It seems like an ordinary wooden bench, brightened with a few throw pillows. But Luca Tedesco’s Eagle Scout project for the Mental Health Association is the culmination of a long journey through scouting and the challenging times in which he reached adulthood. And while the benches are now a place for quiet reflection in MHA’s new Parsippany office, they also have been an opportunity for the Verona High School senior to think back on what scouting has meant to him and what it could mean to others.
Tedesco was drawn to helping MHA by the mental health issues that he had seen around him during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. MHA is a behavioral health provider created in 2017 from a merger of mental health nonprofits that had served Essex and Morris counties since the 1950s. Tedesco had been introduced to MHA’s work, and its chief executive, Robert Davison, by his mother, Leigh Ann Tedesco, who is a psychotherapist in private practice. MHA works to provide mental health services to children, teens and adults, and it has been a key sponsor of the annual American Foundation for Suicide Prevention walk in Verona Park.
MHA’s compassionate approach to mental health resonated with Tedesco.“I wanted to create a safe environment where people can sit down and have a conversation that’s removed from bias and judgment,” he says.
And then there are the experiences that scouting delivers. Tedesco has done rock climbing and rappelling with his fellow scouts; he’s rafted down a river and lived in the woods for a week. “There’s so much that you can do within scouting,” he says. “Things can be limited when you’re on your own or with a smaller group of people.”
While he could draw on his grandfather’s scouting experiences, which also ended with an Eagle Scout rank, Tedesco is grateful for other older scouts who came to pack meetings to share their know-how and participate in activities. “When you start out really young you don’t realize how high you can go,” Tedesco says.
“Scouts truly is whatever you want to make of it,” he adds. “You can get all these merit badges. You can go on private expeditions, you can do basically whatever you want, as long as you put the work in and you express the interest in it.”
And yes, there is a lot of work that goes into earning the Eagle Scout rank. Tedesco completed all the required badges–swimming, cooking, first aid, environmental science, citizenship in the community, citizenship in the world, communications, personal management, citizenship in the nation, citizenship in society, emergency preparedness, camping and family life–as well as a host of others, from art to robotics. He built the bench with some wood-cutting help from a family friend in time carved out from his studies at VHS, his participation in the high school’s music program (where he is a saxophone player) and compiling a performance portfolio for college applications to music production majors.
Tedesco is also working on giving back to scouting, by becoming a merit badge counselor for middle school scouts. “I have a couple of merit badges that are really close to my heart,” says, “Music, swimming, and lifesaving are really important to me.”
However a scout approaches the Eagle Scout journey, Tedesco advises taking care of some of the work in the freshman and sophomore year of high school. “My biggest piece of advice,” he says, “is start things early.”
Photos courtesy Mental Health Association.
