Been Busy

New Canadian Cub Badges

Well, I've been pretty busy.  You see I've been made a cub leader again....  and I noticed something right away....  we keep buying badges.   Now, this wouldn't be to terrible of a thing except - well, our group HAS badges.  We had badges from our group, but we also had badges from another group.... and another group. Yet, as no one knows how many badges we have when discussing working on a badge... well, more gets bought.

Ok, this was also made worse because the badges from the different groups are in different boxes... so a leader might check one box and not see any, but not check the other box.

This would be bad enough... but the uniform changed a couple of years ago, and the badges changed.  They were made smaller to fit on the sleeve arm.  So if you have a mix of badges it can cause some problems.  If you have mostly older badges, with a few new ones, it works ok.  But if you have mostly new ones, you are going to want all new ones or they don't "fit" well together.

But if that weren't enough....  The entire Canadian Scouting program is being reviewed and revised.  And this is sounding like a major badge-program overhaul.  The new program is supposed to be starting September 2015 (If I didn't get mixed up....)  So we have 2 more years of our stack of "old" and "new" badges before they are likely not used again.  (Ok, it is possible, I suppose, that some of the badges may be the same...  but they may redesign the shape and everything of the badges...)

And honestly - we have LOTS of some of the badges.

So - this afternoon I took all the badges our group now owns, and the badge boxes.  I reorganized and consolodated the badges into one badge box system - including relabelling the boxes.  Now all of our cyclist badges, for example, are in one spot. (located alphabetically, and labelled.)  I think we have about 50 or 60 of them.  (And about 20 cubs).    My next step will be to count all the badges and record what we have....  (sounds like fun...)