The Boy Scout Program Launches its Latino Initiative
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Next to speak was 20 year old Ricardo Guerrero who has already graduated from high school and is now attending college. He also received his Eagle Scout award and has been affiliated with the Scouts for 10 years. He is currently an Assistant Scoutmaster. His speech focused on the character building cornerstones of the Scouts and how each of these impacted him. The initial Scout slogan of “Be Prepared” would guide him through everything he did. From there he would learn about citizenship qualities of giving back, community service, and helping those in need.
Protecting the environment and understanding just how easily nature can become endangered would be an important lesson. Learning about teamwork would be critical to the Scouts—learning how to create teambuilding efforts by working in groups. The Scouts also have very high values of duty and honor, respect for each other, and morals guide them to do the right thing. These are all great values to impart to young adults but the Scouts is also about enjoying life, making good friends and creating bonds, and just having fun as young adults.
Assistant Scoutmaster, Ricardo Guerrero (center) speaks about the character and ethic building principles that the Scouts instill into its members.
The value of everything that the Boy Scouts teaches is so all encompassing. All of these character building qualities build a young person’s self confidence and make them very high functioning as young adults in a very quick paced world where sometimes adulthood hits them head on. The likelihood of these young men to be swayed by outside negative influences lessens the more they are involved in the program. The likelihood of them going on to further their education is also a benefit. They go forward with skills, confidence and a support system to help guide them through the pitfalls of going from high school to higher education opportunities.
Yes, there are many school and after school programs that exist for young adults with varying interests such as competitive sports, music and arts, class honor programs. Every youth will have different activities that speak to them so whatever will help give our young adults these great life skills is always of value. The Boy Scouts happens to fit a unique niche because in this one program they combine many types of skills and challenges, each building on each other. It also requires parents to be involved which in turn helps to build parent and young adult relationships.
If we want more leaders, innovators, motivators, go getters in this world—but we also want them to have a balance of kindness, empathy, team building, family and community values, we can’t ask for more than having programs like the Boy Scouts be influential in helping create strong leaders that we can count to “Be Prepared for Life” and for the future.
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