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Scouting 4 Trees is a large service project that was begun in
the Omaha area by Troop 282 in the late 1990's. The project consists of picking up used, real Christmas trees and delivering them to the
tree recycling centers. This is a deceivingly simple description of a
large and somewhat complex project that needs many volunteers to help it run
smoothly. Please see below.
In the early beginnings, a small area around Millard was serviced, but we
started experiencing tremendous growth once we started covering entire zip
codes. Several years ago we teamed up with Troop 558 which nearly doubled
the service area for the project to cover Omaha west of 72nd street excluding
Boys Town, but including the Gretna, and the Millard areas.
In 2014, we're expecting to expand our coverage again with the help of Troops 570 and 429, where the service area will expand eastward to nearly 42nd street
for much of Omaha, and North West to include the Elkhorn area. Our goal is to some day offer coverage for the whole Metro
area. If you are part of a troop that can help us expand, please contact
us.
It's a service project because we offer to pick the Christmas
trees up free of charge and deliver them to the tree recycling centers around
Omaha, but we also solicit free will donations to help fund troop activities and
camping scholarships. Our experience thus far has been that most people are
very happy to contribute, and we greatly appreciate the support from this
generosity.
From the customer's perspective the process works like
this:
- A
customer signs up for us to pick up their tree on a date they choose from
a list of dates we specify
- We
check over the signup information and turn it into a
"reservation"
- An
email confirmation that the reservation has been made is sent, if an email
address is supplied
- The
customer places their tree out near the street before 9am on the day scheduled
- We
come by with trucks, pickups and trailers to collect all the trees and
leave an envelope for donations
To make the project work we need : Boy Scouts:
- to
contact Christmas tree sellers to see if they will distribute a card advertising this service project
- to
prepare and distribute the advertising card, attaching them directly to the trees in some cases
- to grab
the trees and place them into the trailers, and place the envelope on the
customer's door
Adult Scout Volunteers:
- to mentor the Scouts contacting
tree sellers
- to monitor the Scouts as they
prepare and distribute the advertising material
- to build,
maintain and support the scoutingfortrees.com signup and admin website
- to listen
to phone messages from those who sign up via the phone instead
of the web, and enter those into the signup database
- to review
the signups to turn them into confirmed reservations
- to take
the reservations and turn them into routes for our drivers
- to drive
trucks and/or pull trailers to pick the trees up
- to navigate
to help the drivers on their routes
- to help the boys load the trees when needed and help ensure trees are tied down securely as needed
Business Partnerships:
- print shops to print the advertising materials
- office supply shops for envelopes and other misc materials
- tree sellers accepting the advertising material and allowing us to place these materials at their locations
- postal service where we purchase stamps, and they deliver the self addressed, stamped envelopes back to the various troops
To visit the Scouting for Trees website, please click here: http://www.scoutingfortrees.com
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