Junior Sydney Carnes is a female Boy Scout.

She’s been shotgun shooting, which she prefers to archery. She’s camped in below zero degree weather with her crew. And yet, even though she has a card that says she is a member of the Boy Scouts of America, the waitress at Culver’s doesn’t believe her when she says she knows her friend from Scouts.

“They don’t think I can be a Boy Scout because I’m a girl and no one’s heard of venturing,” Carnes said. “They always look astonished and they look at me strangely. I have to keep explaining it to them because they don’t believe me.”

Carnes is a part of Venturing, a program described by scouting.org as “a youth development program of the Boy Scouts of America for young men and women between ages 13 and 21” and by most Venturers as “Boy Scouts with girls.”

“It’s an excellent opportunity for the kids to build confidence in themselves and what they can do and create positive change,” associate advisor Bill Snyder said. “[It’s there] to make you guys leaders, to make you guys responsible adults, to where you can go out into the world and make changes, make things happen. They have infinite possibilities on what they can do and what they can achieve.”

Junior Bryan Murphy is brand new to Venturing, but he has been active in Boy Scouts since age 12. He has since worked his way up to the position of Patrol Leader, which entails helping the younger members earn merit badges.

“[The hardest part is] probably the leadership positions that you have to take on, because it’s a lot to deal with when you already have school and other things,” Murphy said. “It’s a lot of time and effort that you have to put in. If there’s campouts and stuff you have to plan, sometimes it could be 7 to 14 hours a week.”

Much of the time spent as a Boy Scout consists of earning merit badges. There is a strong focus on basic survival skills, such as first aid and learning how to tie different kinds of knots.

“There’s something to gain from everything — just learning how to do different things,” Murphy said. “Over the years I’ve gotten really close to some of the people in my troop. There’s always older groups leaving that have gotten Eagle and new kids going in, so it’s kind of interesting all the new kids you get to meet.”

Although there aren’t any merit badges or the traditional Eagle Scout title to work toward, Venturing members can earn a bronze, gold or silver award.

“You have to do it all on our own,” Carnes said. “We don’t do anything [for awards] in the meetings. Boy Scouts work on earning their merit badges at meetings and campouts — we don’t. We don’t really care about earning stuff.”

Junior Kylie Jennings was a Girl Scout for three years in elementary school until her troop disbanded when the leaders left. She never considered becoming a Scout again until last summer, when she wanted to volunteer at a Cub Scout day camp with Carnes but couldn’t because she wasn’t a Boy Scout.

“Girl scouts was mostly ‘let’s eat snacks and play inside games,’ but this you actually go and help people and camp out,” Jennings said. “I think camping out is the biggest difference. Venturing does more building, while Girl Scouts does more community service, like volunteering at places.”

Although she hasn’t had the time to attend many meetings or activities, Jennings loved the people there and she hopes to go on a camp out in the near future.

“When people think [of] Boy Scouts, they kind of look down on it,” Jennings said. “Some Boy Scouts they call nerdy, but we’re really not. We just do stuff for people and help them and have fun while doing it.Like Carnes, Jennings had trouble explaining Venturing to others.

“A lot of people when they think of Boy Scouts they think of the big Boy Scouts — Eagle Scouts,” Jennings said. “They don’t really think of the different branches. I’ve been asked ‘Did you mean a Girl Scout?’ and I’m like ‘No, I mean a Boy Scout, because Venturing is part of Boy Scouts, not Girl Scouts.’”

Carnes said that even Boy Scouts are unfamiliar with their sister program.

“[At] Boy Scout camps they always give us weird looks and they’re like, ‘Why are girls here,’” Carnes said. “Not many troops have a sister crew, so not very many of them know what Venturing is.”

Advisor Lynda Weerts agrees that there is a lack of awareness among the groups.

“I think that girls think that when they get to junior high, Girl Scouts is over, and it’s not,” Weerts said. “You can go all the way to your eighteenth birthday, until you graduate high school, and get your Gold Award, and I wish more girls would do that. On the same side, I don’t think that a lot of girls and boys especially know that Venturing is available to them.”

There is more to the problem than simply a lack of awareness. At one of the camp outs, the Boy Scout members asked to take all of the pictures with Venturers in them out of the slideshow because they didn’t want to be seen with them.

“They were really rude to us,” Carnes said. “The people who planned it made Syd stand up in the front of all the other Boy Scout troops because they had this competition throughout the day against us, and they made her stand up until the end, and they were like, ‘Well, you would’ve gotten third place, but you don’t really count because you’re girls.’ That’s pretty much what they told us. And the troop leader who said that was the one who got third place. They were pretty much just saying Venturing doesn’t matter.”

Even the male members of the crew hear bad things about Venturing. Junior Timothy Cooper from Faith Baptist School, one of the members of the crew, said his Boy Scout troop would make fun of Venturing before he joined.

“I remember specifically one time we were on a campout in the middle of February and it was freezing — it was, like negative six degrees, and the wind was 60 miles an hour — and this one kid said ‘what do you think the Venture Scouts are doing?’ and he said ‘oh you know, they’re probably at home around their fireplace,’” he said.

Both the more-known Boy Scouts and Venturing participate in the same activities, such as shotgun shooting, camping and selling popcorn to raise money. But in the United States, the co-ed program is kept separate.

“In every nation outside of the United States, Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts are actually one program,” Weerts said. “When my daughter went to Japan the girls were wearing tan shirts, they weren’t wearing the green shirts, and they had a hard time understanding why can you only be in Boy Scouts if you’re in Venturing. So we’re the only place in the world that has it separated. Part of that’s because of the history [history here] Girl Scouts actually got started from a program that was set up for boys.”

Carnes hopes Venturing will gain some separate recognition in the future. Maybe eventually she won’t have to convince her friends’ co workers that she really does know them from Boy Scouts.

“We don’t just sell cookies — we’re not Girl Scouts,” Carnes said. “We’re a part of Boy Scouts, so we do the same things that they do. We can shoot the same guns, we can do archery — we can do all of that stuff. Girls can do just as much as guys can do.”