During middle and high school I was a very active member of the Boy Scouts. I view the time that I spent in the organization as the most valuable experiences of my young life and my Eagle Scout award as my most prized accomplishment. Scouting’s primary goal  is to turn young men into leaders. Scouts are expected to learn valuable life skills such as personal management, personal fitness, citizenship, and cooking along with wilderness survival and conservation skills. Scouts are required to hold leadership positions within the organization to gain experience. Scouting aims to build relational leaders by embodying the five pillars of relational leadership: inclusiveness, empowering, purposeful, ethical, and process oriented.

Scouting is inclusive and empowering to all of members. Scouting is eager to involve anyone in its organization including those who struggle with physical or mental disabilities. Additionally, every youth can feel empowered as they are all expected to hold leadership positions during their time in Scouts. I believe that the roots of Scouting’s inclusivity are found in a belief that anyone can develop leadership skills, a concept that coincides with relational leadership. This core structure of Scouting has created a diverse network of Scouts across America that takes great pride in helping others. Scouts of all ages (7 to 18) work alongside each other to learn, teach, and learn to teach. 

Scouting aims to achieve purpose in its communities across America through ethical service. Scouts are required to have earned a certain amount of service hours to proceed through the ranks, much of these service hours directly impact the surrounding community. Scouts are taught through action how to make ethical and moral decisions throughout their lifetimes. They are gifted with loads of independence and responsibility which they can use to their advantage to learn to develop and follow their own moral compasses. To become an Eagle Scout, the highest rank achievable within the organization, a Scout must, amongst other qualifications, organize, follow, and carry out a service project from conception to completion. Of all of the precious opportunities Scouting has given me, this one was the single most valuable. I learned a lot through the process of developing a service project, it is a much more arduous journey than one might initially expect. The path towards completing the project was riddled with challenges ranging from handling budgeting to tackling design challenges (most projects involve the physical construction of something) but these challenges only made the entire process more rewarding.

Scouting, in and of itself, is process oriented. Scouts primarily learn from each other while leaders simply facilitate the learning. Older Scouts learn to teach by teaching younger Scouts and younger Scouts are inspired by the actions of older Scouts to produce positive change. All components of the program run together smoothly and efficiently to churn out more and more leaders every year. Scouting is structured by rank and every Scout must in some way fulfill certain universal qualifications in order to advance. Although every Scouts’ experience is relatable due to the process-oriented nature, every experience is also unique due to the intimacy of the experience.

If it wasn’t clear by this point, I have developed a strong devotion to the Scouting program. I can safely say that my only regret about the entire experience was not spending even more time participating in the organization. Scouting has endowed me with a toolbox of skills to apply to a large variety of situations throughout my life. Scouting has provided me with service project experience which I aim to apply to my Impact Leadership Village service project. I feel inspired by the positive effects service projects can have which I witnessed through Scouts. Additionally, I feel prepared for the expectations of a service project and the underestimated amount of involvement that they often require. I know to think through each step of my plan carefully to ensure a minimization of hiccups along the way and to focus on seeing the end goal, community benefit, to incite drive to perform the project to completion. I did not realize until learning about leadership in the class, but relational leadership is truly what made Scouting so great.