Tron

Your council has the secret sauce, you should share with everyone and save the camps.

If your state is like my state the resident camps only run for 8 weeks and are about 3x the capacity of what is needed. If we actually got every scout in the state into resident camp for just 1 week a year we'd still have camps running at less than 50%. There are too many camps. I see your concern and would say that the answer is rewilding the worst camps into adventure bases to get cost to down down while also funneling scouts to fewer resident camps.

I met Ricky Mason a couple years ago, he was a keynote speaker at an event; based on that experience I can say he has the right ties to the program to be driven to make it survive, and he has the grasp of knowledge of what is really going on to know what needs to be done. The other thing is we definitely have far too many councils; as we consolidate we won't need as many camps, we're barely using the camps right now. We need to lean on Jim Rogers to optimize the number of camps and campsites. Our membership is low right now, but it's not going to get much bigger. Historically we've been at 2% of American youth in scouting, that puts the real membership metric at only about 1 million youth members. We have to adjust to the fact that Americans are having far fewer children and that the country is growing older. It is a demographic change that is out of our hands. If the younger generations are not confident in their ability to hold down good employment and have a marriage and a home they will have fewer kids. Fewer kids means fewer scouts. Offshoring jobs and letting banks and investment funds squat on empty homes is having a big impact on millenials and gen Z and their decisions to start families.

As councils merge this behavior becomes less and less acceptable due to the talent pool being forced to optimize as the promotion path steepens. A bad professional in a pool of 10 doesn't look so bad due to limited peer comparison opportunities. Toss that professional into a pool of 30 peers and average or mediocre will reveal as poor and incapable.

I think the CST model is failing because the CST volunteers are overwhelmed at how poorly qualified the council and district volunteers are. Imagine the routine things that filter up because so many buddies of a buddy are chairing district committees, and how many council committees are chaires by people that have great checkbooks but ZERO domain knowledge. The problem with on scouting is that it's a qausi official source and not a real official source.

It's my understanding that they do internally.

Im not sure. I think they might be reporting "total unique youth served" which may include LFL AND other headcount or NO LFL and other headcount. I have not completely figured out the total unique youth served calculation. Regardless, you are correct, something is off in how numbers are being reported.

National is reporting higher than actual membership numbers at 887k vs 760k. National is concerned about the membership trend line showing 8% loss year-over-year and projecting a membership loss down to 550k by 2030 if changes are not made.

So the general vibe out of the 2026 NAM is that national, council, and districts support the units and changes are coming between now and this time next year for the organization to align to that philisophy.

1 spare pants, 1 spare shirt, 1 spare underware, 2 spare pair of socks. No camp.shoes.

The rumor about renewals was confirmed and briefed at the NAM today. All renewals are moving to February.

As a stand alone program I dont see this taking off. Cant wait to hear my DE talk about the new great opportunity to start new units.

I would guess that a council has or would do this because the key 3 are not communucating with national and failed to know about this stage of the transition from ypt to syt.

You say sadly; however, a multi patrol troop can easily put on a resident/long term camp on its own for a fifth of the cost and get all.of the non MB experience in without the annoyance of being on a campnwide schedule. If OA took the long term camp requirement out the resident camps.in my state would easily lose 25 to 50% of their campers.

I totally get this, I'm even a parent who expects MB at summer camp, though the pressure is on my kids to actually perform. God help them if they come back from camp with a partial; partials trigger the old "What were you doing instead of completing this?!" and subsequent chastising about how much they are applying themselves and how much they would apply themselves if it was their own money.