Virtual LaSalle Street Trading Tech Awards Video Shows Industry Impact on Scouting
The LaSalle Street Dinner. The LaSalle Street After Hours Affair. The LaSalle Street Trading Tech Awards. Those are all the derivations of 49 years of the Chicago financial district congregating together to raise funds for Scouting in Chicago. Last night the LaSalle Street Trading Tech Awards event became a virtual event and the participants gathered on Zoom to celebrate the industry’s support for Scouting.
I kicked off the evening with some opening comments, including about how far back the Chicago business community’s connection to Scouting goes. It goes all the way back to the very beginning. It was a Chicago publisher, William D. Boyce, who founded Scouting in 1910.
And, more specifically to the financial community, it was A. Stamford White, a member of the Chicago Board of Trade who twice served as exchange president, led a group of Chicago businessmen who negotiated the original land donation of the Owasippe Scout Reservation.
To this day, Owasippe belongs to the Pathway to Adventure Council and is the oldest Scout camp in the nation.
As part of this virtual fundraising event, we showed a video which explains our industry’s commitment to Scouting still today and the impact it is having on young men and women.
Featured in the video from the industry are this year’s chairman, Pat Kenny, to whom I gave the moniker, “The Most Interesting Man in the World.” Dave Johnson, a retired Morgan Stanley executive and a trustee of the Board of Trade Charitable Trust, is also featured, as am I.
More importantly, there are some Scouts in the video telling their stories of how Scouting has helped them, how the industry has helped them and how they are helping other people through their Eagle projects.
The video ends with an adorable Cub Scout, Sebastian, who is full of enthusiasm for the things he gets to do in Scouting. He ends with the line, “I am a Scout because of you.”