first time, pitching a tent and sleeping outside, listening to scary stories around a campfire. Millions of other Americans have similar stories. Scouting has provided countless individuals their first outdoors experiences.
For years, the NWTF has partnered with the Boy Scouts (and Girl Scouts) on a local level through our JAKES program. Chapters have held JAKES events at Boy Scout camps, and Scout troops have both participated in and taught outdoor skills to others at these events. Some Scouts have even satisfied merit badge requirements at a JAKES event.
The Wild Turkey Center, the Federation’s national headquarters in South Carolina, has hosted Eagle Scout projects, lent its facilities for campouts, and reaped the benefit of conservation service projects, including trail building and maintenance at our Outdoor Education Center.
NWTF staff and volunteers share our conservation story at local and state scouting events, and present educational programs at Boy Scout summer camps.
Robert Abernethy, the Federation’s assistant vice president of agency programs, is an Eagle Scout and now serves as an assistant scoutmaster and a hunter education instructor. He noticed that many of the shooting merit badge requirements covered nearly all the hunter education requirements for South Carolina. More so, earning the Boy Scout merit badge included comprehensive field instruction as well.
His observation led to a meeting between NWTF staff and representatives from the Georgia-Carolina Boy Scouts Council and Georgia Department of Natural Resources Hunter Education leadership to brainstorm a program to provide incentive for Scouts to learn about wildlife management, earn their shooting merit badges, and provide a way to earn their hunter education certification. The result? The NWTF Conservation Challenge Badge.
The NWTF Conservation Challenge Badge program recognizes Scouts who earn their shotgun shooting, archery, rifle shooting and fish and wildlife management merit badges, as well as their hunter education certification.
Last June, the NWTF and Boy Scouts of America successfully piloted the new badge program in partnership with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and the NWTF Georgia State Chapter at Camp Knox in Lincolnton. Overall camp attendance, as well as participation in shooting sports and conservation activities there, nearly tripled.
Following the pilot program, the NWTF signed a national memorandum of mutual understanding with BSA that will help us expand our conservation education mission.
The NWTF since has received a grant from the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies to further field-test and perfect the program at designated Boy Scout camps in Georgia, South Carolina, Florida and Alabama. The grant also allows us to promote the NWTF Conservation Challenge at the Boy Scouts of America National Jamboree in Richmond, Va., this summer. On average, the jamboree hosts 80,000 Scouts from across the country, who will have the chance to earn parts of the badge, as well as a special jamboree rocker.
We hope to expand the Conservation Challenge to even more states in 2011 and take it nationwide in 2012. — Christine