Columbus area’s new Boy Scouts CEO beats odds to achieve dream

The odds were against Juan Osorio rising above his demographics and becoming the chief executive officer of the Columbus area Boy Scouts.

In October 1988, he was 3 years old when he and his 8-year-old sister emigrated with their mother from Colombia to reunite with his father in Rhode Island. Two months later, his father unexpectedly died while asleep.

Osorio grew up in Central Falls, a one-square-mile city with dense population (19,347 in 2016) and high rates of crime and poverty. His mother worked in a factory, and he made smart choices to make her proud as his peers chose wayward paths.

“What really allowed me to stay on track with my life’s goals was Scouting,” Osorio said during an interview Wednesday, his second day of work in the Chattahoochee Council of the Boy Scouts of America’s downtown Columbus office.

And since he was a teenager, Osorio’s career goal has been to be a scout executive -- so he can give back to the organization that has given him so much, and so he can pay forward those lessons to as many youths as possible.

Osorio replaces 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.

As the L-E reported last week, Chattahoochee Council board president Rob McKenna and selection committee chairman Matt Barkley said Osorio has the key attributes they sought: personal skills, fundraising success and the ability to connect with underserved communities.

Osorio has worked his entire career in Scouting, all with the Narragansett Council, based in Providence, and covering the entire state of Rhode Island, southeastern Massachusetts and one town in Connecticut. The Chattahoochee Council covers 15 counties in west Georgia and east Alabama. The councils are similar in geographic size, but Narragansett’s population density allows it to serve approximately 14,000 youths while Chattahoochee’s membership is 5,393.

In an emailed interview with the L-E, Narragansett Council scout executive Tim McCandless described Osorio as “an exceptional leader” and has “no doubt” he will succeed in Columbus – even at the relatively young age of 32.

“Juan enjoyed tremendous respect from volunteers, donors and board members of all ages,” McCandless said. “I never encountered anyone concerned about his age. This is evidenced in the fact that many of those who attended his going-away party were Scouting volunteers and donors in their 60s, 70s and 80s. ... We’re sorry to see him go.”

McCandless added, “Juan is extremely talented and committed. He is one of the best professional Scouters I have worked with.”

‘Father-figure environment’

At 7 years old, Osorio joined his local Cub Scouts pack, which met across the street from his home.

“I fell in love with the program,” he said. “I didn’t miss a meeting. I didn’t miss an activity. I didn’t miss a campout.”

That’s because the Boy Scouts provided him the “father-figure environment I needed,” he said. They helped him develop discipline and character and the chance to form lifelong friendships with fellow scouts, he said.

In 2003, Osorio earned the BSA’s highest rank for youths, Eagle Scout, during his senior year at Central Falls High School. His project was a blood drive for the Latino community, attracting approximately two dozen donors who wouldn’t ordinarily have participated.

“There was a stigma about donating blood as an undocumented minority,” he said. “They thought there was an association between the government and the blood center. So I was creating awareness that you’re able to give blood and you’re able to help people and you’re not going to get deported and the language isn’t going to be a barrier.”

Even as young as 13, Osorio looked at his scoutmaster, his troop’s lead volunteer, and thought, “Man, I want to do that. … The impact that I’m receiving, I want to be able to give some of that back.”

Also as an early teen, Osorio met the Narragansett Council’s scout executive, the late Dave Anderson, during a campout. Anderson became a mentor for him. He often invited Osorio to participate in special events -- and Osorio saw that Scouting could become his vocation as well as avocation. So instead of boosting the lives of 20-25 children as a scoutmaster, he could have that effect on thousands as a scout executive.

“Scouting is my passion,” he said. “It’s a lot more than a career to me. It’s given so much to me while I was a youth, so I feel forever indebted to the Boy Scouts of America. I almost see myself as a missionary to be able to spread the word of what Scouting does.”

At a 2015 Scouting conference, child development professor Richard Lerner presented the results of the study his Tufts University researchers conducted. After interviewing and surveying nearly 1,800 Cub Scouts and 400 non-scouts five times in 2½ years, they reported “significant increases” in cheerfulness, helpfulness, kindness, obedience, trustworthiness and hopeful future expectations while there were no significant increases in those attributes among the non-scouts.

Fulfilling his dream

While attending Rhode Island College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Osorio started volunteering in his Boy Scouts troop. The Narragansett Council offered him a job as a program specialist, going into inner-city communities to run meetings for youths who don’t have adults to conduct their program.

From there, Osorio worked his way up the council’s hierarchy, eventually reaching chief operating officer and field service director. The BSA precludes scout executives to be hired at a council in which they have worked. So after being the Narragansett Council’s second-in-command, Osorio had to look elsewhere to fulfill his dream.

His search targeted the Southeast because his two children, a 14-year-old daughter and a 9-year-old son, live with his ex-wife in Greenville, South Carolina. The initial openings he saw in this region didn’t appeal to him. Then in August, during a meeting of BSA executives, Osorio met Berger.

“He told me about all the great things here,” Osorio said, “and that kind of sparked my interest a little.”

Osorio had never heard of Columbus, Georgia, so he did some research and discovered the facts supported Berger’s enthusiasm about the area and the council.

“I really liked what I saw,” Osorio said. “The quality of the volunteers we have here and the board members, I experienced that firsthand when I interviewed here. The quality of the program here and a great Boy Scouts camp we have here, I just saw the passion.”

To actually achieve the goal he set as a teenager, Osorio said, “It’s so surreal.”

He credits Anderson and the other mentors he has had in Scouting.

“I’m so grateful for him and everyone else that allowed me the opportunity to move up in the Boy Scouts,” he said. “It still hasn’t settled in. I sit behind that desk and I’m like, ‘Man, this is real life.’ I feel like I’m living in a fantasy world right now.”

Priorities

During his first year as the Chattahoochee Council’s scout executive, Osorio said, his priorities are to “get the pulse of the council in every aspect possible, meet with all of our board members individually and make sure we are financially sound, balancing our budget and providing unique Scouting opportunities to our youth, where they can’t get those opportunities in any other program.”

He wants to make Scouting more visible in the community to continue the council’s membership growth, which has increased in five of the past six years.

“We do a good job, but people not in Scouting don’t know that,” he said. “We need to do a better job at delivering that message.”

The council’s board especially wants Osorio to target single-parent families.

“Yes, we have our legacy audience, where their parents were Scouts,” Osorio said. “But over the years that pocket of people has shrunk. There’s many more things. Soccer is no longer a seasonal sport. Hockey is no longer seasonal. It’s all year-round now. So we definitely have more competition. We have to try harder now to get in front of families to tell them what Scouting does, even more so with the inner-city communities, because they have additional hurdles that other families don’t have.”

One way to do that, Osorio said, is to expand the number of schools where the council runs Scouting programs, in addition to the churches, where most of the council’s 71 sites serving 103 units are based. The following local elementary schools have Scouting programs run by the council: East Side, Five Points, MLK, Ladonia, West Smiths Station, West Point, Central, George E. Washington and Dawson, as well as the Woodall Program and Loachapoka Middle.

The council is in good financial shape, Osorio said, then he cautioned, “We balanced our budget in 2017, but we are a nonprofit, so every year we start back at zero. … However we ended last year is not necessarily an indicator of how we’ll end this year, but that’s all through good governance and analyzing our budget properly and executing it correctly.”

His biggest challenge, Osorio said, will be implementing the BSA’s new policy of allowing girls in its programs.

“We need to make sure we stay in the forefront of this and that we are providing quality programs and ensuring that families – because we are a family-based program – are taking advantage of every aspect of our program,” he said. “We’re going to begin to have a Families in Scouting program, which will allow girls to be in our programs.”

That will start this fall in Cub Scouts, for children in grades 1-5. Next year, it will expand to the Boy Scouts program, ages 11 and older.

“We’re not going co-ed,” Osorio emphasized. “That’s a common misconception. We’re continuing our single-gender aspect. Our charter organizations will have the opportunity to choose one of three programs: Cub Scouts for boys; Cub Scouts for girls; Family Scouting, where boys and girls are allowed to be in the same group, but they’re broken up by age and gender, so they will have boy dens and girl dens.

“Currently in our Cub Scouts program, a pack is comprised all of the youth in the unit, then they break up into teams; we call them dens, and they’re according to grades. In our family-based program, it will be first-grade girls and first-grade boys in two separate teams. They do some part of the meeting together, but when it comes to advancement, which is what our program is about, and when it comes to the character development, they break off.”

Asked how he feels about the new policy, Osorio said, “With change will come some challenges,” he said. “But I’m excited to be able to provide a program for the whole family. … I think it’s phenomenal.”

Osorio acknowledged another challenge will be convincing Columbus area skeptics that this new guy from Rhode Island can do the job.

He laughed and said, “The Boy Scouts program is the same, whether it’s Rhode Island, California, Florida or Columbus, Georgia. We teach character. We teach discipline and citizenship. And that’s the same wherever you are in the country. I’m a firm believer in what Scouting does. I’m a product of what Scouting does, and I want to portray that to our volunteers.

“It’s not a Rhode Island guy coming here to change things up and do things differently. It’s an Eagle Scout, a Boy Scout coming here to help enrich what we already have. We have a great program. I want to continue that here locally and find new ways to reach new people and get more kids into the program.”

His sales pitch to participate in Scouting also summarizes his story: “We provide life experience. We will give opportunities to build character, leadership, discipline, citizenship and really give a leg up in life. We help you prepare for life. ... I’ve seen it firsthand for myself, and I’ve seen it as I delivered the program to many Scouts, and I continue to see it day-in and day-out.”

This story was originally published January 6, 2018 at 12:14 PM with the headline "Columbus area’s new Boy Scouts CEO beats odds to achieve dream."