Category: BSA’s future

Symbols are important to culture. Any symbol associated with national’s cultural rot needs scrutiny.

Gold epaulets are an example. Representing elitism, they obstruct reform.

(Epaulets, cloth devices worn on shoulder loops on uniforms, indicate the “level” of one’s role in Scouting.)

Explainer: stratified by epaulet

BSA’s most important adult-leader roles directly serve units, like Assistant Cubmaster. The remaining roles are outside of a unit, like National Territory Director.

BSA’s non-unit roles fall in two buckets:

• Silver epaulet: Council roles.
• Gold epaulet: National roles.

Gold epaulets mean little

When someone with gold epaulets enters a room, the response is as if a god appeared.

This mistaken fawning comes from two myths:

Myth	Fact
The national organization is powerful.	Poorly regarded, at perpetual war with the base, and increasingly scrutinized, the national organization’s inability to regrow membership and immense debt (example; there’s also a pile of debt on Philmont) places it at risk of a second bankruptcy (and this is independent of whether the original bankruptcy is shot down, which may cause a death spiral).
People in national roles have superior competence and leadership skills.	BSA’s professional and volunteer advancement system is neutral on one’s competence and skills. The system’s crowning achievement–decades of internally-sourced CEOs–were unsuited for the role. The strongest thing signaled by rising to national is one’s willingness to be loyal to a bureaucratic culture that is so moribund, despite massive 2020 layoffs, it still squanders staff time on clownish pilot programs that can’t produce new, useful knowledge.

A new way: dull-bronze epaulet

I recommend a dull-bronze epaulet for all non-unit roles. This conveys transformative messages:

• All non-unit roles are to serve the base.

• Youth members, their families, and unit-level volunteers–all part of the base–are the most important roles in Scouting.

Third place means serving the base

Youth and families are first place. Unit-level volunteers are a close second.

Bronze means third place. Bronze symbolizes that non-unit roles’ value rests entirely on how they serve youth, families, and unit-level leaders. Making the bronze dull avoids shininess, affirming a posture of service.

This sets a fresh expectation for the national organization. Today, national acts like its main customer is itself. With its record over the past decades, national’s overriding priorities appear to be covering up its own malfeasance, embarking on hare-brained schemes, or validating the bigotry or insecurities of some of its own professionals or volunteers.

A national organization embracing a third-place role would act differently:

• Instead of secretly attacking Cub Scout camping, it would embrace adventure.
• Instead of creating a separate-but-equal regime for girls, it would have laughed sexism out of the room.
• Instead of scamming new Eagles, it would celebrate all its alumni.
• Instead of mocking Native Americans, it would apologize and stop.
• Instead of kowtowing to religious extremists, it would embrace religious minorities.
• Instead of extreme secrecy, its national committees would be transparent and accountable for their service to the base.

• Instead of allowing throwback reactionaries to repeatedly drag the organization into ridiculous membership controversies, it would be responsive to society.

The silver epaulet also goes, and this is good

It is important that national’s cultural improvements permeate the entire movement. Therefore, since the dull-bronze epaulet applies to all non-unit roles, it also replaces the silver epaulet.

With this, councils symbolically affirm national’s new cultural expectation: Serve the base.

Gold is old and busted, dull bronze is the new hotness

We have a long journey to restoring morality, relevance, and responsiveness to the national organization. Setting strong cultural expectations is a crucial, early step.

Again, symbols are important to culture. Part of setting strong new cultural expectations is addressing symbols that are associated with cultural rot.

Gold epaulets must go.

BSA’s Order of the Arrow is reducing its mockery of Native American tribes at National Order of the Arrow Conference 2024, its biannual national conference: It’s deleting American Indian Affairs activities (AIA)!

AIA explainer

A good deal of OA’s AIA is performance art, and much of that art is brownface cosplay, mainly in two forms:

• Doing Native American-themed performance art without permission of the tribes whose customs they purport to represent.
• Just “playing Indian”, acting out a whiteboy caricature of indigenous peoples or amalgams of tribal customs.

And let me be super clear about a point: Some may allege tremendous research and earnest interest in authenticity. That’s great, and I am glad you did that. However, if you are performing without written permission of the tribe you claim your performance to commemorate, you have not separated yourself from brownface cosplay.

While there is technically more to AIA, like static art, the brownface cosplay-dominant performance art gets most attention.

Commentary on (phony) tribal permission

Since before I was a youth in Scouting, OA has swum in allegations of local tribal authorizations of AIA activities. Such authorizations indicate relationships that would be highly valued under a system that alleges to respect Native Americans.

I have yet to see any lodge publicly share evidence of such an agreement. That absence speaks volumes.

I have also repeatedly heard local allegations of individual Native Americans endorsing local AIA activities. They, too, are likely phony. But even if not, they are irrelevant: Tribal customs are owned by tribes, not individuals.

All this notwithstanding, the concern is non-natives appropriating tribal customs under the color of BSA. How Native Americans express their own tribal customs is a private matter between that person and his or her tribe, outside the scope of this document.

BSA (OA) fights society for improper ends

Society has wrestled with cultural appropriation of Native Americans for a century. In the past few decades, society’s viewpoint has coalesced on that the appropriation is harmful. Controversies over Native American-themed sports mascots follow this reasoning.

BSA is supposed to promote leadership. But BSA suffers from a leadership vacuum at the top. Filling this leadership vacuum are inertia and throwback-reactionary culture. Actively preventing leadership, this culture causes BSA to fight for improper ends, such as our costly membership controversies that have served little point than to cause alienation. Included in these improper ends are how BSA clings to anachronisms, such as justifying a “separate but equal” regime using a straight-from-the-1950s hoax that girls are catastrophically different than boys.

Another anachronism is that it’s OK to “play Indian”. This is why brownface cosplay remains rampant in the Order of the Arrow.

An example of OA endorsing “playing Indian”

AIA’s sibling in OA is Inductions and Ceremonial Events (ICE). These are OA’s core ceremonies, which are whiteboy riffs of indigenous customs.

Approved attire for ICE ceremonies includes “American Indian attire”. This allowance is accompanied with “should”s regarding the attire’s authenticity and approval by tribes it reflects. Because “should” is not “must”, OA members remain free to use phony or unsanctioned-by-a-tribe Native American-ish costumes when they “play Indian”.

An example “playing Indian” ceremony is the Ordeal ceremony (PDF password is ahoalton, the word for the OA admonition). It starts with pretendian characters whose names are appropriated from the Lenni Lenape vocabulary. The pretendians’ spoken words are garbled through a noble savage stereotype and typically delivered in a stilted manner that resembles “Tonto talk”.

Warbonnets are among the highest brownface-cosplay-related concerns voiced by Native Americans. Yet we still see warbonnets widely used, such as this April 2023 ICE ceremony:

It’s not the only place where OA uses warbonnets.

The only acceptable Native American-themed performance art depicts the customs of a tribe that has recently and explicitly authorized this use. But we should also consider the view of most recent national-scope youth leaders: OA should end all Native American theming.

CU Boulder values Native American relationships

CU Boulder, the NOAC 2024 host school, is known for its interest in good relationships with the Native American community. Evidence includes its Land Acknowledgement and its Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, which CU Boulder’s chancellor characterized as “long overdue”.

It’s hard to see how CU Boulder would tolerate OA’s mockery of Native American tribes.

To match CU Boulder’s ethos, OA should go further and fully implement the above-mentioned desire of its national and regional recent youth leaders, which is “ending the use of American Indian iconography and activities in our programs”. Given that OA is thematically soaked with cultural appropriation, more NOAC changes are needed than just pausing AIA.

CU Boulder probably did not force this

A reasonable person may suspect that OA removed NOAC’s brownface-cosplay activities due to a CU Boulder agreement. I have not seen convincing evidence of this. This suggests that OA leadership may simply be doing the right thing.

This is the RFP sent out by BSA to multiple universities:

This RFP mentions “American Indian pageants”, so BSA’s starting point assumed brownface cosplay would happen.

In its “Letter of Intent” response to the RFP, CU Boulder does not regulate Native American-themed activities:

This is a good sign. It suggests OA’s national leadership chose to pause AIA without being forced to.

When will OA get its act together?

OA still has no public statement that attests it has decided to stop mocking Native American tribes.

It was time to rip that band aid off decades ago. OA’s brownface was controversial and managed poorly when I was a kid. I am now old, and OA is still mocking Native American tribes!

How much longer do we have to wait for OA to clean up its act? Public clarity from OA leadership is crucial!

25 recent national- and regional-level Order of the Arrow youth officers, who were in office 2016-2022, have called for OA to end its cultural appropriation. Several of them affirmed this letter’s authenticity to me.

They call for an end to all cultural appropriation, more than just the brownface cosplay I’ve written about previously.

Many who support perpetuating cultural appropriation also weaponize “youth-led” as a thought-terminating cliché. I encourage you to reflect on “youth-led”. Perhaps it’s your own anachronisms that need termination?

The letter, copied and pasted without editing:

Members of the National Order of the Arrow Committee,

We are __ current and former national youth officers of the Order of the Arrow, who were elected to represent the interests and voices of Scouting’s youth during our times in office. We believe our organization succeeds only when our traditions align with our values, so we wholeheartedly support ending the use of American Indian iconography and activities in our programs.

We joined the OA and ran for national office because we believed in our organization’s mission.  That mission is about positive youth leadership. It creates extraordinary opportunity we each benefit from in our daily lives. We want to see that promise continue for today’s members and every young person who could one day wear a sash.

But we remain worried that mission won’t survive if the OA doesn’t do the right thing. Honoring American Indian communities requires the utmost reverence, and we know our practices cause offense to many. That doesn’t align with our admonition. We must live up to our shared value of loving one another. Just because these traditions are old does not mean they are right.

This isn’t just a moral argument; these programs hold increasingly less relevance with today’s youth. Many non-members avoid associating with the OA entirely because of these practices. If we wish to survive, we cannot prioritize traditions at the cost of blundering our aspiration of promoting positive youth leadership as an integral part of the Boy Scouts of America.

The need for change has been clear. We took an oath to faithfully fulfill our duties as national youth officers—duties developed by the committee—including recommending items of policy or other actions for the good of the Order. The National OA Committee should act on the repeated recommendations it has received from sitting national officers to end these programs.

In advance of your December meeting, we write to make clear that ending these practices has unanimous support among the OA’s top youth leaders for the past __ years. We come from __ different lodges in __ states. We are Scouting’s future advisers and parents, and we believe a successful tomorrow is realized when we live by our values.

Some may say it’s not the opportune time. We say it’s never a bad time to do the right thing. We urge you to vote to end these programs, so we can all see our true mission succeed.

In brotherhood,

[25 signatures redacted]

I am not including names of signatories. If any wish to be mentioned, I am happy to publish their names.

It is my understanding that BSA’s Chief Scout Executive, or one or more of his direct reports, is standing in the way of reform. Why don’t you support ending brownface cosplay, Roger?

BSA’s career-advancement system is a “good old boy” system. Rather than rewarding excellence or leadership, BSA strongly favors fealty to a culturally-rotted, moribund bureaucracy.

A consistent story I get from professionals across the organization: You pay your dues with tenure in this weird system, and the overriding career goal is a cushy, make-work job where, until your career dies, you waste everyone’s time with pilot programs or other silliness. Not all reach this terminal level. Some stay in useful positions and keep adding value.

An ugly outcome: BSA’s career system runs off leaders, instead favoring caretaker bureaucrats. As evidence, consider the national CEO role. That is where any corporate career-advancement showcases its best leadership talent. Incredibly, every BSA-careerist CEO in the past 44 years has been a failure, creating leadership vacuums that perpetuate inertia, abet tremendous mistakes, and allow cultural rot to fester. (Roger Mosby excepted! He was not a BSA careerist.)

BSA’s “good old boy” system encourages councils to select new CEOs from a curated pool of careerist, caretaker bureaucrats. Because of how the “good old boy” system works, far too many in this pool have already hit their Peter-principle competence limits. That starves the pool of leadership talent.

Thankfully, councils are beginning to bypass BSA’s defective system:

• Bob Kurkjian, CEO of the Greater Los Angeles Area Council as of February 2023. He has an impressive resume with zero taint from BSA’s career system!
• Saroya Friedman-Gonzalez, CEO of the Greater New York Councils as of November 2022. Her impressive resume also is untainted by BSA’s career system!
• Joshua Dick, CEO of the Transatlantic Council as of May 2023. Another impressive resume untainted by BSA’s career system!

You can’t get their talent level in BSA’s system. Hopefully our next national CEO has leadership talent, which again necessitates bypassing BSA’s “good old boy” system.

Now here’s the weird thing: BSA’s rules and regulations attempt to force use of its own defective career system, although it gives an opt-out clause:

A local council shall employ a commissioned professional certified to serve as local council Scout executive and/or its chief executive officer having general direction of its administration and supervision over Scouting activities within its jurisdiction. A local council may, if due to exceptional circumstances it is authorized in advance by the Chief Executive Officer and pursuant to guidelines approved by the National Executive Committee, hire a candidate who would not otherwise be eligible for the position. A council Scout executive or chief executive officer shall serve at the pleasure of the local council’s executive board subject to the policies, procedures and guidelines of the National Council.

Rules and Regulations of the Boy Scouts of America, September 2020

If you’re in BSA’s career-advancement system, you are stuck in a clown show. Clown shows aren’t good for your career. I support you in wanting improvement, but you must make noise!

BSA is searching for a new CEO. Current CEO Roger Mosby was hired to navigate the bankruptcy. That is almost done, barring a pending sign-off by a higher court. Roger is ready to enjoy retirement.

Below is my letter to BSA’s CEO search committee. I am sharing it publicly due to the national office’s hatred of feedback (part of the cultural rot I mention in the letter).

Do you have ideas for BSA’s next CEO? Send them to bsa.ceo.search@gmail.com.

The letter

Search committee,

The CEO selection committee has a historic and unusually important duty. BSA’s next CEO will have a role unlike any before.

The next CEO must clear the national office of cultural rot and set the strategy for BSA’s next few decades. The new CEO will determine whether BSA is viable for the 21st century.

It is crucial to pick someone who has succeeded at large-organization culture change. To do this, the selection committee must depart from the BSA custom of the CEO being a reward for career loyalists. The selection committee’s candidate pool must include a robust selection of outsiders.

Details

BSA’s next leader must be a dynamic change agent with a track record of success. 

First, this person must be charged with fixing deep cultural problems at the national office. A moribund, bureaucratic, bloated national office has persisted for decades. We have many years of evidence of alarming harms the national office has done to Scouts and volunteers. Below my signature are selected examples. (These challenges generally predate the bankruptcy, so they are not attributable to recent events.) National’s culture is so rotted, the national office is Scouting’s main existential threat.

Second, the next CEO will rebuild the organization from historic membership, financial, and employee losses due to the pandemic and bankruptcy. The next CEO will define the BSA’s next several decades: setting financial strategy, starting a plan to resolve immense debt, creating a healthy culture, restaffing, navigating the demise of the chartered-organization model, improving council performance, and a lot more. These are profound responsibilities.

Here’s the hard part: It is crucial for the committee to go beyond BSA’s tradition of using the CEO position as a reward for career loyalists. My next few paragraphs will be difficult, but there’s just no good way to put this.

I grew up as a preacher’s kid in the United Methodist Church and remain a member. Through this experience, I have a lot of exposure to an employment system that is remarkably similar to BSA’s commissioned-employee system.

I have many friends in BSA’s professional staff, most of whom are commissioned. I value their service immensely. But I am distressed at how, like the United Methodist Church, BSA’s employment system over-values loyalty and obedience to the bureaucracy, undermining employees with valuable talent.

Now don’t get me wrong. Loyalty and obedience have value. No coherent corporation consists of a bunch of cowboys. And for many roles, these are invaluable attributes.

We need to be honest about the limitations of BSA’s employee-advancement system. By over-valuing loyalty and obedience, BSA’s career-advancement system prefers people with strengths different than those needed for a CEO who leads culture change, who has the bravery to trim rot, and who must guide a large organization towards a new, multi-decadal strategy.

It is crucial to diversify and broaden the pool extensively. While a few reasonable candidates may be national or council employees, it is crucial that you also go outside the organization. All candidates with extensive, relevant leadership experience should be on the table.

Rogery Mosby’s appointment is an example of going outside the organization. He had valuable, prior experience navigating a bankruptcy, a set of aptitudes other than what BSA’s advancement system can surface. The same goes for our next CEO, whose required aptitudes are once again different than what BSA’s advancement system surfaces.

I warn of nasty politics. I am sure many career lifers still view BSA’s CEO role as their reward. Going against that for a second time in a row will tip apple carts. That will be resisted.

You must be brave and boldly tip apple carts! Yes, you’ll get blowback. Yes, part of your job will be resisting influence. You’ll experience unsavory behaviors–brown-nosing, hard-nosed politics, and many things in between. I am sorry for this, but this is part of what we need from you to assure a viable future for the BSA.

A final thought: Defenders of the CEO-is-a-reward-to-loyalists system may insist that one must have careerist-level familiarity with BSA to succeed as a national-scope leader. That is false. Former CDO Elizabeth Ramirez-Washka proved that wrong. Despite lacking a Scouting background, she excelled and left as a well-regarded leader (more info).

Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have questions.

Thank you,

Aren Cambre

Selected examples of outcomes associated with the national office’s cultural rot

• Decades-delayed, bungled elimination of homosexual ban
• Decades-delayed inclusion of girls
• Active disinterest in facts and truth, evidenced by continued defense of a tragic, harmful, sweeping ban on coed troops and dens that is exclusively fueled by misinformation and sexist, racist, toxic folklore (more info)
• Brownface cosplay is endemic in the Order of the Arrow despite decades of concern (more info)
• While promoting the coed ban, national representatives crack sexist jokes, lie, or gaslight parents and volunteers (more info)
• Secret, hamfisted Guide to Safe Scouting change that decimated the vibrant camping programs of 75% of Cub Scout packs (more info)
• Extraordinary secrecy combined with attitude of “we’re right because we wear gold loops” that negates transparency and accountability
• Overreliance on traditional hierarchy, creating inefficiencies and obstructing information flows between the national office and the customer base (parents and unit-level volunteers)
• Routinely undermining feedback, open hostility to feedback-givers (more info)
• Permissive attitude towards rudderless programs that are no longer useful and engage in aggressive scams, like NESA and its “who’s who” yearbook
• Sapping energy from the movement by fomenting never-ending arguments and misunderstandings among the grassroots due to a gross, bloated corpus of volunteer-facing documentation that is difficult to use, difficult to understand, and rife with vagueness and duplication
• Perpetual laggard on technology, examples including 1. under-resourcing of investments in customer-facing IT systems, 2. electronic documents hugely over-rely on print-format-centric documents, and 3. full merit-badge books are still only available in print or an electronic form that is obsolete, poor quality, and not free

The United Methodist Church (UMC) is a huge charterer of Boy Scouts of America (BSA) units. It is changing its relationship with the BSA.

The UMC’s path forward is churches no longer charter Scout units. Instead, councils, which are the nonprofits that run Scouting in defined regions, will become the chartered organizations for all UMC Scout units.

Explainer: All BSA units are “chartered” by a community-minded organization. A charter is like a franchise. Under BSA’s charter agreement, the community-minded organization owns and operates a Scout unit. This is the longstanding model for BSA.

Formerly UMC-chartered Scout units will shift to an affiliation agreement with churches. This agreement appears to mainly provides meeting space. For Scout units that successfully navigate this, youth members should notice no differences.

I believe this change is:

1. A blueprint for other major charterers.
2. The beginning of the end of the chartered-organization model.
3. An opportunity for BSA’s volunteer commissioners.

This change means a lot on the back end. The unit is no longer owned or operated by UMC churches, and major responsibilities are shifting to BSA councils.

A premise behind the chartered-organization model is a level of investment and ownership in Scout units that is rare. Even when I was a youth (decades ago!), most units had only a “key relationship” with their chartered organization: “here’s the key to the building, I’ll sign that form once a year, and don’t bug me until next year”. It’s no different today.

This is certainly not what the chartered-organization model anticipates.

I am not blaming the chartered organizations. I think the model is obsolete. Can you think of any other major, youth-serving organization that works this way? I can’t.

We need a new path forward. This is the first time a major, national organization has reached an agreement with BSA like this. Other large charterers are not comfortable with the chartered-organization model. Can the BSA deny them this blueprint? I doubt it.

Here’s a challenge: The chartered organization has important duties, such as approving adult leaders. Also, since units are owned by the chartered organization, units operate as a part of the chartered organization. For example, First United Methodist Church’s Troop 123 is literally acting as First United Methodist Church in anything it does. This even includes matters like tax reporting.

It’s a big responsibility.

In shifting the charters to councils, if we make no changes, we’re heaping a lot of responsibility on council staff, which is already typically lean and overtaxed. How will they take on the Chartered Organization Representative (COR) role?

Explainer: The COR is the chartered organization’s official representative to each Scout unit. Among the COR duties are approving adult leaders, appointing some positions, setting expectations on behalf of the chartered organization, and voting in council matters.

Now let’s be clear: if councils are chartering units, we’ve moved beyond the chartered-organization model. We need to rethink the COR! We can divide it into three parts:

1. Superfluous: Some red tape is needed only because the “charterer” is independent. When BSA itself is the charterer, this red tape becomes junk work. Trash it! (Want to get rid of the loathsome, annual rechartering process? This is how!)
2. Professional: Some parts, such as fiscal responsibilities related to ownership of a unit, may need to be handled by council staff.
3. Volunteer: Much of the role may be handled by volunteers in the commissioner staff. This may include approving adult leaders, direct relationship with troops, and more.

Let’s talk more about point 3: As a prior District Commissioner, I found the commissioner role to be ambiguous. That makes it hard to recruit for. Even 15 years ago, technology had already obsoleted a lot of our function, and the remainder was scattered. A role-enhancement could boost the commissioner role by adding clarity, meaning, and authority. That will help us find more commissioners!

It is crucial that we align the right personality to the adjusted commissioner role. It’s crucial that we fill commissioner staff with service-oriented problem-solvers who thrive on the initiative, innovation, and independence of unit leaders.

In changing its relationship with the BSA, the UMC has laid out a blueprint for other chartered organizations. This will soon kill the obsolete chartered-organization model. Change is hard, but volunteer commissioners can take on a good deal of the former responsibility of chartered organizations. In doing so, commissioner service gains badly needed clarity.