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The core problem is that Scouting America cannot generate enough revenue to have enough paid staff. Maybe the answer is that what Scouting America sells can only be measured in a subjective manner, and that subjectivity limits the ability of the organization to have a pricing structure and billing model that allows it to function in any other manner than volunteer based? How do other organizations in the same youth serving space approach this challenge? The answer is they charge higher fees in order to hire qualified paid staff at the grassroots level. Those higher fees pay the immediate salaries and operating costs, a percentage filters up to pay the regional and national costs, the operational model is high engagement through aggressive marketing with multiple short windows of activity and guaranteed results. Let us use this years kickers camp(s) for my daughter as an example. This year kickers camp was split into 7 different camps and spread throughout the year, each camp costs $200. Each camp presents 6 hours of group instruction spread across 3 days. Each camp focuses on a specific skill; the club guarantees that if my daughter shows up on time, in the proper uniform, ready to drill, that she will absolutely learn the skill; they present how they measure the skill attainment, and tell me what each skill is the foundation for, or needed for, to take her soccer career to the next level. They justify the cost of the program and prove the success of the program by presenting figures on how many of their camp attendees go on to play varsity soccer, retain varsity slots, and go on to club sport or college teams. All that being said I think the business model shift in Scouting America that would be needed to get enough paid staff to move away from a volunteer based structure is not palatable to the organizations legacy members/supporters/Eagle Scouts.

Adding paid professionals isn't an option. For every paid professional you add to a council you have a direct dollar-for-dollar transfer away from program. Nationals model of helping councils is grant based. Grant based headcount is inherently unstable and unreliable due to the come-and-go nature of grants. There are no employees to send to the councils to help either. National has around 700-800 employees total depending on the moment. Most of those employees are high adventure base staff (EG: Todays news reports on the Northern Tier evacuations is that 200 staff are being evacuated along side any remaining scouts on trek). The math is that national basically puts ALL OF ITS MONEY into staffing program a the high adventure bases and the Irving office is basically empty. If districts and councils don't lean hard into recruiting volunteers they will cease to exist, volunteer based councils are the only way forward.

OMG: Cubs absolutely do need to camp. Cubs that camp are almost guaranteed to cross to a troop.

The illustrious council camping committee, ever faithful to have more concern over control and power than getting the scouts camping. If Scouting America had an annual or bi-annual camping nights sleeping in a tent or bare ground rule every member of the district and council camping committees in my council would get the boot. A buddy of mine heard the council camping chair say (in seriousness) that he hates camping.

Read my answer above instead of being combative. Someone at your council did it and blamed national. Someone at your council has no respect for you and made you manually fix what they could have had done with a 100 character script by national. It is a double straw argument now. Internet has existed and been available for longer than Scouting America/BSA having online tools. It is what we have everywhere. Somehow, somewhere, sometime, someone introduced this idea that scouting has professional scouters that do everything or anything. We need to get back to the roots of the program and understand that is, and always has been a volunteer based program and if you want scouting in your area you have to recruit a team of volunteers.

I love where you want to go with this; trust me I do. My troop finally enacted a cell phone policy. I am no longer the A-hole dad telling his scouts to put the phones away or they get locked in the car while everyone else does wtf they want; however, I am not sure if this is a national level issue for a couple of reasons. If national were to introduce a new policy, how would they enforce it? As an example, the new safeguarding youth (not the name, but the whole new process) program is mandated from the bankruptcy and settlement and national is absolutely impotent in the means of enforcing it at the council level let alone unit level. This is a legally enforceable mandate where everyone with a functioning brain agrees it is important and it still can't get enforced. We know that the entire country is a patchwork of (at sometimes) weird laws and judicial rulings. Does national want to weigh in and get forced to navigate all the various laws? For example in my state it is illegal for schools and other organizations to take cell phones away from youth who have medical conditions, educational need, or if they have an IEP at their school of enrollment that states they should have access to a cellular device due to their condition(s). The only reason why my troop has a cell phone policy is because the COR basically came in and said, agree to it or your family hits the bricks.

1) Exactly, You were lied to. 2) See my original explanation, you have someone off program screwing things up and blaming everyone but themselves. 3) I grew up in an area like what you describe; somehow never had the problems you are straw argumenting on. 4) That is a lot of districts; it is because the DE's are not properly trained to recruit a functioning district committee. The areas that do not have popoulation for a district committee are almost guaranteed to be an area that is too small to be a district. A district is supposed to be based on population and not geography. The warnings do go out at 90, 60, 30, and day of from national. The commissioner corps in my district personally called every single person which led to some spicey responses. Personal opinion, we need to cull the weak leaders right out of the program.

This would never happen in my council; it would shift the power balance away from a small group of power mongers. EG: A few years ago we had a windstorm come through and knock down hundreds of trees at camp. The camping director of the council was complaining to me about the cost to get 1 campsite backup and running. Me, having experience and professional certification in logging operations offered to come and clean up all of the windfall for free and told the camping director to just pick a weekend for me to roll in and do it at no charge. I got ghosted.

I know quite a lot about the Scouting America IT systems and have made quite a good career in software development and data management, and business management. I can tell you that the systems didn't just lose your district or councils records; that is literally not how any system made at this level works. Someone blamed national and national played the part of the patsy. What probably happened was that someone at your council with registrar level system access accidentally deleted a mass of things and then played dumb instead of immediately putting in a service ticket with national to have the data restored. Something that everyone should be aware of is that the updates to the My.Scouting system so far last year and this year are allowing people properly registered to units, district, and council to make training updates to take this sort of task off of the council registrars plate. Every unit should have a properly registered trainer, every district and council should have a functioning and properly registered training committee.

This is a very valid point; however, the counter to this point is that the weeks blocked by the school year need to somehow get made up through other weeks of usage sometime else in the calendar year. The point I think national is trying to make is that all service industry companies (hotels, travel, camping, etc ... ) have a minimum usage/occupancy to just break even and our camps don't even try to meet that level. The larger the geographic area of councils, the better the staff to scout ratio in a council, the less dependent a council is on FOS. My opinion continues to shift towards FOS being an addiction that is killing councils. If councils had roughly 10 paid staff and somewhere near 10,000 scouts there is almost no need for FOS; however, when a council is 2,000 or 3,000 scouts and the paid staff is 10+ the professionals that should support the program spend all of their time hustling for money instead of doing their real jobs. We need to condense down to roughly 100 councils if we are going to be able to re-align the professional staff to program. This is solved by having fewer camps. The smallest camp in my area can handle around 200 to 250 guests per resident camp week. The largest can handle around 500 to 600 guests per resident camp week. If scouting ran those larger camps at 100% capacity they could afford to pay the staff well enough to draw in more, and higher quality camp staff. National also needs to find more recognition for those camp staff; some sort of knot progression to show off years/seasons of service, codify some rules to fast track OA membership, brotherhood and vigil. Fun fact, pay and recognition work.

I think this is an important point, "hadn't been in unit-level positions in 2+ decades". There is another part of this, the unit level leader without current or any historical experience at the district or council level. I got "in trouble" recently when I failed to constrain my voice. A unit leader who has never been a district or council level volunteer wanted to know "why our district sucks so much and never helps the units" and I just blurted out in response at the meeting "who the F@#$ do you think the district staff is and where do you think they come from?" which apparently this dude, who supposedly has been involved in scouting for 40+ years though the district committee was a paid staff of professionals.

You think national should be ran by the youth? I've been a volunteer for a long time now, consistently the youth struggle to stick to an outing budget, you think they could steer the national organization? You're just trolling now.

That's a low amount, the smallest resident camp in my state runs 2000+ through each season, the largest runs 3600 at 75% capacity (from what I can tell). Understandable. Perception is reality to the individual but doesn't necessarily constitute the true reality. There is one message from national that has been consistent and absolutely true in my opinion: We have too many properties and the properties we have are vastly underutilized. If you had access to the reservation calendar for your most local camp do you think it has had 50% capacity or higher in any cobbled together 8 week period in the last year? Do you think your most local camp has hosted scouts, any scouts, 25 weeks of the past year? If your area is like my area, that answer is without a doubt an absolute no. I know what you're talking about. Many from national have spoke of this at national and territory meetings. The other part of this was something like resident camps need to run Memorial Day to Labor Day or they won't be profitable. 12 weeks of resident camp is the ideal when calculating total capacity.

My council has the worst training rate in the territory. The whole region is a training dumpster fire from what I can tell. I was at a meeting a couple weeks ago and the word was that our council and the surrounding councils were all still scrambling to get May safeguarding expirations caught up and averaging 100 expirations per district across multiple councils.

On one hand Scouting America is being demonized while actually doing better than the general population. On the other hand the goal is zero incidents. Some low hanging fruit to improve the process and strive towards zero incidents would be automated revocation of membership if safety based training ever expires. If Scouting America wants credit for doing better it's going to have to do things like auto revoke adult registration for failure to gain and maintain training. Youth protection/safeguarding expires? Membership should get auto dropped before the next business day begins. Hazardous weather expires? Same thing. You're registered as an adult leader for over 90 days and not position trained, guess what, your membership should be auto dropped. Safeguarding is the main training mandate that has to be absolutely 100% enforced; however, enforcing all of the other training requirements sets the tone of expectations. Until Scouting America gets serious I don't think it gets any credit regardless of being statistically better than everyone else.