The modern world is hard to navigate.
Our mission is to help youth learn how to chart a course to their future. Using the outdoors as a teaching environment, Midtown Youth Adventures partners with youth organizations that help kids learn in practical settings.
By showing them how to read the compass points of a life of cheerful service, servant leadership, and self-reliance, we help youth from all over the Mid-South find their way to becoming the best version of themselves.
Four points on the compass
Scouting is the method. These four are what we are actually teaching, in every unit, at every age.
Cheerful Service
Service given willingly, not grudgingly. Youth learn that the community they live in is theirs to look after.
Servant Leadership
Every youth leads and every youth is led. Patrols are run by the scouts themselves, with adults one step back.
Self-Reliance
Pack your own bag, cook your own meal, read your own map. Competence comes from doing it yourself.
Self-Confidence
Confidence is the residue of having done difficult things. We make sure youth get enough of them.
Skills that outlast
the campout
The outdoors is the classroom. A wet campsite teaches planning faster than any worksheet, and a patrol that forgot the cooking gear learns responsibility in one meal.
Practical career skills
Merit badge work puts youth in front of engineers, welders, nurses, pilots and small-business owners. Some of them find the work they will go on to do.
Life skills
Cooking, budgeting, first aid, navigation, public speaking. The unglamorous things adults are simply expected to already know how to do.
Leading, and being part of something
Youth hold real offices with real consequences — planning trips, training younger scouts, keeping a unit running. They learn what it takes to belong to an organization and to lead one.
Service to community
Eagle projects, food drives, trail and park work. Service becomes a habit the way any habit is built — by repetition, year after year.
None of it is taught from a lectern. It is taught on a trail, in a canoe, over a fire that somebody has to get lit.
Kindergarten through twenty-one
Four Scouting America units all chartered together, so a family can start in kindergarten and never have to leave.
Pack 13
Cub Scouts. Den adventures, pinewood derby and family camping — where scouting starts.
Troop 13BBOYS · MONDAYS 7:00 PM · CHARTERED 1922
Scout-led patrols, monthly campouts, and the long trail to Eagle.
Troop 13GGIRLS · SUNDAYS 4:15 PM · CHARTERED 2020
The same program, the same standard, the same summit.
Crew 13COED · VENTURING · FOUNDED 2022
High adventure and career exploration for older youth, right up to age twenty-one.
Youth from all over the Mid South
At present, while we work with youth from all over the Mid-South area, our focus is the Midtown Memphis, centered on Snowden School, Delano Elementary, Peabody Elementary, Idlewild Elementary, Maxine Smith STEM Academy, East High School, Central High School, and Crosstown High.
The charter organization behind Scouts 13
Midtown Youth Adventures is the nonprofit that charters and supports Pack 13, Troop 13B, Troop 13G and Crew 13 — the Scouting America units known in Memphis as Lucky 13.
We do the part families never see: keeping the charters current, the leaders trained, the trailers loaded, and the cost of a campout within reach. We also partner with other youth organizations that want to teach in practical, outdoor settings.
We are looking for active, engaged Memphians to serve.
Serve with us →
Help a kid find north.
Midtown Youth Adventures is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Gifts go to the things that keep youth in the program: gear, camp fees, adult leader training, and the charters that hold it all together.
We do not have online giving yet. Write to our treasurer and he will walk you through it.