Columbus area Boy Scouts have a new leader

The local Boy Scouts have a new leader.

Juan Osorio’s first day in the office as the scout executive for the Chattahoochee Council of the Boy Scouts of America is set for Jan. 2. He comes to Columbus from Rhode Island, where he is leaving as the Narragansett Council’s chief operating officer and field service director.

Osorio succeeds Anthony Berger, who was the Chattahoochee Council’s scout executive for eight years before departing in July to become the Cub Scouting national director at the BSA’s headquarters in Irving, Texas.

“We’re very excited to get him in here and see what he can do,” Rob McKenna, president of the Chattahoochee Council’s executive board, told the Ledger-Enquirer in a phone interview Thursday. “We’re hoping he’ll expand scouting in a number of directions here. He seems to be very enthusiastic about coming.”

McKenna, an attorney with the Columbus law firm Page, Scrantom, Sprouse Tucker & Ford, said the BSA’s national office gave the Chattahoochee Council’s nine selection committee members “nine or 10” applicants who met the criteria they sought. The committee chose four finalists to interview.

Emphasizing he wasn’t speaking for the committee as a whole, McKenna said he was a member and explained what impresses him the most about Osorio.

In addition to his personal skills and fundraising success, Osorio has demonstrated the ability to “reach out to some of the communities that are underserved,” McKenna said. “We need that here.”

Asked to be more specific, McKenna said, “The lower socioeconomic and single-parent households – that’s a large market of kids who could use the values that scouting teaches but can’t get there.”

Matt Barkley, vice president and chief human resources officer for the W.C. Bradley Co., chaired the selection committee. In a phone interview Thursday with the Ledger-Enquirer, he mentioned the same attributes as McKenna when describing Osorio’s outstanding qualities. He also noted that Osorio grew up in scouting and worked his way up the ranks into positions with increasing responsibility.

And he called Osorio “a total package,” having the professional and personal strengths to lead the Chattahoochee Council, which comprises 15 diverse counties in west Georgia and east Alabama.

“We firmly believe he can work with anybody across the council,” Barkley said.

The Ledger-Enquirer didn’t reach Osorio for comment. According to the Chattahoochee Council’s website, his entire scouting career has been with the Narragansett Council in Providence, R.I., where he began as a program specialist (year not noted), became a district executive in 2007, then the district director (year not noted) and development director (year not noted). He was born in Colombia, achieved the rank of Eagle Scout and has two children.

Berger told the Ledger-Enquirer in July that the Chattahoochee Council had grown its traditional membership (Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts) by 11 percent in the previous three years, from 3,526 in 2013 to 3,914 in 2016. Including the Exploring and Learning for Life programs, the council’s overall membership grew in five of the past six years and now has approximately 5,000 members, Berger said then.

This story was originally published December 28, 2017 at 3:08 PM.