The local scouting fraternity must forge alliances with other youth organisations if it wants to get more young people involved in the movement. So said chairman of the Inter-American Scout Committee, Michael Bradshaw, on Saturday night, as the San Fernando District Scout Council celebrated 100 years of scouting in Trinidad and Tobago at Imani Hall, Cipero Street, San Fernando.
Bradshaw, in reviewing the evolution of the movement, said the last century ended on an uncertain note for scouting, with diminishing public and private funding, a shortage of adult leadership, growing criticism of management approaches, increasingly high operating costs and demands for new measures and methods of accountability.
Bradshaw said the Scout Association of T&T, like the scouting movement worldwide, will need to enter into a wide array of partnerships and strategic alliances with other youth-directed kindred organisations, in order to maximise its effectiveness and quality.
He stressed that in the 1990s, technological advances, along with the export of leisure programmes, namely electronic games, "brought competition that is threatening our programme content and generating a new set of complex issues." Added to which, he said, was the movement of eligible volunteers across international borders.
One hundred former scouts and scout leaders, from 1912 to 2012, who excelled in the spheres of education, the judiciary, law, medicine, business, journalism, politics and culture, were honoured at the lavish ceremony. Among the notable honourees were former President Noor Hassanali, current President George Maxwell Richards, Justice Anthony Lucky, Dr Edward Chamely, former minister and member of Parliament Diane Seukeran, entertainer Franz "Delamo" Lambkin and CNC3 cameraman Ivan Toolsie.
National scout commissioner Azamudin Khan, addressing the ceremony, said the scouting movement is committed to making T&T a better country. However, he stressed the need for financial support from corporate citizens. Khan announced that Sou Sou Lands Ltd has donated five acres of land in Penal for a training ground for scouts. He said the documentation for the land will be signed this year.
"We appreciate what scouting can do and we are saying help us, help us. We need your money to do it," he said. San Fernando District Council head Lynley Lutchmedial added his voice in the plea for financial support. He said running the scouts is costly and there are members who are unable to pay for the necessary supplies.
"For scouting to survive in the next century, we must be financially assisted by corporate Trinidad and the business sector, government agencies and, I might add, successful scouts to fight off the main distractions," he said. Scouting, he said, can "take care of some of the social ills in society, including the violence and drugs that plague us in society today."