Advancement Resources
Scouting ranks, merit bades, and the advancement programs
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LATEST POSTS
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This chart is often shown and as far as I can tell quite accurate; however, there are lies, the truth, and statistics. The values not shown on this chart are critically important to understanding chart: Percent of population under 18yrs AND membership headcount as a percentage of total elgible youth. Scouting America has held steady at 2% of total elgible youth until about 3 years ago. Specifically retention has increasingly gone down. The organization knows how to recruit but units dont know how to retain. -
IMHO BSA made the classic error of while having good market share, they started worrying / focusing on how to attract even more market share and not considering how changes may affect current customers. However you may feel, there was a core constituency for the BSA. They had ownership in the program, felt a heavy tradition with the program. The organization still has never fully benchmarked why people join, why they stay, what do their customers want. BSA shattered that core group in the 70's with wholesale changes (remember ISP and skill awards for Scouting??), they tried to regroup, and then for the next 30 years (maybe 1982 - 2012) were like a small sailboat in a gale, just trying to follow the winds without a firm direction. The suits and other outside influences tore out the foundations. Not to mention the $1 Billion vanity project in West Virginia. They lost a lot of the tradition, a lot of experience, and many of those that had joined and had stayed active for many years. Scouting is more transactional now, if kids join they get X, as opposed to when kids joined many years ago they joined for fun and adventure. Admittedly all of society is now way more transactional, but BSA or Scouting America is more now about what YOU can get from the program and many time not what your GIVE to the program. Then there are the two main divides in the organization. Group A wants to build a program, go and do things, enrich youth, challenge them outside their comfort zones, these we call volunteers. Group B wants to keep status quo on the organizational structure and administration, the focus is preservation and keeping the paid jobs and kingdoms in place. The only scoreboard is money raised. This group we call professionals. In the end, whether Group A or Group B likes it, the BSA (dba as Scouting America) will become a much smaller organization, less professionals, and lesser societal impact. Maybe other groups will fill the void, maybe portions of Scouting will grow. However this shakes out it will not be what the National BSA's rosy growth projections shown at NAM or other meetings think.
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Ultimately, Scouting must evolve with the rest of society, but the way to do it and stay faithful to the foundation is the larger challenge. I have no specific answer, other than still viewing the major foundational supports of Scout Spirit as critical. Kind of like the the "Golden Rule"; it really is fairly simple. But we tend to make it less so too often. -
Meh totally pass on this suggestion. We can't even get the troop to agree on putting the city of the CO on the unit numerals due to cross city rivalry and the fact that we're pulling from 3 cities that are highly competitive against each other in HS sports.
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