United Way Recognizes Boy Scouts for Program Excellence

Thursday, May 22, 2003 – United Way of the Greater Dayton Area serving Greene, Montgomery, and Preble Counties honored the Boy Scouts of America, Tecumseh Council with an Excellence in Outcome Evaluation Award earlier this month.   The Tecumseh Boy Scouts were singularly selected out of the fifty-four local United Way funded agencies to receive the Excellence in Program Improvement Award based on outcome evaluation results.   NCR Corporation sponsored the award and donated a $1,000 honorarium to the Boy Scout Council in Greene County.

“As partners for nearly 90 years, Boy Scouts and our local United Way share a deep commitment to providing quality programs to the youth in our communities,” United Way President Marc R. Levy said.   “We’re very pleased that an agency with such a long history is also an innovator and leader in applying new methods like outcome evaluation to provide the best possible services for our youth.”

Evaluation results have shown that scouting has the greatest impact with boys who participate with trained adult leaders and receive support and encouragement from their parents.   A boy's success in earning advancement is affected by how much support he receives from his parents.   To increase the number of boys who develop lifetime skills, the Tecumseh Council added new activities to improve parent orientation sessions and increase the parents’ understanding of the advancement program.   This year the Council plans to measure new outcomes relating to educating parents of the boys with the desired result of added support for the boys from home.   Results also show the need to increase training for volunteers.   The scouting program has increased scouting and leader recruitment efforts by building a recruitment plan and continuously revising this plan after review of the outcome results.   The new plan will focus on increasing training for leaders.