By: Aaron D’Souza
This past weekend, seven members of our Rover Scout Group helped staff a recruitment booth at the Simon Fraser University (SFU) Open House 2012. The team’s main objective was to showcase Scouting and to recruit more youth participants and volunteers for the SFU Scout group, as well as to find potential young adults who might be interested in joining our leadership and management program.
The volunteers set up a booth with the help of a few of the SFU group’s leaders and built a few pioneering structures with staves and rope. One of the structures was a catapult for shooting balls into buckets, which turned out to be one of the main attractions for nearly all of the children who passed by the booth.
The highlight of the day was watching one small boy who wouldn’t give up playing the catapult until he shot a ball into the bucket. It was great to see that the boy thoroughly enjoyed the process of loading and reloading the catapult and firing away at the buckets. He wasn’t angry if a ball didn’t go in. If it didn’t, he just reloaded again and tried again until he was successful. He enjoyed the process without putting his whole attention on the outcome. A very powerful lesson was concealed in watching him: enjoy the process, and not just the outcome.
Overall it was a great experience for the Rover Scouts to help the SFU Scout group get the word out that their group was healthy, active, and looking for new participants and volunteers. There were also a couple of young adults who stopped by to learn more about our leadership and management program and hopefully they will make it to one of our meetings!