NOAC 2015 Theme Announcement

Every drop of water creates a ripple that extends infinitely outwards when it touches the ocean. Over time, those ripples join together to become an enormous wave large enough to impact anything in its path. As enormous and powerful as the wave may be when it crashes on the shore, it began as a single drop of water from the sky.

The 2015 National OA Conference theme, It Starts With Us, is a message to each guest that they are the beginning of something bigger; a drop in a large ocean of humanity, from which ripples extend in every direction. The nature of that ripple: singular, collaborative, positive or negative, is entirely up to each guest.

The conference learning objective is to create tomorrow with action today. Our actions, or inactions, define what tomorrow looks like. The book on the OA’s first one hundred years is written – but what the OA, Scouting, and the world looks like tomorrow is based completely on what we choose to do today.

Every day we wake up with the same twenty-four hour allotment of time available to us. What we choose to do with it is up to each of us. We must choose to create the tomorrow we want - one dedicated to service and brotherly love - through how we conduct ourselves today.

There’s a duality that exists within the theme: each person’s contributions are unique and important and create a forceful movement when combined together. More importantly, the word “it”, which represents those contributions, is intentionally ambiguous.

What starts with each of us is completely open to personal interpretation. You decide what begins with you and our individual decisions combine to determine what starts with us.

Each guest is encouraged to consider the theme through the lens of their own personal experience, yet compelled to understand: something is beginning.

Last revised on December 29, 2014