Tron

The answer might be Cataylst. It was announced as going forward at the NAM and is designed to maintain engagement for 18 to 35 yr olds.

Correct. Most communities don't even know that they have scouts. In trying to follow your logic the best thing would be to eliminate the class b shirt and have the scouts wandering about dressed as scouts.

That's the greatest dumb answer ever, form more councils.

Quite true but I think the source of the problem is that most units dont have leaders capable of giving up control so the other leaders revert to just getting what the minimum done and leaving. I was asked recently to help on a patrol outing at my troop. The key concern is that the leader was given a green light to do whatever he wants to help his sons patrol develop; however, he cant use troop gear so he came to me for help since my personal gear closet is full. The key 3 dont want the backlash of saying no so them and the adult quartermaster have created an equipment scheme that stiffles any activities outside of their personal plan [planned] around their scouts.

This chart is often shown and as far as I can tell quite accurate; however, there are lies, the truth, and statistics. The values not shown on this chart are critically important to understanding chart: Percent of population under 18yrs AND membership headcount as a percentage of total elgible youth. Scouting America has held steady at 2% of total elgible youth until about 3 years ago. Specifically retention has increasingly gone down. The organization knows how to recruit but units dont know how to retain.

Meh totally pass on this suggestion. We can't even get the troop to agree on putting the city of the CO on the unit numerals due to cross city rivalry and the fact that we're pulling from 3 cities that are highly competitive against each other in HS sports.

Not that I saw, a lot of the slide deck data was not shared this year.

My viewpoint is based on literally talking with people and making sure they understood what was coming and they blew it off. I'm a unit trainer and I literally had a leader tell me this was their excuse to exit the leadership and blame national when I reminded him 72hrs out and asked if he needed any help. The quality of our leadership is garbage; I can't do the training for the other leaders and (in my unit at least) they refused help prior to the cutoff and are now blaming national for screwing up.

This aligns with the 500k trendline scenario that was presented at the NAM.

That sounds like a communcation issue.

I think quality volunteers is in decline. We're seeing this right now. After 60 days of reminders we now have hundreds of volunteers in every council running around with expired youth protection training because they are of such low quality that they couldnt do free training with up to 60 days of reminder notice.

I just don't think it will work. From the egos j cousino mentions to the CO issues. The reality of the situation is not anything someone did or didnt do in scouting. The main issue with units folding due to lack of recruitment; 2% of the area youth is the recruitment goal, it's the same goal as 1970. When an area has only enough youth tp support 1 or maybe 2 troops the adult leaders need to recognize the limitation and set expectations realistically.

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.