Support Troop 23

Troop 23 has been part of Bay Ridge since 1910, and it has always run on what the people around it give: a ride to a campsite, a Saturday at a camp stove, an evening spent helping a Scout through a merit badge, a pot of flowers bought from a folding table outside the church. Money is only one of these, and not the one the troop is shortest of.

Neighbors who know us from the tables outside Our Lady of Angels may not know what that support goes into: a campout most months from September to June, a week of summer camp, the fifty-mile Adventure Trek every summer, and the Pinewood Derby the troop runs for Pack 23.

If you have asked how you can help, this page is the long answer: what the troop needs from its adults, the jobs a parent can take on without camping, where the money from the sales goes, and who to ask.

Adults Are What the Troop Needs Most

In a Scout troop the Scouts lead: patrols run themselves, and older Scouts teach younger ones. The adults make that possible. A trip needs enough drivers to get every patrol to camp and enough leaders on the campsite to go ahead at all, and a Scout who wants a merit badge needs an adult who knows the subject.

Parents who ask how they can help often ask a second question with it: should I stay close to my son, or leave him to find his own way? In a troop the two fit together. Help the troop as a whole, and your Scout gets a troop that can do more, and the room to do it without a parent at his shoulder.

Many of Troop 23's adults have stayed on after their own Scouts grew up. The troop would be glad to see the next ones start while their sons are still in it.

Ways to Help

• Drive on a trip. Trips leave by car from the OLA parking lot, and every one of them needs drivers. The Parent Guide asks each family to drive Scouts, not only their own, to two trips or activities. Travel costs can be reimbursed on request: ask the Committee Chair.
• Spend a day on a campout. Some trips have a place for parents who are not leaders. The 2026 Thanksgiving cooking trip at Pouch was built around parents and leaders running the cooking stations at every Saturday meal. When a trip has a place for parents, its page on this site says so.
• Counsel a merit badge. If you know a subject from your work or a hobby, one badge is enough, and you give it as many evenings as suits you. Counselors register with Scouting America and hold current Safeguarding Youth Training; the Scoutmaster will tell you which badges Scouts are asking for. Here are the badges our counselors offer.
• Join the troop committee. The committee runs everything around the program: troop funds and fundraisers, permits, advancement records, equipment. Its members also sit on the Boards of Review a Scout goes through for each rank. It suits a parent who wants to help but cannot camp.
• Help tell the troop's story. The troop's trips are on this site, but few people outside the troop ever see them. Sharing them where Bay Ridge looks, and getting local groups to share them in turn, is work the troop would gladly hand to a parent who enjoys it.
• Register as an adult. It is not a job, just a door left open: a registered parent can camp with the troop and step in when a trip is one adult short. What it involves and what it costs.

Every adult who takes part in a troop activity holds current Safeguarding Youth Training, drivers and day visitors to a campsite included. It is taken online, about ninety minutes the first time.

Buy Flowers and Wreaths

Four weekends a year, Scouts set up a folding table outside Our Lady of Angels: flowers on Palm Sunday, Easter and Mother's Day, and wreaths on the first weekend of December. They stand by the church doors on 4th Avenue and at the courtyard corner, the two green spots on the map of OLA.

What they raise helps pay for the troop's camping trips and its equipment, and the Scouts do the selling themselves: every Scout is expected to take a turn, in any weather. Each sale has its own page under Events, with the day and the hours.

Bring Someone Along

If you know a boy of eleven to seventeen who would like the outdoors, bring him to a Monday meeting: most Mondays from mid-September to mid-June, 7:00 to 8:30 pm, in the Cavanaugh Room at Our Lady of Angels. He can come just to look around. How to join has the rest.

And pass on what we do. A trip report or an event page from this site, sent to a neighbor or a parents' group chat, is one of the ways people hear that there is a Scout troop around the corner.

Who to Ask

Find them at a Monday meeting, or write to us through the contact page.