yknot

If you look at the issues with liability, oversight, and organizational structure, it's kind of the only model that makes sense from those perspectives. A lot of units have reported getting dropped by church COs and shifting to community chartering orgs like American Legions and VFWs but those create new problems. For BSA to survive going forward, it has to more tightly manage the relationship with local units through its councils. A non council CO just adds a level of liability and extends the managerial length of arm. You can see why they might be heading in this direction if true.

We usually did Committee meetings at a separate time from troop meetings. Our SMs usually attended Committee to talk about program and some ASMs also had committee jobs. That meant on troop nights we generally had enough people to do BORs. Every parent in our troop had to have a volunteer role and BOR was the easiest for those with constraints. They could just stay a bit after drop off or come early.

As far as I'm concerned, the hole is getting deeper. There's a difference between sadly wondering what could have happened vs. conjecturing that charges are overblown due to bias. It happened. It was about as bad as it can get because a child is dead. Let's leave it at that for now. Anything more seems inappropriate for a site and an organization that is about protecting kids.

If a child is dead -- no matter where -- when supposedly responsible adults were present I sure hope there would be a lot of charges. I have to say I am not finding that the direction this conversation is taking to be worthy of scouting.

There's plenty of other research that says kids get burned out. There's also plenty of research that says kids at that age are sampling, not staying. Also, BSA has a long history of using, quote-unquote "Research", to justify marketing and financial goals. If someone on top of the food chain decided that recruiting another younger rank of cubs would increase membership and revenues, then I'm sure they were able to find the necessary research to support it. Based on the membership crashes of the past several years, that doesn't seem to be bearing up. During the pandemic, local nature centers, parks departments, etc., reported significant participation increases for elementary age nature programming. Many had waiting lists for programs. It's very easy for kids to move in and out of other activities as their interests change or their time limitations vary. There really is no reason why membership in scouting has to be so linked to a unit, council, or in some cases rank. It is truly an impediment to retention and recruitment. One of my nephews joined a troop late in high school simply because he wanted to go camping with some of his friends who he enjoyed other outdoor activities with. Unfortunately, the troop leadership just did not know what to do with him and he only lasted a few camp outs.

It's really impossible to try and claim that either scouts or sports are more or less expensive than the other because it all depends on how your local activity is run and how involved the youth and parents want to be. And if you are comparing them, you have to compare true costs and perceived value. I've noticed most scouting cost comparisons leave out the hidden costs of the adult volunteer and fundraising aspects or the fact that uniforms aren't included as they generally are in sports. It's also not true in a lot of places to claim that a sports fee is only good for 8 weeks. League fees often also include participation in things throughout the year like summer pickup games, winter clinics, family days, free tickets to local sporting events, etc.

It is amazing the degree of support the Queen and her husband Prince Phillip gave to the world's youth through their various roles and patronages. In addition to scouting, she was a one time patron and lifelong supporter of Pony Club, another youth organization I have given a great deal of time to. She's also supported youth involvement in golf, tennis, football, and the Olympics not to mention multitudes of youth charitable and social organizations. Many children, not just in the UK or the Commonwealth but throughout the world, have lost a great friend and lifelong champion this week. I'm sad to mark her passing.

I wonder if it would be better for victims if BSA did enter Ch. 7. There certainly would be a scramble among the first in line. Many of those cases, though, were among the most egregious and if they went to court would likely result in judgements creating new high thresh holds for child sexual abuse victims. The ensuing media coverage would also put a focus on the issue in general whereas right now with Ch. 11 it seems to be getting swept under the rug and many of these victims will never be heard from. If the reality in Ch. 11 is that most victims are going to get a check for $37 anyway, I wonder if the validation, in terms of some high profile cases, media coverage, and large judgements under Ch. 7, would be better?

In some cases, I know certain suspect claims had information but it was recorded in the wrong fields or in attached narratives. If there is no other information included other than "someone somewhere abused me" then yes, you're right, you couldn't use that to establish any kind of corroborative matrix. But if there is a name, or a place, that would be something to work with. I know we've been told certain things about the claims but frankly unless they've been reviewed by an objective entity I don't know how much credence to give to anything that has been said.

What I have hoped is that some kind of corroborative forensics will be done to establish a matrix and depict clusters of cases in time and/or place or other common details. That could lend credence to claims in cases where aging memories are failing.

It will be interesting to see what the quotes are. I can't think of any parallels in youth organizations. Pretty much everyone doing anything with kids is under the coverage of an umbrella organization in some way unless they are a free lance piano teacher or a tutor. But those activities are not comparable to scouting and are generally adequately covered by a personal liability umbrella.

To me it seems like liability insurance is going to be the issue. If BSA goes belly up, no single unit or supporting organization would be able to afford it. If scouting is gong to continue at any kind of level more organized than a random street side pick up game, some solution would have to be found. I don't know what that is or what it would look like.

Let me clarify. It had nothing to do with new future liability from existing cases. What (I thought) I understood was that BSA owes money to the settlement -- that some portion of what it has pledged or owes is going to come from future revenues based on its achieving its business plan and that that money will be funneled into the trust going forward. I was wondering if someone knew for certain.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/us/boy-girl-scouts-membership-decrease-covid.html This is from about a year ago. Somewhere on this site is a chart from March of this year showing this year's number is about 650,000.

Do you have this link? https://methodistscouter.org/a-new-agreement/

My dim understanding is that BSA is also on the hook to make some kind of continuing future contributions to the settlement. If so, what happens if they are unable to do so? Does it matter? Somewhere buried in all the court documents was a restructuring plan that I thought was linked to a future contribution scheme. The business plan was based on certain membership numbers. BSA is currently far below the original membership number, although that doesn't seem to be widely known, and achieving the future projections outlined in its plan may be unsurmountable. If the membership numbers keep going down or remain flat when they have been projected to go up, does that have any bearing on things? Is that information that should be known by the judge?

As far as I know those are largely separate tracks: The tinkering that resulted in the 8/26 affiliation document is independent of the extension which gives units more time to sort this out. In a strategic sense it also allows BSA to show optimal membership numbers in its 2022 year end report for December. Some of the UMC units in limbo may ultimately drop but this way they won't be reflected until 2023.

There are about 55 million kids aged 5-17 in the US. The latest membership numbers for BSA from March showed 650,000 kids registered. The percentage is somewhere around 1.2% or perhaps a little higher if post Covid recruitment has seen any kind of a bump this spring and summer.

I doubt you'd find that in any one study or document. You'd have to do some research and piece it together from various sources like this one: https://health.gov/sites/default/files/2019-10/National_Youth_Sports_Strategy.pdf This states that about 55% of US high school age kids participate in a team sport and that percentage has stayed basically stable over time. One of the issues is also determining how many youth are out there because the number varies and different sources group them in different cohorts. Youth sports actually are fairly well known. There are several studies from both private and government sources that track participation although the rates will vary according to the source and there are some inclusions/exclusions that also muddy the picture. There has been some interesting data compiled during and post Covid showing what kids were up to. You could probably track some of that down. One of the interesting local and regional statistics I have noted is that during the pandemic, many nature centers and outdoor related sports facilities that offered things like golf, horseback riding, tennis, nature programming etc., reported exponential growth. That was truly a missed opportunity for cubs and scouting which instead experienced devastating membership losses. Frankly, I wouldn't waste too much time on what else kids are doing. I'm wondering more why an outdoors oriented organization like scouting isn't doing a better job of attracting kids interested in outdoor activity. They clearly want it and are doing it, but they are just not doing it with BSA.

Most of this was free or cheap: - Local and regional airports small enough not to view you as a security risk - Trout Unlimited local chapter -- expert help with fly fishing and providing equipment - Local fish hatcheries - Historical barracks, encampments - State or local astrological observatories/societies - Hawk watches in the fall. Audubon through state and local chapters is a great source for birding in general. Volunteers have come and led sessions or hiked. Not free but in our area several ski resorts offer scout weekends where the packages are really cheap. Some have limited cheap cabin or dormitory type camping.

Except if the tights and a tutu were a protest over longstanding issues with uniforms that are not being addressed, then it's a highly appropriate way to draw attention to the problem. It's supposedly a scout led organization and yet no one listens to the scouts. if they are attempting to find ways to be heard, I can only support that.

I think with the UMC in particular, what most scouters are unaware of is that the UMC is in a crisis on its own. Its whole basket of mission work, of which scouting is a small piece, is at risk. The bandwith for continuing any kind of future liability with scouting given the perceived lack of trustworthiness on the part of BSA is small for that and a variety of reasons.

This was already posted here on July 1 on page 5 of this thread -- unless there is something new here?

There are no magic wands but of all the problems BSA has right now this one is fairly small and would be simple to fix. It's a summer intern level project. For starters, a lot of the artwork is merely to make an old fashioned printed product look pretty and is not instructional or useful. You would delete those images when converting to a downloadable free online version. The only things you'd want to keep would be photos illustrating a skill, informational charts, etc. Additionally, the current booklets are sold for a profit. If they were made available free for educational purposes, many fees go away.

It's not that complicated. Obtaining permissions from institutions and individuals is generally no more complicated than writing a letter or nowadays having an email record. If it's stock photography with a usage fee it can generally be replaced with something similar that is free or recreated.