Jamboree Committee Meets Again!

Attendance:

Matt Becker, John Clawson, Roger Denton, Ben Ernst, Seth Euler, Larry Grantham, Randy Hager, Steven Rosenak, David Thomas, Andy Trout, Rob Walling

The Pony Express Council’s National Jamboree Committee met for the third time on Tuesday, April 5th, 2011 to discuss plans for the upcoming 2013 National Scout Jamboree; scheduled to be held from July 15th-July 24th, 2013 in West Virginia.

Using a new agenda format the group split off into 5 subcommittees at the beginning of the meeting for roughly 25 minutes to discuss the pertinent items that they plan to focus on throughout this planning process. This gave each group enough time to formulate action plans, ideas, and develop a report to be discussed during their portion of the meeting. Each group jumped right in focusing on the priorities at hand in order to make this the best Jamboree experience the Pony Express Council has ever seen. The excitement from everyone in attendance was apparent from listening to everyone’s ideas for promotion, recruitment, financial planning, trip details, and equipment/shakedown groups. With the committee off to such a tremendous start, I look forward to seeing how everything comes in to play, as we get closer to the actual Jamboree!

To start off the full committee meeting, we previewed the first promotional video for the 2013 Jamboree. Thanks to the hard work put in by a few of our own council’s volunteers and youth the 7:38 clip has been developed to spark interest in the upcoming event. Larry Grantham, Steve Rosenak, and Mike Eisenhauer were the driving force in accomplishing this task and thanks to their dedication to making the next jamboree a success we have a wonderful video that can be used as a recruitment tool. The video will be posted on this blog and a link will be on the council website as well. The plan is to put the video onto a disc that will be distributed to every single scout unit along with a letter explaining why it is important for the leader to show the video to the boys. We are shooting to get these discs out to roundtables this month! Other promotional discussions focused on creating banners for Camp Geiger to be displayed at the trading post and headquarters buildings. While also tossing out the idea it might be good to try and get a video loop going that show cases the previously mentioned video clip to played at the trading post on Wednesday nights during camp.

Recruitment is always a major focus and if this event is going to be a fun experience for the youth it must have a full group signed up to go. Although registration is not currently open for the event (Late Spring 2011) the committee has already begun formulating a plan to get the word out because this trip of a lifetime is coming quick. Their plans are to include: Wednesday Night campfire skits at Camp Geiger, Involving the Mic-O-Say Tribal Council to visit and promote to units, use new wood badge participants to help in the planning process, and developing a solid venturing group to work specifically on getting venturing youth interested. It almost goes without saying but the promotions group and recruitment group will be working hand in hand to spread the excitement of the National Jamboree.

Our trip details group has also been hard at work trying to development new ideas to make the Jamboree experience even better. Everything from the touring options, travel methods, and everything in between will be looked at as the Jamboree moves to its new location in West Virginia.

Also in development is a finance subcommittee that will work on creating a budget for the event, coming up with a final trip cost, and helping assist with fundraisers and troop/youth sponsorship methods. Anyone that has ever been to a National Jamboree before knows that the cost can be somewhat overwhelming, but if you ask them after their trip if the experience was worth the money, I can guarantee that everyone will agree that it was. Once a final cost for the trip is made available it will be posted right here on this blog as well as many other places. (The individual cost for the trip in 2010 was over $2000)

In other Jamboree news the first shakedown has been tentatively scheduled for October 20-21st, 2012 at Camp Geiger. This will be the first time that the boys going to the National Jamboree in 2013 will camp together as a group. Plans for the weekend are being put together and new information will be released as it becomes available. One item of concern for this group has been what to do about equipment for the shakedowns. Because it is our understanding the National Jamboree will be providing all the unit’s equipment needs while at the Jamboree site, the group may need to find camping equipment from participating units to borrow during their shakedown weekends.

As discussion moved from the various subcommittees topics into the general group discussion topics, the committee was reminded that at next month’s meeting the group will be reviewing all of the adult interest applications for potential adult leadership for the contingent. And as the meeting drew to a close the last item of discussion was summer meeting plans. The committee has decided that it will meet in June but not in July, on the first Tuesday of the month.

The next meeting has been set for Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 at 7 PM. The group will be meeting again in the Herzog Lodge to discuss progress and any new information. The agenda will be emailed out at a later date and posted on the Jamboree Blog.