Hi All!

Our Scout pack wants to being organizing a uniform exchange to help everyone save on costs.... but we don't know how to begin to keep it fair and equitable to everyone involved. Has anyone done this before? Scout uniforms (with the shirt, neckerchief, hat, etc) can really add up. So we'd like to encourage older or no-longer-involved Scouts to donate their outdated pieces to younger Scouts who can use them. For instance, those moving from Tiger to Wolf can donate their uniforms and hopefully recieve what they need from the next class up. The good thing is that most Scouts keep the same shirt, and just buy new hats/neckerchiefs as they move up the ranks each year, so we might just concentrate on the hat/neckerchief.

But we want to make sure everyone who donates also recieves what they need in order to keep it all fair. Should we have a big exchange day, or maybe keep it more loosely organized and put each den in touch with an older den to solicit their own donations? Some people have done this "unofficially" on their own, but our thought is to encourage Scout-like traits such as kindness, generosity etc. So not only do the Scouts receive the uniform pieces they need (and save $$$), they also learn a valuable life lesson. KWIM? Hopefully this makes sense! I really welcome your thoughts! TIA!!!

It's one of those things...I think, that it's just not going to be fair to everyone. You're not going to have the same numbers giving up items, as may need to receive them etc Making it 'fair' may make it overly complicated.

The way we did our uniform 'exchange' is that folks happily donated items they were no longer using with no expectations of being able to get anything in return.

People needing items paid nominal amts for items, and the money collected went towards a whole pack activity/snack etc

We just kept it really simple. And it worked very well for our group. You could donate items at any time (we had a big rolling rack with all the uniform pieces on it, on hangers). You could purchase before or after any meeting. A popular item to donate/purchase were the handbooks.