yknot

I got a donation request yesterday from council that insisted all funds stay local.

The dilemma is that while scouting in many regions is indeed over-camped -- I think there are almost 10 within 90 minutes of where I am -- without access to convenient camps, many units will fade away. It's harder to get adult volunteers on weekends when they have to drive more than an hour or so. And the really sad part to me is the impending loss of all this undeveloped camp acreage across the country.

I agree that kids like the out of doors but I disagree that scouts really offers much of it anymore. In a previous post I mentioned how nature centers jumped into the gap by offering Covid suitable programming during the pandemic. Their memberships have burgeoned while scouting has tanked. Parents love it when their kids come home talking about hiking and birds and butterflies and trees. Unlike their typical cub scout leader or ASM, the nature center naturalist can actually tell them what animal made that track or the name of the bird they just saw. BSA is really not that outdoors focused.

I think there is a lot more boomer influence in the parent role than you may realize. I know too many women who had kids into their 40s and those kids are mid teens today. Too many dads whose last kid is that age or younger as well. Not trying to quibble over demographics just saying there is still a generational influence in scouting that is very supportive but is on the cusp of disappearing. Edit -- Also, it is Boomer age volunteers who are still filling most of the volunteer leadership positions in our units and many district level posts even though their own children have aged out, many for years.

Congratulations on your future cub and thanks for reminding us grumpy old people that great young people are always out there.

That's exactly what I'm saying. The Boomer generation is still significantly influencing and populating the scouting movement and there are not many more years left where it will still be present. That's going to have a continuing depressive effect on membership.

I think it's more about specialization. Families don't want to waste time or money on activities that don't meet their exact needs and interests. Other youth organizations have adapted to this. A kid interested in soccer, for example, can find options to play rec, local travel, regional travel, or elite travel. I don't agree about the outdoors. During the pandemic when units shut down, many nature centers offered Covid friendly programming and their membership rolls burgeoned while BSA's has tanked. A lot of those kids don't want to come back to scouting because of being too much like homework. Allowing STEM tracks, outdoors tracks, citizenship tracks would allow it to appeal to more youth with differing interests.

I kind of disagree. The biggest supporters of scouting in my neck of the woods are younger boomers who still have relatively young kids and then to a lesser degree, Gen X'ers. We are still out there supporting things like scouts and sports and all the legacy community organizations. I think when the last cohort of younger boomers with scout aged kids, which I'm in, ages out in the next few years, it's going to be noticeable. Which is to say I agree that BSA is going to have a tough time producing a business model that supports retaining all these camp and HA bases.

Well, I'm a boomer with a young teen and so are most of my friends who have/had kids in the program. I don't know if we gravitated to each other because of the generational thing but here we are. Not uncommon for people to have had kids or adopted late in life or be on second marriages with younger kids. We have also been the ones running things. A good segment of Gen X'ers right below us too-- thank the Lord for you guys. Millennials? Uh, almost none.

It seems kind of obvious but you do hope. I don't know about Gen Z. First off, I see them putting off having families as have Millennials. Frankly, I look out over the units I see and there are still a lot of Baby Boomer parents here with adolescents and teenagers, especially dads. We're still riding the membership connection to that generation.

Given that scouts is at 750,000 now, 1 million may be optimistic. The success of this fall's recruitment will be informative when it's seen how many scouts return. There could be a big bounce but it's also possible there could be yet additional attrition. The pandemic has changed a lot of things -- family priorities, finances, youth interests. It's unclear how these changes could affect recruitment. I have wondered what happens if at some point during Chapter 11 it becomes clear that scouting is a dinosaur on life support.

That's my point. BSA COs in many cases actually don't do any supervising, whether or not it is assigned to them on paper, and BSA doesn't follow up. I have witnessed outrageous adult behavior in all kinds of youth settings. In a sports setting, offending adults are no longer allowed to coach or ejected from games and practices. It's clear who is responsible for removing the adult. Often times the people empowered to remove the individual are on site and witness the behavior. In scouting, I've never seen that happen and it is unclear to most COs that it would be their responsibility to do so. It is very rare for a CO or COR to be in attendance at a camp out and witness the behavior. And I'm not even talking about CSA. I think BSA has done a lot, I just don' think it's done enough and I don't think it has been willing to look at some of the reasons why abuse has been so rampant and why it has continued to occur even to the present day despite having so many measures in place.

This is complicated by the fact that while on paper BSA assigns responsibility to COs, in practice it does not ensure those responsibilities are being carried out. Every council is different, so there may be some where COs were more conscientiously supervised and had their charters pulled for lack of unit supervision, but that would never happen in my area because it would result in lost units and membership. BSA in my experience does not care if the CO has any role in the operations of the unit. It knowingly abdicates this oversight responsibility.

That's exactly why COs are so confused about their role with BSA. With most other organizations the relationship is simply one of benign support. We also have church chartered units and the pastors know a couple of people in the organization, generally the person who comes and asks them to sign something, but they know no one else. Most of the CORs are that in name only and don't belong to the congregation. There no longer is any connection between the congregations and the unit. This isn't an issue for any other organization because they are not looking for the CO to hold a supervisory role. The reality is that the scouting model is vastly different for the CO and a supervisory role is indeed required, it's just not recognized as such. That this responsibility isn't highlighted and better emphasized is due to the conflict that BSA has had in maintaining membership numbers at all costs.

I'm not so sure. The reassurances were pretty emphatic to my council.

I think it's also important to point out that it seems like the people who are posting about this on this forum or are mostly lurking but popping in from time to time are... the relative success stories, if that would be the correct term? They were somehow able to function and hold jobs despite needing therapy and experiencing bleak episodes in their lives. The people who are not on here weighing in and likely not even included in the 83,000 claims are the ones who were largely lost. The ones who committed suicide, or turned around and became abusers themselves because that is a common sequelae of abuse. The ones who wound up on drugs or in jail or who went back and murdered their accused abuser later in life, destroying their own lives in the process. We've all seen those media reports. I think excessive anger or impatience or lack of understanding directed at victims is un scout like. I hope a way out of this can be figured out, but it can't be at the expense of doing what's right by people who were permanently damaged. They deserve some meaningful recompense. Not $102 billion, because it doesn't exist, but it seems clear the needle has to move up into the several billions. If BSA is serious about surviving, it will put something painful but realistic and meaningful on the table sooner rather than later.

I saw someone selling it roadside in cut, stacked bundles the way you would sell firewood. People apparently use it for tomato stakes. Not sure how much you'd be able to sell though.

I think you have to adapt to your demographics. I hear about troops in other parts of the country that are very active in the summer but it in our area it's almost impossible to pull off. Very few people are around enough to do much more than summer camp and some ad hoc stuff. We are also perennially short of adult volunteers, most of them are two career families, and most of them seem to want to kick back some over the summer. Summer is really not that much of a break in family activity anymore. As far as the OP, I think the key is to set expectations ahead of time. Our unit has never held fast to the idea of six months fully active. However, even with a summer let down or during a Covid pause, there are tasks that can be done related to the POR. Same thing with a scout that took a POR but found out he had a conflict with some of the meetings. We didn't extend his term, we just made it clear he needed to delegate so his job was done even when he couldn't be there. Every troop seems to do it a little bit different. The only approach I don't like is the no show POR -- the scout who gets credit for having his name down on a piece of paper but never actually does anything.

There are BSA parallel universes. In the perfect world, a BSA would exist that would actually embody scouting ideals and always comport itself in alignment with same. As a result, there would be no serious issues, That BSA would have a robust membership, fully supported volunteers, wise and perceptive leaders, and an ability to model and produce the very best of American youth citizen leadership. We would be proactive stewards and ambassadors of the outdoors and guardians of citizen service and patriotism. We're stuck in the other universe.

About 88% of CSA cases are perpetrated by men, so youth organizations that have a higher percentage of female leadership or involvement by default have lower levels of CSA. It's something BSA has never acknowledged or addressed in its YPT. Female abusers are often quite different -- they often work in tandem with another abuser (typically male) to victimize an extremely young child in their care or they fall into the "cougar" category -- an older teacher for example despoiling a student in situations that are inherently wrong but in some sense more consensual than adult male on minor male or minor female abuse.

That's some myth busting that has been much needed. So many scouters will argue that scouting is a bargain compared to other youth activities and yet we hear differently on the street... or, er... in the woods.

There are a different ways of viewing honorability. If a captain goes down with his sinking ship, that is considered honorable behavior. If the ship is sinking though because he steered it straight into an iceberg, it might still be honorable for him to go down with it but he's also responsible for the disaster. That's kind of how I view the BSA Over the decades I think there's been a mix of institutionalized arrogance and incompetence which, while it might have been honorably intended, has resulted in BSA being inexplicably too blind or too slow or too in denial to see or react to certain dangers. Being good people, which I'm sure some of them are, doesn't justify doing a bad job.

My opinion is that this has been one of the best threads on this site--great, timely, and unique raw information, excellent analysis and multiple perspectives even when they differ, and thoughtful moderation. That's sad, because it's not a program thread, which is where I think most of us would rather be. But in our current reality, I feel it is helping all of us try to wrap our minds around the incomprehensible. I have no doubt that there are some individuals in the BSA upper tier organization that I would respect and trust. However, the ones I have encountered so far, as well as some of the incomprehensible actions taken by national, have not inspired trust or confidence. I'm willing to listen to others who have had other experiences and would be delighted to ultimately have my faith restored. But it has got to be restored with more than words. I have to see some things going in a different direction. So, if I'm a dwarf, I'm not Cynical or Skeptic, but maybe Hopeful?

Bikes have been a hot commodity during Covid. There was a time last year when bikes simply could not be found around here. Some parts are still hard to get and there is a market for them. A guess a good wake up call for anyone else with bikes.

I don't know why people are even putting feeders out now. It's bear season. Another way BSA is so out of touch with current practices. They really need to pad out their advisory boards to include people outside of scouting from Audubon, Cornell, Sierra Club, etc.