yknot

I don't understand the math here. Rosters for most varsity level team sports are 20-25 kids -- baseball, basketball, soccer. If your eligible demographic is 200 kids, that's at least 10% of the grade. But that's also probably 50% of the hopeful demographic that actually wants to play the sport. Not every kid in the grade wants to play a sport or make the commitment to play it at such a competitive and all consuming level, but scouting seems to like to assume that everyone does. There are also plenty of nonschool options for kids that don't make Varsity cuts and they are not all high end travel. Like scouting, there are teams and leagues at all levels of play. Do a certain percentage of kids and parents aspire to be the star starting player in a sport and pursue it that way? Yes, of course, but scouting seems to like to exaggerate that number to blame declining interest in scouting on sports.

It's true the high cost of volunteering in scouting is often unacknowledged, especially when compared to other youth activities. This is part of the value perception equation. It's also not as simple as thinking parents want to dump and run. Potential volunteers who are used to operating in more functional organizations find the systemic dysfunction in scouting incomprehensible. The onboarding experience in most youth activities is efficient and user friendly. Trying to onboard in scouts can be an ordeal. That makes the first point of entry a complete turn off for a lot of competent adults. Not necessarily dumping kids but running backwards away from dysfunction.

I partly agree but it's kind of a chicken and egg situation. Value perception is lacking because the program is so difficult to deliver that quality is inconsistent and often poor. But even when well administered there are multiple aspects of the program that no longer work well, appeal to, or provide comparative value to an increasingly large demographic.

I understand what's out there very well. Problems with value perception is why scouting is declining.

During Covid, membership at one point was at about 655,000, so he's probably right that overall scouting eventually clawed back about 260,000 post Covid. Scouting hasn't, however, added 260,000 in the past year.

There is no point comparing the costs of scouts to sports, it's a waste of time and not relevant to why most people pursue either activity. The costs for both are all over the map depending 1) where on the map you are, and 2) what level of involvement you are at. You can absolutely find travel leagues that are less than scouting. There are many access points and participation tiers. You can spend $10K or you can spend $1K. In many cases when you break down the fees and the hours involved in each activity, scouting has a higher per hour cost than sports and that's why a lot of families see it as a better value and use of their time. Both activities are great for kids at whatever level you can afford them and dependent on their interests and how that fits in with the family time and budget. Scouting needs to focus on listening to why more kids don't choose it.

I don't know exact national membership numbers but the latest I saw from earlier in the fall was around 915,000 and that was down about 90,000 from the same point the year before. There are some district positions that can access the membership totals on an ongoing basis and would know what the current number right now is. There used to be someone on here who would post them but I haven't seen him/her in awhile.

I couldn't agree more. The increasing focus in scouting on earning more well marketed advancement bling in talkfest meetings vs. doing something active, preferably outdoors, is such a self evident turn off for youth. I cannot comprehend this perspective at all.

I think you are choosing this hill to die on for some reason. If it works for your youth, great. But you can Google troops and units all over and see for yourself that many very healthy, active units, including ones spotlighted by BSA/SA, follow school schedules as they have done for decades and do great. Not meeting every single week is not a relevant cause of scouting's decline.

I have to believe the vast majority of units probably follow school schedules to a greater or lesser degree for simply pragmatic reasons. And most units can still manage to keep scouts engaged and active without a formal meeting every single week. People have posted examples here. There is generally plenty to engage scouts over a summer break, from camp to high adventure or volunteering. When units are failing, it's because of a hundred other problems that currently exist in scouting.

Two weeks? I'm really struggling to see that, especially over holiday weeks when there is so much else going on.

It really doesn't have bearing on anything if units meet a few more weeks or few less weeks in the course of a year and isn't an indicator of unit health. This is a mindset that has been pushed by National moreso for marketing, membership, and financial reasons than for any real reason.

Some units just follow local school district calendars because it affects meeting locations or, for certain families, school holiday closures affect child care, transportation, etc. It's not new or linked to burnout. It's just local convention in some places.

I don't have statistics but I don't think it matters much and it can go both ways no matter what kind of configuration you are in. We've had single district units, multi district units, and units with a mix of private schools. They can all work. I will point out that some legacy youth sports are increasingly operating in this way with many mergers of leagues or traditional local associations across town boundaries to keep player numbers up. It works. Kids make new friends from other towns.

Scouting America still selling cringe Indian Lore merit badge craft kits through online store... complete with medicine pouch and "proud hunter" necklace.

BSA "haters" would not be trying to deflect blame, though -- they would be doing the opposite.

That's a disturbing comment. While not pleasant to think about, it is certainly possible that some of the commentators on this forum over the years probably were involved in some of these cases. It's perhaps good to remember that a tactic of the guilty is to deflect blame elsewhere and weigh comments in that light.

Glad to hear it will still be maintained as an outdoor resource vs. being developed

I agree. I have had the same issue with, for example, calling venomous snakes "danger noodles" or "spicy noodles". It's an attempt to Disney-fy things that are real world risks whose dangers should not be minimized.

BSA/SA. In order to achieve Scout rank, a scout has to recite the Outdoor Code, which explicitly delineates appropriate behavior in the outdoors and being conservation minded. WOSM: In addition to what Awake Energy posted, there is an explicit directive from the WOSM website: https://www.scout.org/what-we-do/young-people-and-communities/environment Additionally, WOSM is partners with the World Wildlife Federation and the United Nations Environmental Program. Partnership means that you share the same philosophies. As a parallel example of what codes and partnerships mean, BSA/SA has a youth protection code of conduct and partners with youth protection groups. Youth safety isn't explicitly written into our mission statement, but that doesn't mean BSA/SA would participate in events where youth safety would be at risk because you can find great hammocks and rice plants.

Is the US and international scouting community hosting WSJs on any of those sites and providing de facto political endorsement of those locations and activities by their presence? The answer is no. I'm not clear what line of argument you are attempting to follow. Is filling in of remaining US tidal flat habitat universally bad in an environmental sense? Yes. Is US scouting blatantly supporting those activities? No. Or at least I hope not. I haven't seen or heard of any US scout units participating in "Yay, we support destroying tidal habitat" service projects lately. But we did send a US contingent to Saemangeum and to a similarly problematic although smaller site in Japan in 2015.

If that's the rationalization then I would say that in this as in so many things we have come to stand for nothing. We are -- or at least were -- an outdoors related conservation minded organization.

I did not and do not support Summit for many reasons but you can't compare the two. US Scouting at least attempted some environmental remediation of an existing damaged site where the damage started more than 100 years ago and largely concluded decades ago. Also, while the environmental damage was extreme locally, it was not a site of global importance for threated and endangered species. The South Korean site was a very high profile, very controversial, and very current example of extreme environmental destruction on a global scale and is everything the conservation minded scouting community should stand against. SBR is about 15 square miles; Saemangeum is about 160 square miles of intentional devastation. The scouting community allowed itself to be used by political interests attempting to legitimize what it had done. It's why those South Korean political interests poured so much money into showcasing the site and were so infuriated and incredulous when it fell apart. What I hope this does, however, is bring about a reconsideration of how, where, and why WSJ events are held in the future. From the US side, I think we need to be more judicious about whether we send contingents to WSJ. From the international side, as the report outlines, the world scouting community needs to take more interest and ownership in the safety and I would say suitability as far as alignment with our conservation credo when selecting sites.

I don't see how anyone who is a member of any outdoor conservation organization, of which Scouting is supposedly one, could have attended that WSJ. The Saemangeum sea wall project was on many global watch lists and was fought for years. It's got to be the first time a WSJ was used to christen the destruction of a globally important environmental region.

The site never should have been selected in the first place for any kind of scouting event and it's incomprehensible that US scouting endorsed the site with its presence. The "reclaimed seabed" was a tidal estuary habitat of extreme environmental importance for migratory species in a very challenging part of the world. It was like endorsing a Jamboree on a paved over a US National Wildlife Refuge the size of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia or something else of comparable square mileage and importance. It never should have gotten to the logistical nightmare phase because the Jamboree never should have been held there in the first place. The politics that are most to blame are within the scouting organization not in South Korea.