Dear Life Scout:

We have gotten a number of requests from parents of Life Scouts asking for more information about completing an Eagle Scout Leadership Service project, and this letter is designed to respond to those requests.

The first concern is that it is parents asking the questions. Parents are not eligible for the rank of Eagle. Only about 2 percent of all boys who register as Boy Scouts will ever attain that rank, and if you are interested in being one of those, you should be the one asking the questions, not your parents. If your parents need to ask the questions and find the information on your behalf, you are not one of the 2 percent.

As you consider various possibilities for an Eagle Scout project, remember that it should meet a few criteria:

• It should be something you care about, ideally something you are passionate about! This is going to involve a lot of your time over several months, and it’s not going to be any fun if you don’t care whether it happens or not. So choose something that matters to you, not to your family or to your school or to your church, but to you.
• It should teach you how to round up resources, both the financial and human kind, and lead them toward your project goal. You may need to apply for a grant, obtain special permission from various groups, secure equipment, write letters, publicize your project, or maybe even all of the above!
• This project cannot benefit your troop or Boy Scouts of America. It should help a not-for-profit group or the population in general, possibly even your chartering organization. It should be a project that will not get done without your specific intervention; a good rule of thumb is this: if you don’t do it, then it just won’t happen.
• It cannot be a fundraiser, although you can raise funds as part of your project in order to pay the costs of the project once your project is fully approved by the district. It should not be a simple “collection” effort, either, as it is generally difficult to inject enough of your own personal leadership into a collection project to qualify it as an Eagle Scout Leadership Service Project.
• Because the rank of Eagle is so significant, your project should involve a significant number of service hours from several different people, and most of those should be in your peer group. There is no magic number, but Eagle projects tend to involve at least 100 hours of service, with no more than a third of those hours worked by the Scout and his immediate family.

You should begin thinking about your Eagle Scout Leadership Service project as soon as you have earned the rank of Life Scout, but you shouldn’t be in a hurry to “get it over with” or “check the box”. Attaining the rank of Eagle Scout is a heady honor, and it will open doors for you as you move through your life and note this accomplishment on college entrance applications, job applications, and scholarship forms. But the reason the rank of Eagle Scout is so important to colleges, prospective employers, and scholarship awards committees is that there is an expectation of what an Eagle Scout will do in the future. You will be expected to work harder than the average person at whatever objectives are set for you. You will be expected to be able to complete an assignment with little help and coaching. You will be expected to give back to your community in a number of ways, without an expectation of reward but simply because it is the right thing to do. You will be expected to lead your peers in a positive way. Part of the reason you will be able to meet these expectations is all that you will learn as you complete your Eagle Scout Leadership Service project.

Plan on spending at least 6-12 months on your project from the time your workbook is submitted to your troop’s Eagle Scout Advisor. It usually takes awhile to get the workbook in shipshape and get the necessary approvals to start. The project itself may be finished in a single day, but more likely will take several days over several weeks to complete, and then you need to complete the write-up in the ESLSP workbook and get all the necessary signatures on it. Since your Eagle Scout Leadership Service Project must be altogether complete before you can submit your application for the rank of Eagle, you should plan to begin sometime before your 17^th birthday.

As you consider various possibilities for your project and begin to narrow down what you would like to do, there are a number of resources available to help you ask the right questions and find the right answers One of the best is www.nesa.org the website for the National Eagle Scout Association. You should explore this website thoroughly, click on its many links and listen to the Eagle Scouts interviewed. There are examples of past Eagle Scout projects, which will help you think of things you can do in your own community. There are links to other websites that you will find helpful, and there is just a lot of information that will answer most of your questions.

In the “Trail to Eagle” section of the website you will find a few electronic versions of the Eagle Scout Leadership Service Project workbook. You can download these to your own computer and save them there for future use; you will probably want to use the version that allows you to type into an expandable or “fillable” document with standard word processing functions so you can produce a neat, orderly document without typographical errors. But before you get too far into the process of choosing a project, you should read through the entire workbook, as it will give you a good idea as to whether the projects you are considering are broad enough to qualify. Most importantly, as is stated a number of times in the workbook, do not begin working on any aspect of your project until your project is fully approved by the troop and District!

Once you have an idea for a project, you should schedule an appointment with your troop’s Eagle Scout Advisor so you can discuss it. You can begin to complete the ESLSP workbook you have downloaded to your computer and print what you have completed to take to your meeting, so that you become familiar with the form and you can see how your project might work and what issues you will need to address. Again, this meeting is for you to explore ideas and ask questions. You should contact him and you should make the appointment, and you should meet with him. Your parents should not make the appointment or sit in on your meeting with him. This is your Eagle Scout project!