We held a very successful Boy Scout (BSA) Coin Collecting Merit Badge workshop this past Sunday, March 10. There were 43 Scouts registered for the workshop. For the first time ever, most of our attendees were from out of Council! It was very exciting to see so many Scouts travel great distances from all over the Golden Gate Area Council (San Francisco Bay and East Bay areas) to not only attend this workshop but to attend one of our past two club meetings in February or March. We had around 10 Scouts visit our February meeting and 20 at our March meeting! At the workshop, the Scouts received a review of the material they had been working on prior to the workshop. The new merit badge requirements went into effect January 1 of this year. Club Treasurer, Emile, ran the interactive hour-long plus PowerPoint presentation. The Scouts had a fun day and learned a lot about coin collecting.
As a member of the American Numismatic Association (ANA)’s Education and Young Numismatists Committee and a 53-year member of the Boy Scouts of America, Emile identified numerous and substantial errors in the new requirements and is working with both organizations to get them corrected before January of 2025. (Oops!)
We had six Merit Badge Counselors (Emile M, Suzy T, Gran G, Kevin A, Richard S, and Eve B), five of whom are members and Officers of Cupertino Coin Club, who worked with Scouts individually after the workshop portion, to go over their requirements and ensure each Scout met the seven requirements. Some requirements were about numismatic knowledge, while others required them to collect various denominations from year groupings of coins from circulation. Well-prepared Scouts left the workshop with a completed merit badge in coin collecting. (The Scout Motto is “Be Prepared”.) We will meet with those who did not quite finish all of the requirements at a later date to finish up their partial badges. Our next workshop is scheduled for Sunday, October 6, 2024 and will be held in the new Council Service Center.
