Tron

I dont think we can cut enough salary bloat to save the camps; save some maybe, but there is going to be winners and losers.

s; service to the units. If this metric is not met, the funds raised are not being used, or used improperly. I would be happy to go toe-to-toe with any council executive. Correct. This is correct. The fundraising is supposed to go towards funding program and training; however, so much is being spent to just subsidize professional salaries. We absolutely have the technology to eliminate councils. We have to do a 360 analysis and realize that we could easily get rid of 100 or more councils.

That is all stored in the same data layer as everyone else. Nationals system wasnt unreliable, it didnt fail, someone in your council borked your records.

Lol, training. Training is SO easy and SO many volunteers can't seem to get it done. National needs to make trained status mandatory just like youth protection.

What is your pack like? What are your pack costs?

What would you suggest?

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.