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I definitely think it should be an option yesterday.

Realistically the only way to manage evolving youth gender issues is to have blended dens and troops. Otherwise units would practically have to maintain up to date spreadsheets on their scouts orientation and identification preferences, which is not only intrusive and icky but can change and/or evolve within the year, sometimes multiple times. Some of the evolving youth identifications also no longer fit into clear cut boy/girl gender or orientation categories. If you are claiming to offer single gender dens and troops but an incident happens because a leader is not aware that a youth's situa

I can't agree. These kinds of things don't repeatedly happen in well run organizations. Just one example : the CO structure has been dysfunctional for decades and that dysfunction helped enable child predators to infiltrate the organization. BSA has never addressed it. It took an outside organization -- the UMC -- to force a substantive change as part of a bankruptcy proceeding.

I frankly don't care, within reason, if people are paid or volunteer. I care much more about whether they are doing a good job. I think in scouts we have seen that there is no monopoly at the top, on the part of either paid professionals or volunteers, regarding poor leadership, miscalculation, and mismanagement of the organization. The good folks that have been there trying to swim upstream have just kept getting pushed to shore apparently.

I don't think adult regalia has a place in a youth organization other than a particular color shirt or lanyard or lapel pin to indicate who is an adult leader/coach/official and who is not. In scouts, there's a legitimate use in identifying council, troop number and program. I have a hard time, though, appreciating what the purpose is for signifying anything more for adults in scouting. To me, the often cited idea of using patches, badges and pins to start conversations or to try to publicize a program aspect is like trying to communicate by semaphore or some other obscure method: There are mo

I'm not sure if this will post here or not, but this was posted on discussions.scouting.org before all the non scoutbook threads were deleted a couple months ago. It was the actual BSA number as of March 2022 after some of the post recharter reconciliations had been done. The actual membership number shown is about 647K. I believe the projected numbers are/were what are in the BSA reorganization plan.

Here are a couple of interesting articles on Native American connections to scouting. I've seen them before but there are some points covered that seem relevant to some of the discussions here, especially those raised by the Lenni Lenape pastor. While some of the examples included in these articles are more archival, there are a lot of other clips and examples that are current within the past few years. I think one of the key points that the pastor makes, which was what I was driving at in one of my posts, is that even without a religious ceremonial connection, in his opinion, we are allowing

Exactly. My thoughts were connected to using it to signify something -- a rite of passage, a rank advancement, an honor -- when it has no real connection to the activity or the honor. Face paint for the sake of face paint at a carnival or sporting event is different. Nothing is being implied by its use other than art, fandom, or function unless of course you use it to mimic or signify something.

The only other nonethnic youth activity I know apart from scouts that incorporated something like face paint as a rite of passage was foxhunting. Young members of the Pack would get "blooded" the first time they managed to arrive at a kill with the rest of the field. Their faces were marked, sometimes with fox blood, sometimes with something more benign. However, modern day outlooks have changed and fox killing is viewed differently and blooding, or the simulation of blooding, has like many other dated practices pretty much faded away. It's hard to understand then why proponents are so determi

If our friend Cynical Scouter, whose name is still attached to many of these threads, were still here I think he would remind you that BSA's fraudulent concealment and negligence has already been proven in court. It was the cause of several large judgements and is why BSA saw no other option than to file for Chapter 11. It would have been unable to defend itself against the legion of lawsuits that were already on the horizon then.

BSA and OA lost a good opportunity to strengthen its relationships with tribes with the disposition of council camp properties. Many of those properties were and are in traditional tribal areas where the land was appropriated from Native Americans and in some cases only a few changes of hands away from its tribal origins. Instead of selling to developers, BSA and OA could have offered some of these properties to their local OA tribes at advantageous terms. There are local tribes in our council area that have been looking for land to use for their own ceremonies and uses. That would have been a

In the late 70s I was in a lot of those other youth organizations -- 4-H, US Pony Club, drill team, catechism classes and CYO, sports leagues. I recall no such similar literature, manuals, or attitudes. The only corollary would have been in the Catholic setting where priests were revered and to a lesser extent with individual ex-cavalry military officers who were involved with mounted youth Troops and Pony Club. Their involvement however was more arms length as they were generally judges, officials, chef d'equipes.

Things are indeed different now but comparing an epidemic of child sexual abuse to some of these other issues isn't really a defense. It really falls apart when you look at environmental or health issues, because there are many similar situations where government agencies, corporate entities, or other organizations noted, collected, and yet failed to act or do the morally right thing with the information they had and often tried to hide because it was inconvenient, just as the BSA did. Whether it was a cancer causing substance or an abhorrent medical practice, we don't attempt to excuse it wit

Whoa...

It's in a couple of councils and camps. I can't fathom how it continues. BSA is lucky the people who made Leave No Trace seem to be unaware of it and didn't cut images in to juxtapose with some of the interviews.

I don't think it's honest to say that an organization that can produce and still to this day perpetuate and protect a situation like Mic-O-Say isn't outside of the norm and doesn't foster, closed, cultlike subsocieties and mentalities. I'm not aware that the Y's of the world or the Little League have anything even remotely comparable. If BSA can close ranks around something as ... I'll be nice and call it questionable ... as Mic-O-Say, who could trust that it wouldn't have closed ranks around anything else it deemed inconvenient to acknowledge?

To me this is the similarity with the abuse cases in the Catholic Church and to a lesser degree other religious denominations. Even more so than other religions, the position of the Catholic priest in a community was revered as above reproach, as was someone who embodied the highest of scouting's ideals, the scoutmaster. For that matter, even at the youth level, rank and file scouts are given a measurable level of higher regard by their community. How many times have we heard something along the lines of, "It will be fine, he's a scout." We still default to it here to this day on this forum, m

I think most of the councils sent out a version of a letter that must have come from National. It didn't say much and was along the lines of this: https://www.bsacac.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Statement-on-Hulu-film.pdf

It is adults who drive most of this and the negative connotations are perhaps most extreme in OA but not unique. There are also those adults who get up in front of other adults and youth and sing the Back to Gilwell song, or others who insist on singing some of the traditional camp fire songs or skits that are also more for the 1950s. I have seen this chase prospective or new scouts and families out the door. I think BSA needs to reevaluate how it is presenting itself overall, not just in OA.

I think you're right, but it's because there is no point to the UMC going bankrupt along with the BSA.

Thanks. That's what I was looking for.

It's June 30th and the UMC agreement that was supposed to be finalized a few weeks ago, and then the week after the June 16th webinar, and then again more than two weeks later, is still not out despite assurances it would be done by today. I wonder if, when the June 30th date was originally set, the participants assumed the lawsuit would be over by now?

That's not so crazy. The Methodist Church has been undergoing its own schisms and upheavals and has also had decades of membership and financial losses that it has to weigh and consider. There is very strong support for scouting in certain sectors of the UMC and the UMC can't afford to alienate them and lose more membership. On the other hand, the financial risks and potential costs of continuing a relationship with scouting is real. Negotiating something that doesn't have the UMC itself ending the relationship with scouting but instead causes that by default or significantly reduces the leve

It's a great story and has been picked up by multiple major and minor media outlets and is getting good visibility. It is also all over facebook, twitter, and other online sites and news sources. None of the stories or posts I have seen have mentioned anything about the bankruptcy case. It's all been positive.

A letter from the national Elks organization went out in December telling state chapters not to recharter scout units. Some states ignored it, some individual lodges ignored it, but many lodges did choose not to recharter. Last I heard, there was possibly an effort along the lines of what UMC is negotiating to allow some kind of limited involvement again with scouting but I have not heard that officially or seen any update. Maybe someone else on here knows more. Around the beginning of the year, elks.org removed any reference to boy scouting from its site, as did my state chapter and several o