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Definitely if there is no requirement to maintain existing units. Unit churn could become a real thing.

In my council the BOD is massive as well; but that is by design as it's a "giving to get" situation. Our BOD is all mid level corporate leaders and local government leaders who want a BOD line item for their resume so they can move up to a bigger position or bigger corporation; in return the council presumably gets a direct line to potential FOS dollars. What I find the most lacking in my councils BOD is that there is a total lack of BOD members from other non-profits. I have a lot of non-profit experience and when I speak with senior leaders in my council about non-profit concepts of growth and sustainment they go 100% into deer-in-the-headlights they just don't get it because they are all business people and they don't really have non-profit experience.

I see what you are concerned with but it's not an issue if the unit executive wants to be an ASM. It's not even an issue that the UE acts like the COR, he's the CORs supervisor; it's micromanagement but ultimately as the UE he has all of the authority of the COR already.

Great points. I'm starting to think the underlying answer is that SA is far too interested in creating "leaders" instead of good people with outdoors skills. I hope not. IMHO anyone of us could throw a rock and find a more qualified person than Bear Grylls.

Phantom members might become a thing with this new 3x3 rule coming out; not for new units but for old units that start to hemorrhage members to new competition. I know in my town there are several leaders from the various different units talking about getting together and starting a new unit when this 3x3 rule rolls out. The side conversation is which of the existing units is going to fold as our town just does not have enough kids to support another troop, but we know the new troop will out perform at least 1 of the existing troops; especially when it grows to 6 or more scouts.

It really depends on the scouts, over the past handful of years I have seen scouts that were not ready at 11 crossover and then drop; yet, I have seen 2 high functioning 10 year olds crossover and outperform older scouts at the troop. Last January I saw a 10 year old tent alone during troop winter camp while several 13-15 year olds needed to tent with their parents due to lack of winter camping knowledge and fear. It really depends on the scout and the program currently has a bit more flexibility to push those higher functioning 10 and 11 year olds up asap which is nice. It would be good if there was a better way to manage 11 and 12 year olds that are not ready for the troop. It makes sense to shorten cubs from a viewpoint of what is best for a single child scout or when evaluating a scout in isolation; however, we have to remember that the younger ranks were added due to tag along siblings. Those tag along siblings are going to be there no matter what, and so they experience burnout regardless of registration situation. What we have seen over time is that it is better to capture those youth into the program at k5 - 2nd grade and let them maturate as scouts instead of having them develop a distaste to the program from being locked out due to their age.

I've volunteered and led many non-profit/fraternal groups over the years; working mostly locally but in a few cases at the state and semi-regional level. Motivation is really simple. Motivation is never the problem, people are already volunteering, they are exhibiting motivation already. The biggest problem that BSA has is that BSA generally does not understand that volunteers are motivated in other ways than financial. When a volunteer gets shat on they retract from volunteering and if the situation does not resolve they move to one of the dozens of other groups asking them for their time. Volunteers are motivated through their ethos; if the organization is not in alignment with their ethos they move on. BSA in some cases holds onto some volunteers who are not in ethos alignment because of the volunteers children; however, we have all seen how once those kids age out or eagle out the volunteer disappears like batman escaping the police (which leaves the local BSA entities hanging). Specific to commissioners I will say that my council has a very low performing commissioner corps; my district probably has one of the worst commissioner corps in the nation. What has killed commissioning in my council is that the council has repeatedly told the commissioners that their mission is something different than what the training says the commissioner mission is. We can't keep commissioners, we get a couple people to sign on as commissioners, they do the training, they learn about some knots and other uniform flair, they earn their flair, and by that time they are already burnt out and pissed that they are being told to do things no outlined in the training or commissioner college materials so they quit and move on to patting their knots and saying that they tried.

This is a nothing burger. Most residential wells and water systems do not require testing. I did water quality testing for 5 years and what I learned was if you don't look you don't see.

Everything you're talking about here speaks to the lack of quality control/inconsistency of quality control in BSA. BSA could learn A LOT from Scouts UK about leadership quality control; BSA's next big challenge is making sure trained leadership is present instead of all the tweedle dee's and tweedle dums.

I think you hit the nail on the head solidly. What value does OA provide to scouts in todays day and age?

What is the real goal here? WOSM is basically just a parent/partner organization for the big entities in each country. What does this do to help position them as the key international base for the movement? What changed that helps WOSM get into the last handful of countries without scouting or that have scouting programs that are not part of WOSM?

How does a council drop commissioner service? The commissioner corps is a fundamental part of the mission of the districts and councils to serve the units.

You should redact those names. Black magic markers are everyone but the presses friend. Have you tried changing the roles in Scoutbook as well? I mean like, doing it in Scoutbook and my.Scouting at the same(ish) time? The data layer is supposed to be the same and perhaps Scoutbook is overriding your changes?

Both of your comments tie together. Scout Reach is supposed to be about financial disadvantage regardless of location or race. One of the units I volunteer with finally was able to brow-beat the council into giving us Scout Reach funding (council ponied matching funds for disadvantage scouts in the unit); we just would not shut up and kept beating up council staff on the fact that our community is primarily white with 41% living at or below the poverty line (56% of youth in the community are reported to be in disadvantaged households) and that it shouldn't matter that we're not in the "inner city" of the council. Scout Reach is pure broken in my opinion.

A lot of good points; but the PDFs are not even available to print on demand and are not maintained. GTA is a mess, with about 2 dozen sub pages with hacked together updates. I would totally go with, hey come here and grab the PDF and take it to kinkos if you want.

You don't really do anything in My.Scouting that I know of. Their membership are with national and will expire when they expire; just be sure to not renew them when you do internet rechartering at the end of the year. For now you would just go into Scoutbook and put an end date on their positions and functional roles.

There might be some age impact here, 21% dropping out is huge though. Based on the mentality of this lawsuit and true goals I suspect few died and more just gave up as their goal was to destroy BSA and they failed to achieve.

We're both probably missing stuff here as not everything is available/clearly defined yet. Supposedly the SB+ stuff is being cleaned up right now and some of this confusion should go away. I really wish they had just published hardcopy leader guides for the wolves-aol. Hoping back and forth between the handbooks and the website is going to get old fast.

Let me kick the hornets nest here. During the NAM the marketing presentation broke down the demographics by race and locality of BSA and made some crazy claims. Specifically nationals marketing was concerned about over-representation of Asians and Whites, and suburban and rural. I had to just accept the numbers on what national considers suburban/rural/core city membership (right?); however, they gave percentages of membership race composition and I took those right away and compared them to the 2020 US census national composition and BSAs racial makeup is +/- 1% by racial composition. There is no racial disparity in BSA; contrary to perceived exclusion, or whatever people are thinking, statistically the disparity is not there. Yet again there was the claim that Asians and Whites are over-represented; it's just a DEI dog-whistle. National also talked about male vs female but with far lest zeel except that female membership is a constant year-over-year increase. Female membership is currently right around 8% of the total membership. That's the BIG disparity; which is why we're changing our name from Boy Scouts of America to Scouting America. Our energies should be on recruiting as many people as possible; however, our target should be more than just growth, but exceptional growth for young women. They're 51% of the population so statistically speaking we're underserving young women until they reach 51% of the membership. This effort though is going to get watered down and distracted from because nationals marketing and HR/DEI are more focused on why we're over serving Asian and White males.

When you asked those people to step up did you provide any written position descriptions? In my experience literally taking the position descriptions out of the leader guides and providing them works wonders. Written position descriptions sets fair barriers for people. Did you explain that volunteering for the position is not forever and is a 1 year obligation that they can renew or walk away from? I am involved with several units and I will compare and contrast the best functioning to the worst functioning. The best functioning literally just runs the program; no "we do it this way because" no "we've always done it this way" no "well the unit leader likes it this way" its we're doing it by the book. This is your position description, we want you to do your position specific training so you have a baseline idea of what the unit leaders do, we're asking you to do this for 1 calendar year, and if you want to stay on after that for another year, great; if things are not working out and you want to try something else great. This unit has every position filled except FOS chair. Contrast that to the unit that is the worst functioning: it's a mixture of some book stuff, some a unit leader 20 years ago made up stuff, the new unit leader wants to put his stamp on it made up stuff, position descriptions are made up and barely recognizable to the literature, people outright refuse to do training, and there are people guilted into staying involved after their kids leave the program and EVERYONE sees that and is scared of stepping up. This unit has about half the functional roles filled and of those roles there are multiple that are filled by people who start every parent meeting with "my kid is no longer in the program I am leaving at X date!" which turns into X+N when that date hits and no one has stood up. The unit is going to implode, just totally collapse if one of these parents gets a new job, or get sick, just has one of those really good only a monster would blame them for quitting reasons.

So how do you reconcile your findings against nationals findings?

Ok, makes sense but shouldnt be that way in cubs. In theory each Lion and Tiger den is starting a new Den Leader and soon there after picking up an assistant. When the lead starts to get burned out the assistant and that lead should be able to swap positions. From a committee standpoint at cubs the committee should be rotating to avoid the burnout. Let us not kid ourselves, most of the committee positions are just show up and answer a very narrow range of questions; if you have an experienced CC most of the committee is just breathing oxygen and hopefully learning something in the event that the CC gets hit by a bus.

Ok, makes sense but shouldnt be that way in cubs. In theory each Lion and Tiger den is starting a new Den Leader and soon there after picking up an assistant. When the lead starts to get burned out the assistant and that lead should be able to swap positions. From a committee standpoint at cubs the committee should be rotating to avoid the burnout. Let us not kid ourselves, most of the committee positions are just show up and answer a very narrow range of questions; if you have an experienced CC most of the committee is just breathing oxygen and hopefully learning something in the event that the CC gets hit by a bus.

Some of this is literally set an expectation. Sometimes replacements don't step up because you're not clarifying the unfairness of no one else stepping up. I was wearing multiple hats at a local unit and no longer have kids in it. The COR and I had several succession discussions over the past 7 months or so and I was clear and fair to the unit; I let the COR know that were certain things I was no longer doing; however, I would stay on to help train replacements. It's the CORs primary duty to find adult leaders; it's great to help. I am moving on because I set clear expectations and no one can complain because I am offering to help train my replacement. In the interim the COR is going to have to put on those extra hats which will put pressure on him to get the job done in recruiting a replacement. At the district level it is often the district executive and the council executive that are at fault. The specific fault is the chair of the nominating committee is garbage. Recruiting for the district or council committees cannot be limited to "Does anyone want to nominate anyone? derp!" It has to be a call every unit, visit every unit situation. Every unit needs to be contacted every single year and asked to nominate at least 1 of their scouters to join the district/council committee(s). BTW if you have not figured out my districts whole nominating committee is a dumpster fire.

So my question about the burnout is; burnout directed towards what? Is it overall fatigue? Is it sick of toxic leaders? Is it the 365 cycle of fundraising?