Meet the 2025 recipients of the Hillcourt Silver Medal

The “Green Bar Bill” Hillcourt Foundation created the Hillcourt Silver Medal to honor those who have dedicated a significant amount of time to preserving Scouting’s long and illustrious history.

Established in 2024, the award is presented annually to historians who have given distinguished service to Scouting history at the national or international levels, including the various Scouting organizations throughout the world. Recipients may be professional or avocational historians, including professors, teachers, museum directors and curators, archivists, librarians, independent scholars, authors, artists and collectors.

The 2025 recipients are Robert Fistick, founder and national chairman of the Scouting America program Scouting Memories; Russell Smart, chairman of the National Scouting Museum Task Force; and Sophie Wittemans, president of the Centre Historique Belge du Scoutisme.

To be eligible for the award, the service to the history of Scouting may be in any form or medium, including books, articles, museums, displays, speeches, conferences, film and other forms of art.

Let’s take a closer look at the 2025 Hillcourt Silver Medal recipients.

Robert Fistick

Robert Fistick is the founder and national advisor of the Scouting Memories Project, chartered by Scouting America in 2018 as a national joint project of the National Scouting Museum, the Order of the Arrow and the National Alumni Association.

Envisioned as the national interactive digital repository of Scouting history, the website offers user-friendly access and screened content provided by Scouting historians along with the general public. Digital content includes text, photographs, video, oral histories, memorabilia and local Scout museum information.

Fistick also organized and chaired the weeklong conference Preservation Workshop for Scout Museums at Philmont Scout Ranch in 2022 and has taught at many other history and museum conferences.

Fistick has served as a member of the National Scouting Museum Task Force since 2014 and also serves on the National Order of the Arrow Subcommittee for Preservation and Awards. He retired as a deputy director of the Library of Congress in 2011 after 35 years of federal service.

Russell Smart

Russell Smart is a visionary leader in bringing Scouting’s history to the public. A member of Scouting America’s National Scouting Museum Task Force for many years, he has served as chairman since 2021. In that capacity, he leads the renovation and redevelopment of the museum’s facilities at Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico, in a multiyear project to update the museum’s galleries and exhibits, including his personal efforts in curatorial work, historical interpretation and fundraising.

His leadership has included partnering with national and regional historical associations to use the museum to tell the rich story of Philmont and neighboring sites, such as the Santa Fe Trail.

Smart is also a well-respected Scout memorabilia antiquarian and exhibitor. He has been the chairman or a significant contributor of both memorabilia and funding for the museums at Scouting America’s National Scout Jamborees in 2013, 2017 and 2023 and at the World Scout Jamboree in 2019.

Outside of Scouting, Smart is a real estate developer and community leader.

Sophie Wittemans

Sophie Wittemans has spent three decades collecting, championing, conserving and promoting Belgian Guide and Scout history in Belgium and internationally. She presented research at the international program Scouting: A Centennial History Symposium at Johns Hopkins University in 2008, has hosted events and conferences, and has authored a number of works on Scout and Guide history, including the book A History of Catholic Girl Guides and Girl Scouts in 2015 and many articles on Girl Guiding history.

Wittemans has served as the general commissioner (president), chair of the board, international commissioner and archivist and historian of the Guides Catholiques de Belgique. Since 2006, she has served as the president of the Centre Historique Belge du Scoutisme.

Wittemans is active in working to reopen the Girl Guide archives in the United Kingdom and heads the Sophie Wittemans Fund at the King Baudouin Foundation, which gives grants to encourage research into the history of Guiding and Scouting in Belgium.

Wittemans is the curator of the art collection at the Belgian Federal Parliament and is completing work on a Ph.D. in art history.

Who was Green Bar Bill?

Born in 1900 in Denmark, Hillcourt became one of the first Scouts in the country at age 10. Active as a youth and young adult, he was a leader and writer for the Danish Scout Association. He moved to the United States in 1926, devoting his life to the Boy Scouts of America as a professional writer and a volunteer leader. He authored several editions of the Boy Scout Handbook, Handbook for Scoutmasters, Scout Fieldbook and hundreds of popular articles on Scout skills and activities in what was then called Boys’ Life magazine under the name “Green Bar Bill” — based on the patrol leader’s badge of two horizontal green bars. Hillcourt authored the first scholarly biography of Scouting’s founder, Baden-Powell: The Two Lives of a Hero, with the help of Lady Baden-Powell. After retiring in 1965, he spent almost three decades traveling the world teaching advanced Scouting techniques to leaders around the globe, earning him the title “Scoutmaster to the World.”

What is the “Green Bar Bill” Hillcourt Foundation?

The estates of Hillcourt and his wife, Grace, were left in trust to fund the “Green Bar Bill” Hillcourt Foundation, which supports Scout programming and history, and serves as his literary executor and the custodian of his extensive collection of Scout memorabilia, books and personal papers, now on long-term loan at the National Scouting Museum at Philmont Scout Ranch.

For the last 16 years, the Hillcourt Foundation has supported independent scholarly work on the history of Scouting as a sponsor of programs such as Scouting: A Centennial History Symposium at Johns Hopkins University in 2008; a panel on international Scouting history at the American Historical Association annual meeting in 2015; and a panel on the comparative history of aspects of Scouting in the United States and Sweden at the Society for the History of Children and Youth annual meeting in 2015, as well as the National Scouting Historian Summit for Scout youth and leaders in 2019. The foundation is a frequent contributor to the National Scouting Museum and various volunteer efforts in Scouting history, and also a supporter of certain activities at national and international Scout events.