New Program in a New Building

Leadership Center Update

The capital funding has been raised, schematic design is complete and we are now into design development (more detailed design work) of the Leadership Center project next to our Base Camp facility in the Fort Snelling area.

What Will It Look Like?

The Leadership Center will be an approximately 42,000 square foot, two level building with increased meeting room space (for Scouting and community use) that will replace our current Saint Paul and Golden Valley Scout Service Centers. The atrium area of the building will be two stories tall with a fireplace on the north wall and a Scout shop just off the building entry area. Visitors will have a nice view of the western end of our historic Cavalry building (Base Camp) as well as the new building’s courtyard. The new building will serve an administrative function, yet also have youth programs that we will run on site and be open for community groups to rent meeting rooms much like how Base Camp operates now. There is a 1,900 square foot area dedicated to leadership programming on the second floor and mezzanine of the new building called the Leadership Laboratory. We will be conducting youth leadership training as the primary program offered at the Leadership Center. The outside areas will include a new four-element team based COPE course as well as a new climbing structure to replace the climbing towers we dismantled in November (see site plan). The courtyard will include an informal gathering area, fire pit and scattered casual seating areas. Once the Leadership Center is open, we will have completed our vision of a Scouting Campus that offers youth programming in an urban setting.

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A Building For Youth

We have written, tested and have been conducting youth leadership curriculum at Base Camp for over a year now. The curriculum has been modified from the BSA National Youth Leadership Training – Grey Wolf and Scouting’s advanced adult leader training – Wood Badge. The target audience for this training is junior and high school age youth. Currently, we have a one-day Emerging Leaders program that has completed the testing phase and groups have been registering for this course since last summer. We are finishing a pilot of our multi-day youth leadership program in early 2017 and will start registering youth groups this spring for the program. We expect the Leadership Laboratory to be a busy place in our new building during the day, evening and weekends.

Timeline

The footings and foundation of the new building will start in April with full construction by late May. Construction will take 12-13 months with the anticipated move-in occurring the summer of 2018. As the site begins being prepped and construction begins, we plan to have a webcam or another way of keeping Scouting and the community-at-large aware of the project status on the council website.