In defense of this rebrand, BSA clams it grew by about 16,000 members.2Truth: BSA probably shrank!
BSA’s 2024 shrinkage
When BSA gives its annual member count, it’s using the count as of December 31. That day is probably BSA’s high-water mark.3
Comparing 2024’s member count to 2023, BSA shows 16,000-member growth. However, the 2024 number isn’t clean, affected by novel accounting tricks:
Apples-to-oranges comparison: BSA declined to account for changes induced by a new membership model.4
Keeping dropped-out members on the roll longer: In late fall 2024, BSA extended the lapsed-member5 period by 50%6.
These tricks skewed accounting for youth who dropped out shortly after joining in fall 2023.
In the prior membership model, these youth would have dropped off the membership roll on March 1, 2024. Thanks to BSA’s accounting tricks, these new, fall-2023 Scouts who quickly dropped out stay on the roll ten months longer, now past December 31, 2024!
I estimate this to be 29,000 Scouts. This means 29,000 Scouts, who are included in the December 31, 2024 count, wouldn’t have been included under the prior membership scheme!
After removing 29,000 youth from the 2024 count, instead of 16,000-member growth, you get a 13,000-member loss (1.3%)!
On May 7, 2024, BSA announced its new Scouting America (SA) brand. National marketers advised that “[SA] should be used immediately”.7 The same day, BSA issued revised brand guidelines8 to help maximize SA across the movement.
The main thing accomplished is removing “boy” from the corporate brand to “ensure that everyone feels welcome in Scouting”9.
This isn’t solving a problem! The main way people know Scouting is through awareness of what local Scout units do. Some may be aware of the program names, especially Cub Scouts. None of this involves gendered words!
The gendered word is only in a distant corporate name. Few seem to know or track this name.
“Boy” is probably not a problem…
I’m not convinced “boy”, in a distant corporate name, is a problem.
I have yet to encounter a single girl, who is a realistic candidate for a BSA program, who declined to engage due to “boy” in a distant corporate name.
I have yet to see any evidence-based analysis asserting how the corporate name is an issue.
I created a Dull Men’s Club group on Facebook. It has almost 1.5 million members. About a third are women. Did “Men’s” drive them away?
I tested my Dull Men’s Club theory with a poll. With about 8,000 responses, women are saying, in an overwhelming, 99:1 ratio, that “men’s” in the group name is not a concern.
The M in YMCA means “men’s”. Is the YMCA perceived as excluding females?10
…but let’s pretend “boy” is a problem
Let’s suppose “boy” is a problem. The solution is easy: Adopt “BSA” as the corporate brand!
If an initialism works for the YMCA, it can work for us, too.
The SA brand’s effect on recruitment
If “boy” in the corporate name was noxious, then eliminating it would have helped recruitment, right?
Before I continue, I want to be clear: correlation is not causation. While 2024’s peak-recruitment period corresponds to first-time use of the SA brand, we cannot use simple math to say that SA caused any changes in recruitment.
However, if SA fixed a major problem with recruitment or perception, we should see a significant recruitment boost.
Recruitment was down in 2024. Compared to 2023, SA recruited 6.3% fewer Scouts11:
2023 new-Scout recruitment: 298,939 Scouts
2024 new-Scout recruitment: 279,994 Scouts
Why did we rebrand?
It’s unclear how the SA brand creates value:
The “boy” in the old corporate brand was not noxious.
The SA brand is not associated with increased recruitment.
As is its habit, our national organization fiddles while Scouting burns. The SA brand appears to be magical thinking, that shiny objects can save us, therefore allowing us to once again avoid addressingdifficultchallengesthatBSAneveracknowledges.
Appendix A: Monthly recruitment breakdown
Below are the number of new Scouts recruited each month of 2023 and 2024. All boldfaced months are on or after the SA brand was introduced.
2023
2024
difference
January
10521
9867
-6.2%
February
14104
12580
-10.8%
March
19130
12550
-34.4%
April
12251
11202
-8.6%
May
11627
8596
-26.1%
June
10966
9564
-12.8%
July
10438
7452
-28.6%
August
31442
30540
-2.9%
September
75104
77170
2.8%
October
53225
44942
-15.6%
November
26632
21322
-19.9%
December
23499
34209
45.6%
Total (June – December)
242933
233795
-3.8%
Total
298939
279994
-6.3%
Monthly count of youth who first joined BSA, indicated by “new, paid” membership status.
Despite its new brand, described later in this article, the corporate name remains Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
Under the fixed-membership scheme that existed before August 1, 2023, most individuals’ membership periods coincided with the calendar year. Therefore, December 31’s member count generally included those who were a member at any point in that calendar year. January 1 was when most non-renewed memberships went to “lapsed” status, and March 1 is when most non-renewed, lapsed members were dropped. A minority of members have membership periods that are offset from the calendar year. While those offset memberships might affect the date of the high-water mark, I’ll bet a $2 bill the number would be very close to the December 31 count. ↩︎
On August 1, 2023, BSA switched to a rolling-membership scheme, where one’s membership period ends 12 months after joining. Before then, all members were on a fixed-membership scheme, where each person’s membership period was tied to their Scout unit’s annual renewal cycle. For most people, that corresponded to the calendar year. ↩︎
When a person’s BSA membership expires, that person’s membership is “lapsed”. This is a grace period between expiration and being formally dropped. In this lapsed period, the member is still treated like a paid member. BSA includes lapsed members in its count of total members. ↩︎
In an October 29, 2024 presentation titled National Town Hall (page 21), a BSA national employee asserts that the lapsed period is “extend[ed] … to 3 months”. Before then, it was two months. ↩︎
Some allege that YMCA switched to “The Y”. In fact, the “YMCA” brand remains prominent. In my area, “YMCA” is typically how it’s described. ↩︎
Numbers on newly recruited Scouts are discerned by filtering an SA report to Scouts with “new, paid” status. Renewing Scouts have a different status. ↩︎
In 2017, Scouting America (SA) pulled a sexist scam. After falsely claiming equity and inclusion, SA foisted a separate-but-equal regime on Scouting. It did this to appease misogynists.
The crown jewel of SA’s regime is the linked-troop sham. The linked-troop sham’s sole point is to maximize gendered segregation.
Enter Wood Badge, a great adult-training program. As I write this, SA’s national organization is running a Wood Badge course at SBR. (SBR is SA’s monument to bigotry.)
SA took a shit on this Wood Badge course, using it to showcase the linked-troop sham. That’s why it’s the Linked-Troop Wood Badge course.
It’s tragic that SA defiled Wood Badge. But it did. That shit has some nasty stank, so so let’s talk about it.
Background
When SA first accepted girls in its Cub Scout and Scouts BSA programs, many believed claims that SA was becoming inclusive and serving families better. That was gaslighting.1 SA was actually doing shady shit on the sly.
The shady shit was how SA included manosphere-grifter logic in its decision-making. This logic manifested with how girls were “included” under a gendered, separate-but-equal regime. This was done so that SA could take care of the feelings of misogynists.
To enact this separate-but-equal regime, SA abandoned these:
Scout-unit self-determination on single-gender vs. coed
The separate-but-equal regime’s crown jewel is the linked-troop sham. Under that sham, boy troops and girl troops may “link”, allowing them to share some administrative resources and do limited activities together.12
Due to SA’s gaslighting, this sham is widely misunderstood as SA’s interim state, buying time for it to offer a coed option.
The opposite is true. The linked-troop sham is a brief, interim step to full gendered segregation. In response to wide misunderstanding, SA representatives haughtily mansplained that coed will “never” happen13 and, dripping with disdain14, lectured that the “ultimate goal with the linked-troop [sham]” was that boys and girls are ripped apart, with their respective, mono-gender troops “identify[ing] as separate entities”15.
SA’s separate-but-equal regime, and the regime’s linked-troop sham, rest entirely on misinformation and toxic, racist, and sexist folklore.16 Despite this, SA’s representatives have made multiple public statements where they clownishly and falsely claim rationality.17
Separate-but-equal regime: SA’s hug of misogynists
Misogynists’ voices do not belong in SA, especially not while SA was planning how to accommodate girls!
Former Chief Scout Executive18 (CSE) Michael Surbaugh felt differently. He gave misogynists a powerful platform at the 2017 National Annual Meeting.
The National Annual Meeting (NAM) is SA’s most important annual meeting. NAM 2017 wasn’t wasn’t any old NAM. NAM 2017 is where inclusion of girls was the main topic!19
In his NAM 2017 keynote speech, Michael laid out plans to accommodate girls. His lead in was a big ole bear hug to misogynists, saying that their views are “something we have to wrestle with”. He shared how some misogynists felt “the worst thing we could possibly do is to allow young women to get the Eagle rank”, how other misogynists think the “integrity of that Eagle rank” depends on denying access to girls, and more misogynistic trash.20
Here’s the video of Michael’s awful remarks (skip to 24:54):
By airing misogynists’ concerns at a crucial moment, Michael validated them and revealed their power. This speech was Michael’s admission of how sexism is woven into the national organization’s cultural fabric. (Sexism is a component of SA’s culturalrot, which I talkaboutelsewhere.)
After honoring misogynists, Michael dried their tears, appeasing them with the separate-but-equal regime (starts at 26:20 in above video).21
The regime is fueled by folklore and misinformation
The main idea driving the separate-but-equal regime is SA’s dunderheaded theory, that adolescent maturity is reducible to pubertal stage. In a “hold my beer” moment, SA extended its dunderheaded theory to slander an entire class of youth: SA’s official line is that since some girls hit puberty earlier than boys, adolescent girls as a class are venomous harridans who “disadvantage” the entire class of weak, fragile boys.22
Here’s the problem: Maturity has many factors, not just pubertal stage.23 Maturity is highly individualized. There is no evidentiary basis that boys and girls have catastrophic maturity differences at any age.
Regardless, SA “protects” boys with the separate-but-equal regime’s ban on coed dens and troops. With boys and girls ripped apart, venomous-harridans girls cannot “disadvantage” the weak, fragile boys.
While the dunderheaded theory was the start, SA went much further. In doing so, SA revealed that its separate-but-equal regime rests entirely on a corpus of misinformation and folklore.24
SA’s corpus of misinformation and folklore includes weird theories about adolescent maturity25, sexist folklore26, alignment with racist adultification27, questionable sources28, an absurd theory on relationships29, an absurd theory on which gender is advantaged30, folklore about gendered learning differences31, open sexism and misogyny32, a likely lie about another Scouting organization’s experience with coed33, and disparagement of families and volunteers34.
Rationality was never SA’s priority. The fix was in from the start: Michael Surbaugh decided that misogynists’ feelings must be protected, above all else. Therefore, the point of SA’s corpus of misinformation and folklore was to concoct a fiction of rationality, to obscure the misogynist hugging.
SA used the playbook of manosphere grifters. To appease insecure males, these grifters misuse research35 to reinforce clownish, masculine stereotypes by “distort[ing] biology and evolution” while advocating for “deny[ing] rights and respect to women, trans and nonbinary people”36.
Many saw past SA’s absurdity. Some succeeded in liberating themselves from the regime!
The regime was easy to flout in Cub Scouts
Cub Scout leaders widely flouted SA’s separate-but-equal regime. Cub Scout packs that accepted girls largely ran coed dens.37
It was easy to openly provide coed experiences in Cub Scouts. The sheer amount of coed contributed to Cub Scouts’ partial liberation from the separate-but-equal regime. But it’s harder in Scouts BSA.
…but hard to ditch in Scouts BSA
While many coed Scouts BSA troops exist, they have a harder time, which suppresses their openness.
Coed troops fight through more challenges, such as a four-deep rule for adult leaders39, fractured vision due to redundant Scoutmasters40, redundant youth leadership41, and more.
Also, anachronistic, counterfactual notions on how adolescents relate to each other are common in Scouting.42 Some of these anachronisms overlap matters governed by SA’s youth-protection rules.
Youth-protection rules are held in high regard. This is good! The viability of Scouting hinges on effective youth protection. Yet coed troops, in moving past anachronisms, must navigate gray areas not clearly covered by youth-protection rules. Sometimes they must adopt practices that, while likely as effective as sanctioned practices, do not follow the letter of the law.
Altogether, artificial barriers to coed troops and a lack of transparency on their existence suppresses perceived desire for coed troops. This reduces pressure on SA to liberate Scouts BSA from its separate-but-equal regime.
Enter the perfidious National Scouts BSA Committee
Further suppressing liberation is the perfidy of the National Scouts BSA Committee (NSBC), the committee that oversees43 the Scouts BSA program.
In a mansplaining storm, the NSBC’s chairman cracks sexist jokes.44
NSBC members joined national bureaucrats in displaying arrogance and hostility to the base.45
NSBC members joined national bureaucrats in using folklore and misinformation to slander girls as a class.46
The NSBC’s disdain of the base is entrenched. Years after SA kicked off its sexist scam, the committee hadn’t lifted a finger to help the base47:
In a Sept. 7, 2023 Reddit comment, a member of the National Scouts BSA Committee publicly leaked the committee’s “let them eat cake” disdain of the base.
At the time of this Reddit comment, SA kicked off its sexist scam 6.3 years prior, and the Scouts BSA program had been subjugated by the separate-but-equal regime for 4.8 years!
Broad discontent with the regime would have been readily apparent to anyone who’s alive and breathing. But when a committee doesn’t care about the base, it doesn’t listen to them.
The NSBC is awash in perfidy.
The only clear evidence of the NSBC cosplaying usefulness starts in May 2024, when SA put this committee in charge of something big.
This “something big” may be more gaslighting.
Laughably stupid coed-troop pilot proves SA still loves misogynists
At the May 2024 NAM, SA finally admitted its sexist scam is wearing thin. It announced a lengthy coed-troop pilot, to be run by the National Scouts BSA Committee.48
This was an empty gesture. If SA wanted to do right, it instead would:
Immediately liberate all from the separate-but-equal regime, deleting the regime in its entirety.
Apologize for the regime.
Discipline all national professionals and volunteers who betrayed Scouting to support misogynists.
Instead of doing right, SA continues to hug misogynists by delaying a decision on liberation. Coincidentally, delay is is the main point of SA’s pilots.
SA’s pilots are trash
In the real world, pilots are smart. They uncover findings, via a live test of a proposed change, that would be difficult to know in advance.
I have yet to uncover any recent SA-pilot finding that 1. wouldn’t have been discernable, in advance, by an informed person or 2. could have been an easy course correction later. For example, while late-2010s pilots were run for girl troops and girl dens, every last part of BSA’s Family Scouting Questions and Answers, which laid out the separate-but-equal regime, would have been predictable by an experienced adult leader who had seen Michael Surbaugh’s 2017 NAM misogynist-appeasement speech, which preceded the pilots.
Some pilot programs have no findings! For example, the yearlong pilot of coed Cub Scouts dens49 had no findings50.
SA’s pilots are trash. Mere bureaucratic-stalling exercises, they simply delay change.
SA’s laughably stupid coed-troop pilot is trash
When SA admitted its sexist scam is wearing thin, it announced a long delay before any possible liberation: The NSBC-run coed-troop pilot will run through July 2025.51
This is just another trash pilot. It has no proper end. There’s nothing to learn!
Coed has been normal in USA society for well over a century.52 All of SA’s international peers programs are coed.53 SA already has over 56 years of coed experience, mainly in its high-school programs.54 Unofficial pilots of coed troops have been ongoing55 since girls were first admitted to Scouts BSA in February 201956. Everything SA need to know to navigate coed, it’s already at its fingertips!
Without a proper end, what goal is the laughably stupid coed-troop pilot seeking?
Coed-troop pilot goal 1: prolong misogynist appeasement
With the laughably stupid coed-troop pilot, SA pretends that girls are a weird, novel entity who need 14 more months of careful study. Because, you know, SA’s 56 years of experience with coed wasn’t enough.
That is absurd! It’s line 3 from hymn 231, “How Great Manosphere Grifters Art”.
This validates that the laughably stupid coed-troop pilot is doing the customary SA-pilot thing, kicking the can down the road. At a minimum, it extends SA’s misogynist-appeasement period by 14 more months.
This buys time for the laughably stupid coed-troop pilot’s more insidious goal.
Coed-troop pilot goal 2: hug misogynists by hobbling reform
That Surbaugh felt it important to appease misogynists demonstrates they had a lock on SA’s national organization in 2017. I have zero evidence that SA has pushed them away. In fact, for reasons I cannot get into (I cannot say more without violating confidentiality of my sources), SA’s misogynists may now be more powerful than in 2017.
If SA was to liberate Scouting from the separate-but-equal regime, that would be a slap in the face to SA’s misogynist friends. Liberating Scouting from the regime invalidates misogynists’ feelings!
To minimize hurting feelings of its misogynist friends, SA must obstruct reform. The best way to obstruct reform? Put an anti-reformer in charge of assessing the reform.
That’s the why I theorize SA put a perfidious entity, the NSBC, in charge of the laughably stupid coed-troop pilot.
The National Scouts BSA Committee has never distanced itself from perfidy. The NSBC has never apologized for its transgressions. It has never repudiated its errors. It has never disavowed its sexism. It has never committed to do what’s best for the base. It has never been transparent.57 Its members still promote the linked-troop sham to this day! We can only expect the NSBC’s perfidy to continue.
Continued NSBC perfidy means more warped data, more lies about girls, more cherry-picking research, more weird theories about pusillanimous boys being “disadvantaged” by venomous-harridan girls, more ignoring the base.
Given this, we should expect the NSBC to twist the laughably stupid coed-troop pilot’s findings in ways that build on its corpus of misinformation and folklore. We should expect the NSBC to yet again advance manosphere nonsense, just to help SA hug its misogynist friends.
Summed up, the laughably stupid coed-troop pilot is likely a ruse. SA is probably, once again, setting the stage for more gaslighting.
The laughably stupid coed-troop pilot will likely lead to…
…a phony liberation…
I think the most likely outcome is SA will once again gaslight everyone.
It will have a splashy announcement of Scouting’s liberation from the separate-but-equal regime. When national bureaucrats should be apologizing to us, they will instead pat themselves on the back, acting as if our liberation from their blunder is an incredible achievement.
Likely armed with warped findings from the laughably stupid coed-troop pilot, SA will do shady shit on the sly, retaining key anachronistic gendered rules or standards.
In other words, SA will likely obstruct clean liberation from its sexist scam. Instead, it will likely cling to substantial parts of the scam.
…or retention of the sexist scam…
Full retention of the sexist scam is a possibility. Remember, SA’s misogynists probably still have a lock on the organization. They don’t want to be slapped.
This hinges on how far the NSBC goes with its distortion of the laughably stupid coed-troop pilot.
…or a full liberation?
I wish this would happen, but it’s unlikely.
A full liberation would mean full deletion of SA’s sexist scam. All arbitrary, gendered standards would evaporate.
That’s it! It’s simple. It’s clean. It’s fast. But it slaps misogynists in the face. That is why I lean against SA doing this.
In the end, SA needs leadership to overcome its sexism. That requires leadership from an organization beset by a decades-long leadership vacuum. Don’t get your hopes up.
Back to the Linked-Troop Wood Badge
Those of you at the Linked-Troop Wood Badge, I am sorry.
I am sorry SA is forcing you to sing an opera written by manosphere grifters.
I am sorry SA forces you to cosplay a fiction, that girls are venomous harridans and boys are weak and fragile.
I am sorry your Wood Badge session was warped by misinformation and folklore.
I am sorry SA warped your course to validate its misogynist friends.
I am sorry.
Wood Badge is a good program. Look past SA’s sexism, and apply Wood Badge’s valuable lessons to your life and to Scouting.
Silver lining?
SA’s national CEO, Roger Krone, is attending this Wood Badge as a participant!
This would be a great opportunity for him to send a shot across the bow and announce immediate liberation!
Will Roger be be brave? Will Roger demonstrate leadership? Or will we get more of SA’s sexist scam?
I would love to be wrong
I would love to be wrong!
If anyone can point to me evidence that the National Scouts BSA Committee has openly rejected its perfidy, or that SA has openly committed to cleanly liberate the movement from its sexist scam, drop a comment!
Scouts BSA Web Conference March 2021. At 29:30, the National Scouts BSA Committee chair cuts off another presenter to mansplain that “nobody” supports coed, then cracks a sexist joke, and then conveys likely false information about Venturing and other countries’ Scouting programs, then concludes that coed troops are “not happening” and that you can “take [my haughty mansplaining] to the bank”. ↩︎
This was plainly obvious in social-media Cub Scout leader forums and in my in-person observations. ↩︎
Due to SA’s poor program design, the jump from Cub Scouts to Scouts BSA is jarring, corresponding to about a 25% year-over-year membership loss. The national organization, preferring inertia over integrity, is unmotivated to fix program-design problems. Instead, SA clings to a fantasy that the 5th grade Cub Scout year is a good transition to Scouts BSA. Ergo, since Scouts BSA falls under the separate-but-equal regime, SA declined to liberate 5th grade Cub Scouts from regime. ↩︎
Because SA treats the girl troop and boy troop as separate troops, each troop must separately meet the two-deep rule for adult leadership. Therefore, troops unofficially running as coed operations must have four-deep leadership. ↩︎
The boy troop and girl troop each must supply its own Scoutmaster. This is by design. SA poisoned the well to induce conflicts and burdens that interfere with a harmonious, single operation. ↩︎
Theoretically, each troop is to have its own Patrol Leaders Council. This leads to ridiculous arrangements, such as coed troops having both a male and a female Senior Patrol Leader. This is by design. SA poisoned the well to induce conflicts and burdens that interfere with a harmonious, single operation. ↩︎
This is a qualitative statement, based on my experience in the program. But it comes out in objective ways from time to time. The amateur folk psychology of Scoutmaster Pete in On My Honor (Jay Mechling, 2001) is an example. Pete’s amateur psychology seems to get some things right, but he has some major misses. So is the bizarre theory, advanced by the national organization, that males and females are bifuracted by their use of categorically different ways to build relationships, reviewed more in The case for equity and inclusion: Ending BSA’s specious coed ban (Aren Cambre, November 2022) in the “Poor application of questionable theory” section. ↩︎
The testimony of several insiders affirm that national program committees are mostly do-nothing puppets of the bureaucracy. They are extraordinarily secretive to hide how little they do and how misaligned they are with the base they serve. While some committees have a few capable members, those people’s effectiveness is attenuated by how SA neuters committees by stacking them with passive loyalists. ↩︎
https://www.facebook.com/groups/bravescouters/posts/2426021844249879. In this video excerpt, the chair of the National Scouts BSA Committee, in the middle of a mansplaining lecture about the separate-but-equal regime and its linked-troop sham. is a sexist joke. The “truth behind this joke” is that wives should be subservient to husbands. ↩︎
Scouts BSA Web Conference March 2021. At 29:30, the National Scouts BSA Committee chair interrupts another presenter to mansplain that “nobody” supports coed, then cracks a sexist joke (same as in above footnote), and then conveys likely false information about Venturing and other countries’ Scouting programs, then concludes that coed troops are “not happening” and that you can “take [my mansplaining] to the bank”. ↩︎
Again, only through 4th grade. 5th graders are forced back into the separate-but-equal regime. ↩︎
The June 1, 2023 cancellation of the separate-but-equal regime for grades K-4 was accompanied by no new rules, new standards, or program changes. This is strong evidence that the yearlong pilot had no useful findings. ↩︎
Scouting America (nee Boy Scouts of America) will likely have a large 2024 youth-membership loss. It’s likely due to its new rolling-membership scheme.
By December 31, 2024, BSASA will likely have a 2.4% member loss. If nothing changes, it will reach 14% by April 2025!
SA could have avoided this with a subscription model.
(Important data note: All member counts in this document are of youth members. Adults are not represented in any counts.)
What’s changed
On August 1, 2023, SA switched from a fixed-membership scheme1 to a rolling-membership scheme (what these mean).
While rolling memberships are a conceptual improvement, renewals appear to be shockingly low.
The old way: fixed memberships
In the old, fixed-membership system, well-run Scout units reached out to all members to secure renewals. Paying for renewal was easy.
Let’s use Cub Scout Pack 123 as an example.
Each year, Pack 123 pays $100 to renew its charter. The charter is a license for the pack to operate. Renewing this charter is called “rechartering”.
Most unit charters expire on December 31. Therefore, by December 31, Pack 123 must pay for the next year.
All Pack 123 members have their own SA memberships. When Pack 123 recharters, in addition to paying its own $100 fee, it pays SA annual membership fees on behalf of its members.
Suppose Pack 123 has 20 youth members and 10 adult members. The pack will pay SA $24502 for next year’s memberships:
$100: Pack 123’s annual-charter fee
$1700: SA’s $85 fee for each of Pack 123’s 20 youth members
$650: SA’s $65 fee for each of Pack 123’s 10 adult leaders
As wise stewards of limited funds, Pack 123 prefers not to pay SA’s fee for youth or adults who stopped participating. Therefore, before paying $2450, a Pack 123 volunteer reached out to all families to assure they are renewing and to collect funds.
Also, a Pack 123 volunteer managed the friction of dealing with SA’s burdensome recharter process. Families did not deal with that burden. They only needed to send a payment to Pack 123. Easy.
A detail: New members had prorated memberships. Sally Smith, who is new to SA, joined Pack 123 in September, 2022. Since Pack 123’s charter cycle begins on January 1, Sally only paid for four months of SA membership: September 2022 through December 2022. When Pack 123 submitted its recharter, it paid $85 on Sally’s behalf for her 2023 SA membership.
The new way: rolling memberships
On August 1, 2023, SA switched to a rolling-membership model. All new members pay a full year upon joining. Their memberships expire next year, on the last day of their join month.
Suppose Timmy Smith joined Pack 123 on September 15, 2023. His SA membership renewal is due September 30, 2024.
SA disconnected individual memberships from the unit-recharter process. When Pack 123 recharters, it no longer manages Timmy’s annual SA membership. Instead, by the time Pack 123 starts thinking about its January 1 renewal, Timmy is not on their minds. Since Timmy’s membership expired on September 30, Timmy’s parents should have already renewed his SA membership through SA’s website.
Problem 1: SA removed a crucial touch point
In the old system, Pack 123 contacted all families regarding SA-membership renewal.
The new system breaks this personal touch. Since Timmy’s SA-membership renewal is divorced from Pack 123’s recharter, Pack 123 no longer needs to reach out to Timmy’s family regarding renewal.
Problem 2: Burdening parents
Parents now directly deal with SA’s processes.
SA’s main objective is to get parents to toss $85 over the fence once a year.
SA makes this hard. The main problem is red tape. Online renewal requires parents to digitally sign a thick, 1,197-word document! It takes around 9 minutes to read: while 1,197 words have a baseline estimate of 6 minutes to read3, this document will take longer:
It is written poorly, at a “difficult to read”level4.
It has formatting problems.
I am estimating 50% longer due to re-reads of difficult sentences or pauses to comprehend. That means 9 minutes to read the document.
Also, I imagine for most parents, logging into a SA system is a rare event, possibly only for each annual renewal. A once-every-year system will induce friction simply because each year, the parent has to re-learn it and possibly go through the password-reset exercise. I estimate this will induce 5 more minutes of delays.
Beyond remembering how to log in and reading the agreement, I estimate 5 more minutes to navigate the form start to end.
5 + 9 + 5 = 19 minutes! SA is asking parents to go through a 19-minute, bureaucratic exercise just for the privilege of throwing $85 at SA!
Families are rejecting this burden. Below I show how a shocking percent of rolling memberships are not being renewed!
Considerations for how 2024 may end up
This section is insufferably boring. Sane people may wish to skip to the next major section.
We can use December 16, 2024’s numbers to predict how 2024 will end up. On that day, SA had 1,007,482 youth members5, falling into these categories:
2020: The COVID pandemic decimated SA’s ability to recruit and retain, causing another 1/3 membership loss.
2021: More of a pandemic-emergence phase, this is an abnormal year.
In addition to major shifts in numbers, these disruptions changed how new members appear in the annual cycle. Most new SA youth join in the fall, part of grade-based cohorts. Mormons instead used age, so join dates for their youth were distributed across the whole year. We no longer have this effect.
Even if the above reasons are insufficient to avoid using years before 2022, I further theorize that the pandemic shifted society’s approach to youth programs. That should also be evaluated before adding pre-2022 predictors.
Lapsing: an explainer
SA’s recharter process is burdensome. This is why many units are late on rechartering.
In the old, fixed-membership model, a unit being late with its recharter means it’s also late on paying SA’s annual fee for each of its members. Nominally, a late recharter means a unit has to stop operating and that all its people have expired SA memberships.
Enter “lapsing”: This is where SA gives expired units and their members a two-month grace period (it’s now longer–more later). Lapsed units and members are still treated as active. They can still participate in all Scouting activities.
Units must resolve their charters within that two-month lapsed period. On the first day of the third month, lapsed units and members become dropped. That is when non-renewed units must stop operating and when the individual memberships are expired.
Annual cycles
Most units’ charter cycle begins January 1. In the fixed-membership system, the vast majority of lapses also happened on January 1, due to late recharters.
This had some predictable effects on youth memberships:
December 31’s membership number approximated an annual high-water mark.
January 1 brings a surge of lapses, partly fueled by late unit recharters.
By March 1, all these January 1 lapses had converted to paid renewals or drops. That approximated SA’s annual low-water mark.
Relevant 2022 and 2023 data:
Milestone
2022
2023
Dec. 31 youth membership count
1,042,860
1,015,028
March 318 (next year) membership count (after the Jan. 1 lapses converted to renewals or drops)
792,908 (March 31, 2023)
805,209 (March 31, 2024)
Change from December peak to March valley
-249,952
-209,819
% change from December peak to March valley
-24.0%
-20.7%
We can use means of 2022 and 2023 numbers as predictors. Had we continued with the fixed-membership model, we may expect to drop 230,000 youth in the spring. That is about 22.4% of the Dec. 31 membership number. (Math note: Below, I will use 230,000 to predict expected drops for 2024 and use 22.4% when I need to estimate drops from subsets.)
Expected drops for Aug. – Sept. 2023 new youth
New youth who joined on or after August 1, 2023 are on SA’s new rolling-membership model. These youth are especially important for predicting how 2024 will end up.
Here’s our 2023 new youth for SA’s key growth months:
Using our 22.4% predictor of drops, 35,779 of these new youth will drop.
The real drop number is muchworse.
Aside: Do new youth drop at the same rate?
Nearly all youth who joined on the rolling-membership scheme–starting August 1, 2023–will be new youth; few will be dropped youth who rejoin.10 Therefore, the first wave of rolling-renewal drops will be almost entirely of youth in their first year of SA.
The 22.4% drop rate applies to all youth, both new and renewing youth. Is that the right number if we’re only assessing drops for new youth?
The number of members in SA, categorized by age, increases through age 9, and most recruitment happens in early years:
The combination of these factors suggests low drop rates for young new youth.
However, the drop rate is not 0.
As a Cubmaster of a huge, successful pack, I saw attrition from new youth after their initial, prorated-membership period. I roughly recall it being 10% – 20%. While I don’t have broader data, I assume this is a general phenomenon.
When I was District Commissioner, my PDS-score11-addled District Executives kept starting new units that quickly flopped. This inflated the new-youth counts.
I further theorize that retention is poorer the older new recruits are, especially with new Scouts BSA recruits12, which further increases the new-youth drop percent.
Also, with how the rolling-membership scheme forces everyone to prepay for a year upfront, those who quit quickly after joining can no longer be represented in the data.
The data is messier than I prefer. While it is possible that the new-youth drop rate may be different than 22.4%, I theorize that it’s close, and I lack a basis to use a different number. While I am open to an update here, unless the correct figure is tremendously different than this estimate, it won’t have a major impact on this article’s major findings.
Fall 2024’s actual numbers
A detail: SA increased lapsed period 50%
First, a crucial detail that will be relevant later: SA recently increased its lapsed period 50%, from two months to three months. I think that change was made in October 2024 or November 2024.
With the old, two-month lapsed period, Sept. 2023’s non-renewing, new members become lapses on Oct. 1 and drops on Dec. 1. By increasing the lapsed period 50%, Sept. 2023’s lapses don’t become drops until Jan. 1, 2025.
Did you see that? SA shifted the peak recruitment month’s drops–September 2023’s drops–into 2025!
Below I’ll share how shockingly few rolling-membership youth are renewing. It seems odd that national’s new lapsing scheme causes its December 31 to include 100% of who joined in 2023’s peak membership month, even though few are renewing.
The numbers are scary
Let’s review retention of new youth we added in our peak 2023 recruitment months: August, September, and October. They are the first batch of members who will renew rolling memberships in 2024.13
SA’s November 30, 2024 number of lapsed youth will only include those whose memberships expired on Aug. 31, Sept. 30, or Oct. 31. In other words, it accounts for all members in the first three months of the new, rolling-membership scheme!
The bottom number in the first column will help us get there:
SA’s summary dashboard filtered to “Lapsed, paid”, date set to “November 2024”.
This means 153,405 lapses are attributable to memberships expiring in August, September, and October. (July’s lapsed memberships are already washed out of this number, having converted to drops on Nov. 1.)
But these are not just rolling-membership lapses!
While most units appear to renew on December 31, some renew on other months. Therefore, late recharters will trigger lapses of fixed-membership youth in all months of the year. That is the 19,37914 number on the second column–the lapses we had in November 2023. We should expect similar numbers for 2024, so I will just subtract 19,379 from 153,405, yielding 134,026 excess lapses (84% of the 159,771 new Scouts in Aug. – Oct. 2023) attributable to the rolling-membership system.
A detail: This Nov. 30 number is favorable to SA. SA had one to three months to convert all non-renewed August, September, and October lapses to paid renewals.
Wait, lapses aren’t drops!
Above, I gave numbers for new Aug. – Oct. 2023 youth from different dimensions:
35,779 anticipated drops
134,026 estimated lapses
Recall that lapsing is a grace period before a drop. Some lapsed members pay to resume their membership. All others are dropped.
It is my understanding that someone emerges from the lapsed category in one of two ways:
immediately, by paying for a membership
when the clock strikes midnight at the end of the last day of a month, when the lapsed member becomes dropped
Therefore, members removed from the lapsed category during the month indicate renewals. We can estimate how many lapsed members renewed in a month by comparing the beginning and end of a month:
This means SA can convert 7,202 lapsed members to paid renewals in a month. To be fair, November included Thanksgiving, which is often a dead week for families. Let’s be generous and round up to 8,000 lapsed-member recoveries a month.16 Compared to the November start of 160,607 lapses, SA’s conversion of lapses to paid memberships is 5.0% per month.
Now I need to construct a model to translate lapses into expected drops.
We can calculate the percent contribution that Aug. – Oct. 2023 made to the 159,771 total new youth membership in that period:
August 2023: 31,442 new members ÷ 159,771 total = 20%
September 2023: 75,104 new members ÷ 159,771 total = 47%
October 2023: 53,225 new members ÷ 159,771 total = 33%
Using all this, I can create a rough estimate for what drops we should expect. This is a rough estimate because the Nov. 30 lapse count–my starting point for this calculation–represents 3 months of trying to renew August lapses, 2 months of trying to renew September lapses, and 1 month of trying to renew October lapses, so each month’s contribution to that lapsed-member count has shifted from its contribution to total members. However, given a 5% monthly reduction in lapses–a small number to begin with–the distortion will be of a low magnitude. I do not see a way of untangling these numbers with the reports available to my source, so my inability to tease that out is an acknowledged source of error, albeit an error that is small compared to the big numbers it’s being compared to.
Starting with the Nov. 30, 2024 new-member lapse count of 134,026:
December 1: August’s share of the Nov. 30 count, 20%, will convert to 26,805 drops.17 The remainder, 107,221 lapses attributable to September and October, will continue in December.
December 31: The monthly 5% reduction will cause the December 1 number to reduce to 101,860.
January 1: September 2023’s share of remaining lapses (59%18), 60,097, convert to drops. The remainder, 41,763 lapses attributable to October, continue in January.
January 31: The monthly 5% reduction will cause the January 1 lapsed number to reduce to 39,675.
February 1: All that’s left are October 2023’s remaining lapses that weren’t converted, 39,675. All these convert to drops.
The sum of drops are 25,465 + 60,445 + 40,553 = 126,577.
Here’s what’s alarming: drops represent 79% of the new youth from August, September, and October 2023!
Drops for rolling-membership youth are 253% higher than the expected 35,779!
Predicting end-of-year 2024 numbers
We can predict end-of-year numbers for 2024 by summing these:
Using the mean, we should expect 27,048 new members for December 2024.
Above, I shared a member count as of December 16. As of that day, 15 days were left in December, or 48%. Therefore, I will scale this predictor of new members down by 52%, arriving at an expected gain of 12,983 members between December 16, 2024 and December 31, 2024. This predicted gain is likely to overstate SA’s true gain in this period as the last several days of December are holidays or travel seasons.
Projected December 31, 2024 youth count
1,007,482 (December 16 youth count) + 12,983 (expected new-youth growth for remainder of December) = 1,020,465 youth members on December 31.
Superficially, that’s a 0.5% increase from 2023’s 1,015,028 count. But it’s inflated.
December 31, 2024’s number inflates member count
The December 31, 2024 number will indicate on-paper retention for 100% of new youth from September 2023 – December 2024. This inflates the numbers!
Remember Sally, who above joined in September 2022 under the prior, fixed-membership scheme? Her twin Oscar also joined at the same time. In November 2022, Oscar decided that Scouting is not right for him, so he quit.
Because Oscar quit before Pack 123 requested everyone’s fee for 2023, Oscar’s 2023 membership fee was not paid.21 Therefore, Oscar counts towards SA’s December 31, 2022 number but not SA’s December 31, 2023 number.
Sally’s friend Rebecca joined in September 2023, after the start of the rolling-membership model. That means Rebecca’s parents paid for a year of membership upfront. Rebecca’s membership expires the end of September 2024.
By November 2023, Rebecca decided Scouting is not right for her. She quits. Remember that Rebecca’s membership goes through September 30, 2024. Her lapsed period lasts until January 1, 2025. Therefore, even though Rebecca quit Scouts in November 2023, she counts towards the December 31, 2023 and December 31, 2024 numbers!
See the difference? Even though Oscar and Rebecca joined in September and quit two months later:
Oscar, who joined under the fixed-membership scheme, only contributed to SA’s member count for his join year.
Rebecca, who joined under the rolling-membership scheme, contributed to SA’s member count for her join year and the following year.
2024 is that “following year” for all who joined in the first few months of the rolling-membership system: Aug. 1 – Dec. 31, 2023! Therefore, SA’s December 31, 2024 number is inflated when compared to prior years!
The real December 31, 2024 number
I expect SA to do its usual, which is to pull a number off the same report it used in past years. If so, it will be an inflated number, as per the prior section, as the report is unlikely to be adjusted for the new membership model.
If we are to do an apples-to-apples comparison–exclude those who joined after August 1, 2023 but quit before they would have paid for 2024 under the old system–then December 31, 2024’s number, the high-water mark, will lower than the report’s number.
We can estimate that! From the 1,020,465 Scouts, subtract the 22.4% estimated drops from the fall 2023 rolling-renewal growth. That nominally means you’d remove anticipated drops from everyone who joined between August 1, 2023 and December 31, 2023.
Before we do the math, a few exceptions:
For those who joined in August 2023, their non-renewed lapses became drops on December 1, 2024. Therefore, they are already removed from our numbers.
In the old system, I believe that those joining for two or fewer months before their unit’s recharter date had to purchase membership through the end of the following recharter period. (Is this correct? Leave a comment!) As most units’ charter cycles start January 1, this usually affected only November and December joins. For example, someone joining in November 2022 would typically pay 14 months, taking that person through the end of 2023. Therefore, such people, even in the old system, appeared in their join year’s count and in their next year’s count. In the interest of an apples-to-apples comparison, I will not deduct any Scouts who joined in November 2023 and December 2023.
I therefore will only use September 2023 and October 2023 for this calculation.
September 2023 + October 2023 new members = 128,328
Expected drops from that pool in the old system: 22.4% of 128,328, which is 28,745.
Subtract the estimated drops from the end-of-2024 estimate, and you get 1,020,465 – 28,745 = 991,720members on December 31, a year-over-year drop of 2.2%! (Note: In addition for being a more realistic number, this also corrects for the distortion caused by increasing the lapsed period to three months.)
February 2025 update: how close were my predictions?
Above, I estimated that SA’s end-of-year number would be 1,020,465. It ended up being 1,030,862. I was within 1%.
Re-running the above math with the new number, an apples-to-apples comparison would be 1,002,117, which means 2024 had a 1.3% decline from 2023.
But wait, there’s less!
The December 31 number omits a crucial part of the story. Given high non-renewals of rolling-scheme members, our spring low-water mark is likely to be far worse than last year.
The real story comes after the January 1 lapse surge works out. This surge is induced by two longstanding factors:
Late recharters causing lapsed memberships. Typically, most youth in a unit renew, so most of these convert to paid memberships once units submit late charters.
Members who were non-renewed by their units, typically because the person quit SA.
Per numbers shared above, if this was a pre-rolling-scheme year, the January 1 lapse surge would land on about 230,000 drops. After our spring lapse surge is completed, we would have 1,020,46522 – 230,000 = 790,465 members.
But it will be much worse. When 79% of rolling-membership youth are not renewing their SA membership, you’re going to take a bath! We need to figure out the rolling-renewal members’ contribution to the total-membership picture, then adjust the expected spring drops to reflect the far higher rate of renewals of rolling-membership youth.
August 2023’s lapses converted to drops on December 1, so they are already flushed out. That means we need to add up the new members from September, October, November, and December 2023 and figure out their contribution to drops. The counts of those new members are:
September 2023: 75,104 (you saw this same number above)
October 2023: 53,225 (you saw this same number above)
November 2023: 26,632
December 2023: 23,499
Total: 178,460, which is 18% of the 1,015,028 total from December 31, 2024
The 82% who are not part of the Sept. – Dec. 2023 cohort will drop at the expected rate. We need to scale the 230,000 expected drops down to 82%, resulting in 188,600 drops from all those who didn’t join in Sept. – Dec. 2023.
Oops, remember that I wrote that August’s drops are washed out already? That means the new-as-of-August 2023 people, who renewed (not quitting), are still in the big number. Therefore, the estimated 188,600 drops inadvertently includes 22.4% of these not-quitting August 2023 people! Let’s add them back. August 2023 brought us 31,442 new Scouts. Earlier I projected that 26,805 of them dropped, leaving us with 4,637 who will remain. Let’s add 22.4% of them back, or 1,039, so our 188,600 drop number declines a little to 187,561.
I estimated that rolling-renewal members are dropping a 79% rate. Of the 178,460 who joined Sept. – Dec. 2023, 140,983 will drop.
Add them up, we expect to see 187,561 + 140,983 = 328,544 drops by April 1, 2025. That means SA’s low-water mark for 2025 is only 691,921, or 14% fewer than 2024’s low-water mark!
All are now on rolling memberships
To avoid muddying waters, I characterized SA members that first joined before August 1, 2023 as still being on the fixed-membership scheme.
There is no more fixed-membership scheme. All members are on the rolling-membership scheme. Those who joined before August 1, 2023 have membership periods that coincide with the charter cycle of their Scout unit.
These members can now pay for annual membership directly to SA. As long as their Scout unit is willing, they can instead continue as if the old model was still effective by paying their Scout unit, and the unit remits the annual SA fee on their behalf.
How SA can fix this
Get the members back
Nothing has changed about the Scouting program that would cause non-renewals to surge to 79%. It’s hard to pin that on anything but the rolling-renewal scheme.
How do we get these Scouts back? My son’s membership expires on December 31. I’ve intentionally allowed it to not renew to see what kinds of contacts I get. So far, it has just been a single, easily missed email on November 1! National isn’t even trying.
Are gold loopers yet againasleepatthewheel? (I know that many in Irving are not asleep at the wheel and are genuinely concerned about this. They are hamstrung by how SA’s bureaucracy resembles a patronage system, causing employees and volunteers to be promoted far beyond their Peter-principle limit, so people with poor performance and bad ideas have outsized influence in Irving.)
We should have had a higher renewal rate than 21%! What are we doing to gain conversions back to renewals?23
Add a subscription model
It beggars belief that a subscription model wasn’t done from the start. Monthly bills are as American as apple pie. Internet, cell phone, Spotify, Netflix, rent or mortgage payments, etc., monthly payments are ubiquitous! It is unusual for a service to have a one-time fee!
Why did SA not see this?A subscription model removes the barriers of the annual-renewal blunder! Once you join, you begin paying $7 a month ($84 a year). This is on autopilot until you decide to quit. What this means:
The lack of an annual touch point will not induce expiring memberships.
The family’s administrative burden is resolved upon joining, a process all new families already suffer through.
While not an objective of a subscription model, SA may enjoy enhanced revenue from non-participating members who, due to the set-and-forget nature of monthly subscriptions, do not cancel the payments when they quit Scouting.
While some fear the revenue effect of families canceling their memberships, I find that fear to be misplaced. Even in the old system, a great number of youth dropped in their prorated period, denying SA the next year’s membership revenue. And if I had to make a choice, I’ll take the risk of less predictable cancellations over the 79% drop rate the annual system caused!
Fix the annual-renewal form
While I think we need to pivot from annual renewals, some will prefer that over a subscription model, so this still needs improvement.
The form is too hard! It needs to get as close to a click-and-submit form as possible.
It starts with trashing that dumbass, 1,197 word document. The way that dumbass document was written, and the idea that parents must sign it, is contemptuous of the base. If Irving bureaucrats cared about the base, they would never shove such a long, thick, dumbass document into an ordinary transaction. And the fact that we are expected to sign such a detailed, dumbass document reveals a national organization so arrogant, it believes we are so misaligned with its goals that it’s entitled to shove our noses in its goals annually.
E.g., why does national include the excerpt from the Declaration of Religious Principle in its bloated, dumbass document? Because despite that most SA members are Christian–in practice or culture–SA insists on its members mocking Jesus, and it insists on shoving our nose in it repetitively.
Come on, Irving bureaucrats, a renewing member does not need to sign your dumbass document!
Beyond that, there are other improvements that could be made. For example, the emailed notice should have had a unique link that takes one to a click-and-submit form, pre-authenticated for that member, that needs little info beyond the credit card number! The emailed notice could be sent more often. Other lines of communication could be used.
While SA’s prior membership scheme was a fixed-membership model, SA offered prorated memberships to new members, providing them membership through the end of the fixed-membership cycle that they joined in. Not long before the start of the next membership cycle, the new members would pay for a full year’s membership. ↩︎
This number, and all other numbers in this report (unless otherwise indicated), come from SA’s “summary” dashboard. ↩︎
Calculated by getting youth count using SA’s default filter but unchecking any lapsed membership categories. The remaining default- filter membership categories include “CrossOver, paid”, “Member Without a Unit”, “Multiple”, “New, multiple”, “New, paid”, “ReRegistered, multiple”, “ReRegistered, paid”, “Transfer In, paid”, and “Transfer, multiple”. Note that the report being used appears to have already filtered out some of these types. E.g., deselecting any of the “multiple” types has no effect on the count. ↩︎
Calculated by filtering to membership types that are lapsed. ↩︎
When you select a [Month] [Year] report in SA’s reporting system for the Month Year field, you are getting a report for the last day of that month. The only exception is when Current Month is selected, you are getting the data as of the day the data is viewed; that is how I got data for days other than the last day of a month. ↩︎
These number come from a different dashboard.
If using the “summary” dashboard, these numbers come from a field that purportedly is cumulative. In theory, to get August 2023’s new-member growth, you subtract the August 2023 report’s number (total for Jan. 1 – Aug. 31) from the July 2023 report’s number (total for Jan. 1 – July 31) while filtering the report to “New, paid” youth memberships.
However, on closer inspection, there is an anomaly: January 2023’s new-youth number is 95,385, and February 2023’s number is 79,111. A cumulative field won’t have a month-over-month decline!
It was later discovered that the new-member stats shared by SA officials match those on a different dashboard that shows registration status by month, filtered to “new, paid”. I will therefore use that other dashboard for new-youth data. ↩︎
PDS scores are part of SA’s hazing ritual for District Executives (DEs). This scoring system emphasizes goosing current-year numbers with little regard for future sustainability. Setting up new units, and, when feasible, obscuring true program costs with donor funds, appears to inordinately help PDS scores, but whether the units are around in the future hardly matters: short DE tenures, institutional silos, and an obsolete model for commissioner service makes it difficult to have great success with these new units, especially outside of areas experiencing natural growth of families with Scouting-friendly demographics. ↩︎
Scouts BSA is a middle-school program. I therefore expect high rates of attrition for new, older middle schoolers, who are joining a program they will quickly outgrow, or for high schoolers, who are infantilized by a program designed for the prior age cohort. ↩︎
While true in the big picture, SA’s numbers suggest a very small number of members may have been on the rolling-renewal system in the year or so before August 1, 2023. I suspect these were test users. ↩︎
I think the 2024 number will actually be lower than this as some of the fixed-membership lapses are displaced by new, rolling-scheme members whose membership periods coincide with their unit’s charter period. Still, I have no better number than the 2023 number, and as that number likely modestly overstates the fixed-membership lapses, it bends my math in SA’s favor. ↩︎
This number was obtained by visiting the summary dashboard on this day. Otherwise, when selecting a month and a year of any prior month, the user gets a figure for the last day of that month. ↩︎
I used 29 as the denominator. The difference between Nov. 1 and 30 is 29 days. ↩︎
Small, potential source of error: This probably does not include conversions that occurred on November 30. I think they show in the December 1 numbers. However, November 30, 2024 is a Saturday in a long, holiday weekend, so I doubt there is any movement. ↩︎
59% comes from dividing September 2023’s new members by the sum of September 2023 and October 2023 new members. ↩︎
Recall that SA includes lapsed members in its total-youth count. All as-of-Dec. 16 lapsed members stay on the roll through the end of the month. While conversions of lapsed members back to paid are good, they don’t change the end-of-month number. ↩︎
As with the previous new-member numbers, these come from the dashboard that shows registration status by month. ↩︎
In that year, Oscar became lapsed on January 1, 2023 and dropped on March 1, 2023. ↩︎
Here, I went back to the end-of-2024 number that I called inflated. The adjusted number that I calculated later was to provide an apples-to-apples comparison to contrived numbers from prior years. The “inflated” number is my prediction of a point-in-time count in the current system, so it the correct one to use for projections for the spring. ↩︎
There appears to be a piecemeal measures being enacted or considered, but I need to maintain confidentiality. SA, you need to be public and open about your strategy! ↩︎
Despite increasing scrutiny over its 109 years of mockery of American Indians, OA clings to racist playing-Indian activities. Its recent pattern is to express interest in correcting its sins, only to take de minimis measures unguided by strategy.
OA has good reason to be clingy. OA gets woo from its playing-Indian activities. This woo papers over that OA is just a collection of poorly related activities. Removing OA’s woo reveals its incoherence!
OA has no future. It’s time to abolish it. If we quit while we’re ahead, BSA can retain OA’s useful parts.
The goal was debasement of all American Indian tribes. That would have removed tribal customs from any sense of ownership, eliminating moral quandaries about remixing tribal customs for one’s own profit.
This is racism. I am not faulting OA’s founders for having used racist practices. In their time, racist campaigns against American Indians, like forced assimilation, were viewed as noble. I doubt they understood their art as racism. Regardless of original intent, we now know better. OA’s founding and its contemporary playing-Indian activities rest on racist ideology.
The USA started pivoting from racist practices against American Indians in the middle of the 20th century. Unlike the USA, OA clings to its racist legacy.
Cynically, it makes sense. OA profits on the woo of its racist legacy. Take the woo from OA, and you’re left with an organization no sane person would design: a collection of poorly related activities.
OA’s new mission and values have four points. On a thin read, these points sound reasonable. The problem comes when OA lays out how the points are relevant, in a four-point list of “meaningful changes”. Two changes are contemptuous of high schoolers. The other two reflect features that should be part of SA‘s mainline programs.
In other words, OA’s own change agenda validates that it should not exist!
Change 1: Retention in Scouts BSA
OA’s first change is “a specific commitment to retention in Scouts BSA”. In saying this, OA is admitting it’s a tool to encourage high schoolers to linger in SA‘s middle-school program, Scouts BSA.
Even though it’s open to youth through age 17, Scouts BSA is a middle-school program. I will write more about this in a future article, but the capsule summary is that Scout BSA’s original design was for ages 11-14, and its program strengths still speak mainly to middle schoolers. Most high schoolers have rejected this middle-school program, fleeing SA.
For 114 years, insiders have called SA’s high-school-retention failure the “older [youth] problem”. Because SA is so bound by inertia, it is willfully blind to any strategy other than retaining high schoolers in its middle-school program. It has therefore facilitated 114 years of failure in solving this problem. (Also a topic for a future article: 114 years is enough time. The experiment has failed. Let’s move on. SA must move all high schoolers to Venturing. This will catch SA up to USA’s cultural norms and nearly all of our international Scouting peer programs.)
The centerpiece of SA’s failed high-school-retention strategy is adding bells and whistles to its middle-school program. Camp staff, high-adventure programs, and OA are the main bells and whistles.
The problem is that once the bell-and-whistle activity is done, the high schooler returns to babysitting duties in the middle-school program. Yuck!
Order has meaning. By making this the first listed change, OA’s leadership conveys that OA’s main job is to help SA avoid admitting the failure of its 114-year-old high-school-retention experiment.
Change 2: Broader service to all of SA
In this part, OA pledges to extend its high-school-level leadership training and programming beyond its own popularity-contest-gated membership. In other words, it’s seeking to be simply another program offering available to all age-eligible BSA members.
Hold on a second, let’s ask something: Which would do best at delivering leadership programming and conferences to high schoolers?
A weird, racist, secret society that is unwilling to shuck its racist, playing-Indian crap.
See why this is a threat to OA’s relevance? Why would a weird, racist, secret society do better at high-school programming than a mainline program designed for high schoolers? (Hint: It can’t.)
But wait, there’s more!
OA ran an experiment in summer 2024, and it had a great outcome! The 2024 National Order of the Arrow Conference was a dramatically-reduced-racism environment. And it succeeded! The conference was great!
While about 15 instructional sessions at NOAC 2024 still promoted OA’s racist ideology, It would be trivial to trash them. We can easily eliminate from NOAC all remaining vestiges of OA’s racist activities!
SA must liberate high-school-oriented programs from its weird, racist, secret society. Venturing, SA’s mainline high-school program, is a much better fit for this!
Change 3: Emphasis on peer leadership
The point of this is OA sees itself as a place where high schoolers can “[have] the opportunity to lead their peers as opposed to younger Scouts”.
Um, we already have that. It’s called Venturing. That’s where high schoolers can lead their own peers.
Really, this is just a repetition of change 1. OA sees itself as a shiny object, distracting high schoolers from how SA’s wants them stuck in middle-school purgatory. As soon as the OA peer-leadership experience is done, guess where that high schooler goes back to? Babysitting middle schoolers.
The best way to deliver this promise is with Venturing. A weird, racist, secret society adds no value over Venturing.
Change 4: Recognition for Scouts and Scouters
This change makes little sense. SA has robust recognition opportunities in its mainline programs. Why do we need a weird, racist, secret society for that? (Hint: we don’t.)
Back to the purpose
These four changes were how OA plans to alter itself to align with its new purpose. Let’s get into that new purpose.
Sadly, points 1, 2, and 4 of the new purpose are undifferentiated from what should be normative in mainline SA programs:
Recognize those who exemplify the Scout Oath and Law in their daily lives, and, through that recognition, cause others to act in the same way
Reinforce a life purpose of leadership in cheerful service to others
Be an integral part of Scouting America and encourage participation in all it offers through units, outdoor adventures, and national events to further the Scouting experience
Points 1, 2, and 4 of OA’s purpose, as of July 2024
None of these are enhanced by a weird, racist, secret society.
Point 3 usurps what Venturing already excels at:
Create and deliver peer-led, adult-guided, advanced leadership experiences for Scouts and Scouters that positively impact their unit, community, and ultimately our nation
“Advanced” here is a comparison to Scouts BSA’s middle-school-oriented experiences. It’s coded language for how OA offers programs targeted to high schoolers.
Venturing is SA’s high-school program. That is the best place to deliver high-school-targeted activities.
OA is still a secret society
OA was founded in 1915 as a secret society. To its credit, OA reduced its secrecy over time. But just as reduced-racism does not make OA not-racist, reduced-secrecy does not make OA not-secret.
To shuck the racist and secret labels, OA must drop all racism and all secrecy. It has declined to do either.
On secrecy specifically, I have two examples.
First is its Safeguarded Material practice. This is just a fancy label for how OA keeps core ceremony scripts secret. (The scripts’ passwords are ahoalton, itisonlyright, and leadershipinservice, respectively.) (By the way, in the context of SA, “safeguarding” refers to abuse prevention. Why does OA use that word for its secrecy-preservation scheme?)
Again, for OA to not be a secret society, it has to stop keeping secrets. Stop adding passwords to your documents. Stop the extreme secrecy of the National Order of the Arrow Committee. And importantly, stop the legacy of secrecy in your sayings, actions, and culture.
OA is weird
Why do I use “weird” to describe OA?
When talking about OA, we’re referring to a 109-year old secretive organization, whose incoherence is only masked by woo from playing-Indian activities, that through its own admission mainly exists to keep high schoolers in a middle-school program, and that in 2024 clings to racist activities long rejected by society.
How is that not weird?
OA has no future
In my past pieces (article 1, article 2), I held out optimism that OA may have a path forward.
I no longer believe that.
OA refuses to change. And I get it now. It can’t change! Its most urgently needed reform–dropping its racist, pretendian practices–will reveal an amalgam of unrelated activities, with access gated by a popularity contest.
Who needs that?
OA’s 110th birthday is in 2025. The best way to celebrate this is to quickly abolish OA while it can still happen in an orderly process. Some of OA’s programs have value, and we can preserve their legacy by reassigning them to Venturing.
Doing anything else is allowing OA’s slow suicide. If allowed to persist, OA will slowly self-immolate in a cauldron of conflict, dragging into chaos the parts that had value.
It’s time to move on. None of SA’s WOSM peers have a weird, racist, secret society. I am unaware of any USA youth-serving organization other than SA with a weird, racist, secret society.
All of SA’s energy needs to be focused on creating a better future. To succeed, we must eliminate all distractions, like OA.
Appendix: How about cheerful service?
This article focuses on the youth-serving aspects of OA. What about “cheerful service”?
While OA claims a character-development aspect of service, especially influenced by the Billy Clark story, the notion of youth providing community service needs to be engrained at all levels, not something claimed by a weird, racist, secret society.
I therefore do not feel it’s a strongly addressable need in the context of this article. Service must be an emphasis of all of BSA’s programs!
However, camp service remains valuable. I hear too many stories of how it enhances councils’ ability to deliver programs.
I recommend creating a new council-camp-service society. It must not be a renewed OA: No mockery of American Indians, no secrecy, no gating by a popularity contest, no national committee moated off from the base. It would be a clean-sheet society open to all who wish to serve.
An achievement system, whose main input is service hours, could be the recognition system. Councils would be well advised to develop appreciation systems to recognize camp-service achievements.
Boy Scouts of America recently chose a new name, Scouting America (SA). This will be a doing-business-as arrangement (DBA), so the underlying corporate name says the same.
BSA’s marketers ham-fistedly insisted on no abbreviations. Sorry, Scouting America will be abbreviated to SA. 66% fewer syllables and 89% fewer characters is too strong a pull. And BSA initializes so much, it’s a longstanding pattern: BSA, NYLT, NAYLE, OA, PLC, ILST, AOL, DYLC, NESA, NCAP, et al. It’s a Sisyphean quest to stamp out initializing this corporate name.
Blunders will continue until people at the top declare they’ve had enough. What are you waiting on?
P.S., Scouts USA or Scouting USA make more sense. It reflects our country name instead of usurping the name of two continents, and it fits the naming convention of many of our WOSM peers.
The Order of the Arrow’s core ceremonies–the call outs and inductions–are pretendian parodies of American Indians and their culture.
The USA has a racist legacy of destroying American Indian tribes with forced Westernization. While that failed, OA’s core ceremonies celebrate the racist legacy’s goal: a dystopia with fully debased tribes, with nobody to own tribal customs.
If we want a useful OA, it must stop mocking American Indians, and it must stop celebrating our country’s cruel, racist sins.
In OA’s pretendian parodies, Scouts act out fake stories that were created by Westerners, done while employing a mishmash of language, themes, names, and clothing appropriated from American Indian tribes. Even worse, the ceremonies are often delivered with gross Western stereotypes of Indians: garbled with Tonto-talk pidgin, the phony stories are rich with noble-savage tropes.
Example Tonto-talk pidgin, spoken by the Tonto character. It stars at 0:53. Normal in Order of the Arrow ceremonies, Tonto talk is a stilted parody of American Indian speech.OA’s legend is inauthentic, comes from Western sources (source of image).
The ceremonies celebrate the end game of racist oppression
Some defend OA’s pretendian parodies as “respect” or “honor”. In fact, these ceremonies validate our country’s horrible sins.
Our country has a legacy of racist oppression of American Indians. This includes Indian removal, boardingschools, and much, muchmore. Among the goals of this oppression was to “White”-wash all American Indians: Through forced Westernization, the USA tried to destroy tribes. Had this succeeded, an outcome would have been divorcing tribal customs from any sense of ownership.
If you can’t change them, absorb them until they simply disappear into the mainstream culture…. In Washington’s infinite wisdom, it was decided that tribes should no longer be tribes, never mind that they had been tribes for thousands of years.
OA’s founding was in 1915. Then, the USA was still deep in its racist suppression of tribes. For example, re-education camps Indian boarding schools were still active. Oppressive official acts would continue decades longer, such as the Indian termination policy, which started in the 1940s, and the Indian Relocation Act of 1956.
In the time of OA’s founding, there was likely little moral qualm about treating tribal customs as if they are obsolete, public-domain artifacts.
A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one…
In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.
Thankfully, our country’s racist oppression failed. Tribes are now strengthening their communities, cultures, and identities through tribal self-determination, which started before the mid-20th century and become federal policy in the 1970s.
The ceremonies perpetuate racism
An OA interested in respect and honor would seek authenticity and support tribal self-determination. Instead, with its mocking and appropriation continuing even now, OA acts as if our country’s repudiated, racist agenda actually worked.
“Respect” and “honor” is the opposite of perpetuating a repudiated, racist past. It is the opposite of corrupting young minds, presenting pretendian parodies as if they were authentic.
If respect and honor were OA’s priorities, it would:
Support tribal ownership of their own customs.
Only share truth about American Indians and tribes.
Not mock tribes.
An Order of the Arrow that respects and honors American Indians has no pretendian parodies!
It’s still going on
Racist or tribe-mocking practices remain normative in OA. In the context of pretendian parodies that are portrayed as authentic:
They use brownface cosplay. In fact, their placement as the first suggestion in Approved Attire for Order of the Arrow Ceremonies shows that OA still encourages costumes that parody American Indians. By only constraining limitations with “should” statements, OA winks at those who wish to cling to appropriation.
Ceremonialists play fictitious American Indian characters invented by Westerners, such as Allowat Sakima (Chief of the Fire) or Meteu (Medicine Man).
The ceremonies mention fake characters as if they are historical, such as Chingachgook.
A phony legend about a real tribe continues to be read. Adapted from the 1826 romance novel Last of the Mohicans, the legend is a fiction written about the Mohicans that OA assigned to the Lenape, a different tribe!
They falsely convey that historical characters from different tribes, such as Uncas, who was Mohegan, are part of Lenape history.
The characters speak mostly noble-savage tropes garbled with Tonto-talk pidgin.
A pretendian parody from a June 2023 Order of the Arrow event.
A pretendian parody form a July 2023 Order of the Arrow event. Even though they didn’t use the preferred costuming option on OA’s approved-attire list (order means things in lists!), the noble-savage tropes and Tonto talk pidgin keep this in American Indian-parody land.
Introduction to Ceremonial Skills Workshop (p. 45)
Pre-Ordeal Ceremony Evaluations (p. 46)
The Ceremonial Multiverse (p. 49)
The Vigil Honor Experience: Beyond the Triangle (p. 50)
Vigil Honor Ceremony Evaluations (p. 51)
What if we flipped the tables?
Let’s suppose that BSA was destroyed. Further suppose that soccer clubs, to given a sense of woo to their elite players, set up a secret society. The induction ceremony has performers dress up in tan shirts and campaign hats, wear our Eagle Scout and Arrow of Light symbols, and do a parody of a court of honor.
Would any sane person allege that honors BSA? Of course not. In the same sense, OA’s parodies of American Indians is neither honor nor respect.
Core ceremonies are irredeemable
Since I was a youth, OA swam in local allegations of American Indian endorsement of core ceremonies. I still hear it today. They typically invoke some random oral blessing from a mysterious American Indian from years prior.
These alleged endorsements cannot be differentiated from the “my Canadian girlfriend” trope. Why? Because they are probably phony. (I would be happy for someone to provide a link to a lodge website where it hosts a copy of an endorsement from a local tribe for its core ceremonies. Leave a comment if you know of one!)
Well, shouldn’t we try to get tribal endorsement of our core ceremonies? That would be inappropriate!
These ceremonies are amalgams of Western stereotypes and Western fictions, employing stories, characters, outfits, and traditions of multiple tribes.
As such, an endorsement would have to come from some group that represents over 2,000 tribes. Given the diversity of American Indians thought, practice, and belief, merely believing such an organization could exist would suggest foundational ignorance of American Indians.
OK, let’s suppose we inventoried every last part of our ceremonies and identify the tribe we stole each part from. The clothing, the language, the themes, etc. That is a herculean task that I doubt is feasible. But what if some amazing soul did it? We would have to approach each tribe and ask for their endorsement of their share of our Western parody that was built on theft. Simply asking that of a tribe is an insult!
Out of respect for the American Indian people and tribes, we must acknowledge racist parodies for what they are: irredeemable celebrations of tribal debasement.
It must stop
Racist and inauthentic, OA’s core ceremonies have no path to redemption. They have to stop.
A major feature of the Order of the Arrow’s Ordeal experience is the elangomat system. The elangomat is a helpful guide to Scouts who are going through the Ordeal, a joining rite of Order of the Arrow.
I mention this to introduce Bill Hartman, who invented the elangomat system. Bill has a rich history with the Order of the Arrow, and his service continues: Bill leads the Guild of Inductions Experience Designers (GIED), a passion project where he and a team are reimagining Order of the Arrow’s core ceremonies. Among GIED’s goals are to remove cultural appropriation from the ceremonies.
GIED honors OA’s founder, E. Urner Goodman
In addition to disassociating OA from our country’s legacy racism, eliminating cultural appropriation honors a later-life admission of E. Urner Goodman, OA’s founder.
In 1970s living-room conversations with Urner, Bill Hartman recounts him lamenting his “biggest mistake” in founding the Order: utilizing fake legends in the context of naïve Scouts who mistakenly believe they are real history. (To be clear, Urner was only commenting on the factual legitimacy of the stories. Bill does not recall Urner otherwise commenting on the ceremonies’ ethics.)
In addition to providing OA a respectful exit from racism, the GIED’s work addresses E. Urner Goodman’s regret.
The National Order of the Arrow Committee could care less
In a rational world, a long-tenured member who invented a crucial part of inductions would be a valued contributor. His group’s passion project would be given weight. That is the case for the GIED.
The National Order of the Arrow Committee is in a different world. When the GIED’s work was shared with a portion of this committee, a committee member write this to all committee members:
From: [redacted] Subject: Recent Ceremony proposal Date: September 3, 2023 at 12:46:34 PM CDT To: [redacted] Cc: [redacted]
All,
It has come to my attention that many of you probably received an email from [a person who shared GIED works] with … PROPOSED CHANGES TO the OA CEREMONIES. Let me be clear that this is NOT the current direction of our committee. We have our own team led by [selected committee members] who are looking at any changes that may be necessary to our Induction process and ceremonies. This has been a very detailed and methodical evaluation occurring over the past 2 years. I have forwarded [the GIED works] to [selected committee members] for them to look at, but that is it. [The sharer’s] proposals by no means reflect the direction of the OA at this time.
The OA leadership remains in close working relationships with the BSA leadership and the BSA Mission and Reputation group regarding our plans moving forward and we will continue to keep the OA National Committee updated and they will vote on changes when appropriate.
Thanks,
[redacted]
Living up to the cultural rot of the national organization, the committee is actively moating itself off from mere peasants. Of course, everything good that BSA has ever done has been invented from within by a gold looper, right? Of course that’s true. Peasants must know their place, which is to shut up and receive wisdom from wise elites who know better.
Additionally, this reveals that a team has spent two years secretly pondering the ceremonies. That is far too much time, so this committee is obviously engaged in bureaucratic stalling tactics to delay reform further.
Wait, there’s more! The ceremony revisions were finally published in December 2023. Sadly, all the problems with the Ordeal ceremony I identified above are from this revision. (The passwords on the ceremony docs are ahoalton, itisonlyright, and leadershipinservice. Secrets in Scouting are bad, you know?) If this is the result of over two years of work, it’s clear evidence that OA is unserious about fixing its cultural-appropriation issues.
GIED’s works should be considered. There may also be other proposals worthy of consideration. Whatever it does, OA must pivot from the national organization’s norms: Instead of acting elitist, it must stop moating itself off from the base.
Limited patience warranted
A key reason individuals become pretendians, like Elizabeth Warren, Iron Eyes Cody, and Johnny Depp, is “[p]ersonal gain and material advantage” (source, p. 15). OA’s pretendian parodies have given it gain and advantage: a shortcut to creating a uniting theme. This uniting theme substitutes for OA’s raison d’etre. Without the woo from the ceremonies, OA is just a collection of weakly related activities.
OA is facing an existential crisis. Discerning a raison d’etre is hard. Patience is needed while OA improves.
Transparent improvement must start now. We need a clear-eyed, open acknowledgement of the inappropriateness of OA’s pretendian parodies. We also need a firm, time-boxed goal for OA to clean up its act.
So far, OA’s leadership has not differentiated itself from national’s cultural rot. For example, in the nine months between a major survey and the AIA announcement, it stonewalled the public, and it still has not shared the survey results.
Again, patience is limited. Should the culture of BSA’s national organization–stalling, hostility to outsiders, intransparency, low performance, and resistance to accountability–continue to be OA’s methods, that signals a lack of seriousness. A lack of seriousness will only lead to OA’s dissolution.
Appendix: Thanking hobbyists
I want to make a brief mention of the Indian hobbyist movement. The USA’s racist attempts to “White”-wash American Indians and destroy tribes succeeded to a degree, quashing some tribes, leaving nobody to carry on their customs.
In some cases, Whites took up the traditions and, to the best of their ability, kept them alive. That was the Indian hobbyist movement.
There was a time and place for the Indian hobbyist movement. Those who kept traditions alive deserve thanks. But that was a century ago. Tribes are strengthening, in some cases re-forming, and reasserting themselves through tribal self-determination.
Today, it is most sound when non-American Indians limit their American Indian performance art to that which is directly sanctioned through the tribe that owns the art. For BSA’s institutional purposes, that sanctioning needs to be explicit and transparent.
All that said, there is no ethical argument for perpetuation of pretendian parodies within an organization that claims to build character.
BSA’s Summit Bechtel Reserve (SBR) is a fantastic spot for quadrennial Jamborees.
It has a dark side. Protecting BSA’s bigotry is its raison d’etre. With program revenue a tiny fraction of expectations and staggering debt, it’s worth less than zero and is a major fiscal strain on BSA’s fragile national organization.
BSA has never shared a plan to turn SBR around. As a Scouting-themed amusement park in a remote location that lacks national-scope repute, a turnround seems extraordinarily challenging.
Bigots love BSA’s leadership vacuum
BSA has a decades-long leadership vacuum. Special-interest groups filled this vacuum, freely using BSA as a tool in their culture wars. They are why BSA have squandered so much treasure and goodwill on membership controversies.
Special-interest groups are also why BSA became a stalwart of immorality, aggressively litigating a right to be bigoted all the way to the Supreme Court.And it won this shit prize in 2000.
BSA’s bigoted flex put it at odds with society. Government agencies, pivoting from discrimination, were increasingly resistant to associate with an organization that was openly bigoted on gender, sexual orientation, and religion.
Here’s the irony: BSA used Fort Walker for Jamborees 1981-2010. Then, it was named named Fort A. P. Hill. A Confederate, A. P. Hill was a traitorous scoundrel and fool. Hill and his co-conspirators waged an illegal rebellion, bankrupting southern states to engage in a devastating, bloody war of choice, just to preserve bigotry.
Acolytes of special-interest groups follow Hill’s example, morally and fiscally bankrupting BSA so that they can wage war against society, in interest of promoting their bigotry.
An outcome of the special-interest groups’ bigoted flex: SBR! Yup, BSA built SBR to preserve its bigotry!
Former Chief Scout Executive Robert Mazzuca, one of a succession of incompetent CEOs, spills the beans in the first few seconds of this video:
Robert’s admission: “taking our destiny back and seeing if we couldn’t find a place and a home for our new Jamboree”. (I am certain he said “new” in the wrong place, meaning to say “new home for our Jamboree” SBR is the new home for the traditional, not-new Jamboree.)
Why would you need to find a new home for the Jamboree? Why do you need to take your destiny back? It’s because, despite two acts of Congress, BSA still feared that its bigotry would end access to Fort Walker, its Jamboree home since 1981.
BSA could have dropped its immorality. Instead, BSA made foolish fiscal choices, just to perpetuate bigotry.
None of the other reasons make sense
In the above video, other gold loopers gave flimsy, alternate excuses for developing SBR. They were shared starting at 1:01:
Summer camp
High-adventure base
Leadership center
These are affirmed by SBR’s website, which lists these three uses, along with a “Family Adventure Camp”.
None of these uses make sense.
Summer camp makes no sense
BSA had no need for another summer camp.
Thanks to the BSA national organization’s war of attrition against its own membership, by 2010, BSA’s market share of youth had shrunk 46% from its 1971 peak. We had well under-grown our infrastructure, which was affirmed in a late 2010s speech by former Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh. (As of the end of 2023, we’re down an astounding 80%!)
BSA is winning its decades-long war of attrition against its own membership. Its 2023 market share of youth is 80% below its peak.
In this context of decline, how is the base served when national competes with declining council summer camps?
Leadership center makes no sense
The leadership center may be the dumbest excuse to build SBR. It was not needed, and it’s too remote.
Again, thanks to its decades-long war against its own membership, BSA has been under-growing a diverse array of national and council facilities since 1971: camps, office buildings, and more. In fact, BSA had so much surplus capacity, it sold a silly, Westlake, Texas training facility to contribute funds to the bankruptcy settlement.
Silly Westlake, Texas training facility (map) that was sold to help pay the bankruptcy settlement (image source).
There was no need for more training space in 2010. Yet we solve that phony problem with an expensive, new facility in the middle of nowhere?
We add value to an unneeded training facility by hiding it in a remote location?
High adventure makes no sense
Nothing done at SBR is high adventure.
BSA’s description of high adventure:
A high-adventure trek is a joyous opportunity—beyond the scope of the routine. It is more than just a scenic outdoor experience. It is more than just a physical challenge. It is an experience in living and cooperating with others to meet an exciting challenge. It is learning to overcome difficulties and learning to live in harmony with nature.
The last phrase is key: “learning to live in harmony with nature”. That crucial context colors what you get at BSA’s genuine high-adventure bases, which are at the Florida Keys, Rocky Mountains, and northern boundary waters.
SBR is phony high-adventure: A Scouting-themed amusement park built on an area already terraformed by extensive surface coal mining, SBR defies nature! Those enjoying SBR’s headline attractions are using man-made facilities on a scraped landscape.
78% of SBR’s 2023 attendees attended its middle-school summer camp program or programs focused on SBR’s amusement-park rides:
“Hold on a second, didn’t you say no high adventure was done at SBR?” Correct! Attending a high-adventure program at SBR means you leave SBR, instead going to New River Gorge National Park or adjacent areas!
The New River Gorge National Park did not need a nearby, $439,000,000 white elephant for Scouts to enjoy it. If SBR was never developed, then New River Gorge National Park would be like a regular national park: fully available for Scouting adventure!
Poorly utilized
Those percentages I wrote about in the prior section? They split a tiny number.
Back to the video shared earlier, starting at 1:44, a gold looper shares that SBR will be a “high-utilization site” with projected usage to be “somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand kids a summer”.
Let’s split the difference at 75,000 kids. What was the 2023 utilization? 2,428 kids, 97% less than projected.
Might as well be zero!
Of those 2,428 kids:
921 did summer camp (That means attendance at all summer-camp sessions was comparable to my council’s single week of winter camp!)
535 departed SBR to do high adventure
972 focused on amusement-park rides
That giant sucking sound: massive financial failures
SBR’s financial piggishness started in its infancy.
Per a 2013 Reuters exposé, SBR’s actual cost was 99% higher than estimated, accompanied by a 32% fundraising shortfall. Given a $439 million facility with a $343 million fundraising goal, this means a $220 million cost overrun met by a $108 million fundraising shortfall.
Now let me admit limitations of these numbers: This is from a mid-2013 article. BSA is invited to share if it got closer to fundraising goals or meaningfully addressed the overruns (unlikely given massive bond debt outstanding; see below). But it will take tremendous shifts from the Reuters article’s numbers to get out of clown-show territory.
More sucking: a SBR-sized heap of debt
(This section is complicated. The main point: Arrow WV, Inc. is a nonprofit controlled by BSA, and it owns The Summit. Arrow WV likely owes Boy Scouts of America, Inc. well over $350 million. It does not seem likely Arrow WV can ever pay this back. BSA reports this amount owed to it as an asset, and that one asset accounts for 41% of all of BSA’s assets!)
SBR is underwater, and the negative fiscal trends are accelerating.
More info on the financial numbers below and the meaning of Arrow WV, Inc.
SBR is owned by Arrow WV, Inc., a nonprofit controlled by BSA. Numbers specific to SBR come from Arrow WV’s IRS Form 990s.
As of press time, the latest Form 990 available covers 2022. Unless specified otherwise, the numbers are as of the end of the 2022 fiscal year.
Thanks to steadily increasing liabilities, Arrow WV, SBR’s owner, went underwater in 2022 with a net worth of -$1,742,9892:
This is fueled by annual operating losses:
Let’s look more into the liabilities.
For 2022, Arrow WV had total liabilities of $370,598,2503. Of that, $783 is “Accounts payable and accrued expenses”, and the remaining $370,597,467 is an intercompany payable.
This intercompany payable is funds that Arrow WV owes to other entities within the BSA family. This common accounting tactic means 1. that other corporations within BSA’s family spotted Arrow WV $370 million to cover its shortfalls and 2. Arrow WV is expected to pay them back.
The author’s campsite at the 2017 National Scout Jamboree at SBR. (Photo credit: Aren Cambre.)
Boy Scouts of America, Inc.–the main corporation in this family of entities–has an intercompany receivable of $356,180,2804. Reported as an asset, it’s money owed to BSA. It’s likely that all, or nearly all, of this is money owed to BSA by Arrow WV. (BSA’s intercompany receivable is about $14 million less than Arrow WV’s intercompany payable. This suggests that Arrow WV owes at around $14 million to other corporations in BSA’s family.)
Let’s assume all of BSA’s intercompany receivable is from Arrow WV. About half that receivable is BSA’s guarantee on county bonds issued to finance SBR’s construction. Fayette County, WV issued $225,000,000 of bonds5 in 20106 and 20127. As they are guaranteed by BSA, BSA must pay them off. As of the end of 2022, the bonds still have an outstanding balance of $185,799,3858.
Subtract the bonds from the intercompany receivable, and this means Arrow WV–AKA, SBR–owes BSA $170,380,8959 for other reasons.
I suspect these “other reasons” fall into two categories:
BSA covering for Arrow WV’s start-up expenses that weren’t covered by bonds or donor funds.
Daddy BSA paying for things each year that Arrow WV can’t afford.
The expectation may have been that Arrow WV pays this back. But it hasn’t, and it can’t due to staggering annual losses. Arrow WV’s intercompany payable (amounts owed) keeps growing, which is not surprising given its large deficits.
Of BSA’s $902,582,447 of total assets10, 41% are that intercompany receivable. (Yes, corporations can report money owed to them as assets.) In other words, 41% of BSA’s assets may be worthless!
$18 of youth membership fees = SBR deficit
BSA’s annual youth member fee has had meteoric increases:
Meteoric increases in BSA’s annual youth member fee.
If BSA produces any significant savings, its first priority is to provide relief to its youth members from the staggering annual fee increases.
Let’s suppose BSA sold SBR and paid off the bonds. This means BSA no longer incurs about $18,344,608 of annual losses11 related to SBR.
Divide that $18,344,608 savings by BSA’s 1,015,056 youth members, and you get $18 per Scout.
Think about it: $18 per Scout is equivalent to the deficits of a failing facility that few will ever use. If we had no SBR obligations, BSA could reduce the annual youth membership fee from $85 to $67.
Yeah, I know, bean counters may spin some yarn about a corporate accounting trick that disassociates member fees from SBR. I could care less. The loss is real, reported on Arrow WV’s own IRS 990 form. No accounting trick takes away that the highest priority for operational revenue savings needs to be relieving youth from exorbitant national-fee increases.
I had a great time at the 2017 Jamboree
I was a Scoutmaster of 2017 National Scout Jamboree’s Troop 4116. SBR is an outstanding facility for Jamborees! I loved my time there.
2017 presidential address to the Jamboree, where President Trump told Scouts about sex orgies, then bashed immigrants so intensely, some of my troop members cried. (Photo credit: Aren Cambre.)
But my fondness cannot change that SBR is a failed, money-losing pig.
Wishful thinking can’t change today’s reality. We now own this white elephant, courtesy of special-interest groups. And it’s proposed as the home of the 2031 World Jamboree. (Nov. 26, 2024 update: This bid fell through.)
I encourage BSA to reconsider the vision of a gold-looper who helped found SBR:
The key to [SBR] is, from an operating perspective, … that it will sustain itself economically in perpetuity.
Those who like SBR, who want to keep it for perpetuity, the onus is on you to fix its finances, to hold SBR responsible for its “key” promise. What’s your plan?
For sure, the plan isn’t what steampunk Baden-Powell’s ghost shared with gold loopers in the 2000s:
You read that right. Grown-ass adults had to pretend that fragile males had to be protected from being “disadvantaged” by females by cosplaying BSA’s separate-but-equal regime! ↩︎
BSA uses its Declaration of Religious Principle (DRP) to bar atheists and agnostics. This graceless, bigoted policy is offensive to Christianity.
Jesus’s words and deeds command Christians to radical grace, compassion, and inclusion. Those are the opposite of BSA’s Declaration. Those who follow Jesus cannot support a policy of excluding those who are different.
(This article speaks to what I know, a Christian perspective. If you have a different faith perspective that leads to inclusion and tolerance, leave a comment!)
The Declaration’s contemporary point: bigotry
Religious observance, faith exploration, and tolerance have been encouraged since 1911 by the “Reverent” Scout Law (source, see page 10). That law gives full justification to features like the Religious Emblems Program or the Scouts’ Own concept.
Supplemental language that largely resembles today’s DRP was created around the same time. In its context–the tail end of the Third Great Awakening–the DRP was almost certainly intended as a magnanimous statement reflecting then-contemporary norms.
The point of this article is that today’s religious-extremist interpretation of the DRP forces Christians to contradict Jesus’s words and deeds. Christians who prefer not to slap Jesus cannot align with the extremists’ interpretation of the DRP. That is the focus of this article.
The Greatest Commandment and Golden Rule: core to Christianity
Crucial to Christian faith are the Greatest Commandment and the Golden Rule:
The Greatest Commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”
The Golden Rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Source: Matthew 22:35-40. (The added boldface will be relevant later.)
Jesus commands you to love your God and love your neighbor. Any Christian belief or practice that contradicts this is heretical.
The next sections explain why Christians who value Jesus’s “main point” cannot support the DRP.
In this parable, someone is severely injured by robbers. He is left lying on the side of the road.
A priest and Levite pass the injured man, leaving him for dead. In those days, priests and Levites believed they would be defiled if they touched a corpse. By moving to the other side of the road before passing the injured man, these two avoided becoming unclean.
Then comes a Samaritan, the Good Samaritan. He rendered aid and paid for the victim to convalesce at an inn.
Yet Jesus illustrated his Great Commandment with a story featuring a Samaritan as the good guy! The Samaritan was not to be hated. The Samaritan was worthy of grace and love! A dreg of humanity acted better than the the priests and Levites, holiest of society!
If we take Jesus’s words seriously, we can’t act as if atheists’ and agnostics’ presence defiles us. But we play that stupid game, acting like the priest and Levite, when we support the DRP.
When we use the Declaration for its main purpose–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–instead of loving God and others, we’re copying the sins of those who Jesus condemned.
We must not harm children
The Declaration of Religious Principle is kin punishment, punishing children for a grievance against the parents.
Civilized societies have long moved past kin punishment. BSA’s DRP sends us back centuries, punishing innocent children over an alleged sin of the parent.
Belief systems of youth are mainly their parents’ beliefs:
Parents have a general right to educate their children according to their own religious conviction, and children generally lack a right to resist reasonable religious practices (or non-practices!) ordained by their parents. (While beyond the scope of this article, I encourage a read of Children as Believers: Minors’ Free Exercise Rights and the Psychology of Religious Development, Harvard Law Review, June 2022.)
Contrast BSA’s approach to Jesus’s: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matthew 19:14)
Jesus was not barbaric. He did not impose a religious test. He ministered to all. BSA could learn from Jesus.
When we use the Declaration for its main purpose–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–instead of loving God and others, we’re harming children.
We must not be rulemongers
Jesus’s Great Commandment was in response to a question from a Pharisaic “expert in the law” (a lawyer). Notable about the Pharisees was their obsession with rules, especially ones concerning purity.
Jesus’s responses to Pharisaical interrogations often illustrate how their rulemongering distracts them from what’s important. Tragically, the Woes of the Pharisees align with the woes that underly BSA’s Declaration, an obsession with outward appearance and superficiality.
Jesus told the Parable of the Good Samaritan in response to questioning of another “expert in the law”. Jesus was once again addressing someone obsessed with rules.
And in that parable, the priest and Levite were examples of people who were so rulebound, they missed opportunities to minister.
If Christians take Jesus seriously, we need to avoid the Woes of the Pharisees. We need to avoid allowing an obsession over rules to cause us to miss opportunities to grace and ministry. Essentially a Pharisaical document, BSA’s Declaration can’t be reconciled with Jesus’s own teachings.
When we use the Declaration for its main purpose–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–instead of loving God and others, we’re missing opportunities to minister due to our rulemongering, a trap Jesus warned us about.
We must show grace towards the vulnerable
People are complex. Simple decisions can mask difficult circumstances leading to them.
Many atheists or agnostics are recovering from harms caused by past church experience. Avoiding the institution that caused harm could be a crucial part of that person’s recovery.
As an example, let’s use United Methodist Minister Teresa MacBain. In the nine years of her ministry, spiritual malpractice she experienced in her childhood–problematic biblical teachings from a different denomination–haunted her, creating questions so immense, the only reasonable path forward for her was to renounce religion entirely, becoming an atheist.
In addition to slapping Jesus and innocent children, BSA’s Declaration slaps adults who may simply be doing their best to overcome spiritual malpractice.
When we use the Declaration for its main purpose–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–instead of loving God and others, we’re contravening the Golden Rule, which Jesus said is one of two most important commandments.
We must not compel faith tests outside of church
In the Greatest Commandment and the Golden Rule, Jesus used second-person pronouns, “your” and “yourself”. It’s hard to miss what it emphasizes: Your faith expression is your own private, personal, and core matter. Jesus’s key concern is your own faith, not how you coerced your neighbor.
This doesn’t mean your can’t share your faith. For example, a mainstream Christian practice is corporate worship experiences. You know, going to church. Regularly attending a church conveys to that congregation, and anyone who sees you walking in the door, your alignment with that church’s beliefs.
But how about outside of a voluntary, religious setting? That is where we find secular organizations, like BSA. In Matthew 6, Jesus cautions against demonstrations of religiosity in the secular world:
Don’t practice righteousness in front of others.
Gifts to the needy are to be done in secret.
Don’t be like the “hypocrites” who visibly pray. Instead, pray in secret, behind closed doors.
Don’t pray loudly by “babbling like pagans”.
Don’t put on a show of somberness while fasting.
He follows with the Lord’s Prayer. This prayer again emphasizes the individual’s own relationship with God: individual reflection and individual acts. Corporate petitions (“our”) are on behalf of the voluntarily aligned in a religious community.
There’s much more to unpack from Matthew 6. But further exegesis won’t change Jesus’s strong preference for private religiosity and a focus on one’s own faith life. Jesus was deeply skeptical, sometimes condemnatory, of open demonstrations of religiosity, especially when one uses public religiosity to seek affirmation of others.
Let’s recap. Jesus exhorts us to a faith that focuses on the individual’s private relationship with God.
Religious tests in a secular organization oppose this. These tests are one party compelling a demonstration of religiosity out of another party. This isn’t the same as respectfully participating in a prayer at a Scout event. It is a test of an individual’s private matter.
It is difficult to reconcile a zeal for Jesus’s words and deeds with support of compelled religious tests in a secular organization.
When we use the Declaration for its main purpose–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–instead of loving God and others, we’re disrespecting those who prefer to obey Jesus’s expectations for how individuals are to conduct faith practices and relate to others of faith.
We must offer immense grace
Another parable on grace is a cautionary tale. Jesus’s Parable of the Unmerciful Servant describes a servant who had received unexpected, undeserved grace in the form of cancellation of a massive debt. Shortly after that debt cancellation, the servant demanded payback from a peer who owned him money. Due to his lack of grace, the servant’s debt was un-canceled, and he was thrown in jail until he could pay it back.
Part of Christian theology includes a Christian’s receipt of wholly unmerited salvation. That is a profound act of grace given to us. We are expected to emit at least that much grace: “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (source)
We are to show unimaginably vast grace to our fellow man. That starkly contrasts seeking to exclude others from a secular organization over a mere lack of outward religious signs.
Christians who use the Declaration to exclude others are not showing 77x grace or even 7x grace; they are sucking grace out of the room!
Part of grace is setting aside one’s pride and compassionately engaging with people unlike you. That includes theists doing the opposite of BSA’s Declaration: engaging with with and ministering to atheists and agnostics.
When we use the Declaration for its main purpose–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–instead of loving God and others, we’re declining to show grace, contravening Jesus’s expectation of us to show 77 times as much grace as we receive!
We must serve society
Religiously unaffiliated people are already a large plurality that will keep growing:
Pew Research on trend towards religious disaffiliation in the USA (source).
Religiously unaffiliated are a mix of beliefs, occupying a spectrum from atheist to non-participating traditionalist. But 37% of religious “nones” are identify as atheist or agnostic (source):
Pew Research on religious “nones” in the USA (source).
Also, for 67% of religious “nones”, “disbelief/doubt/skepticism” is an “extremely or very important reason” for why they are a none (source).
By banning a large and growing percent of society, the DRP’s bigotry and gracelessness cause BSA’s irrelevance.
BSA can be relevant by deleting the DRP and instead promoting tolerance and understanding in the world it inhabits. Or BSA can cling to the bigoted, harmful, backwards DRP and accelerate its decline.
A note about bigotry
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines bigotry as “blindly devoted to some creed, opinion, or practice” along with “having or showing an attitude of hatred or intolerance toward the members of a particular group…”
Private, secular, membership organizations, like BSA, have a Constitutional right to slap Jesus. BSA squandered enormous funds and goodwill to preserve this right, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court with BSA v. Dale.
But “legally permitted” and “morally straight” are different. A mentally awake and morally straight Christian cannot support a secular organization’s Jesus-slapping religious test.
Summary for Christians
When we use the Declaration for what religious extremists want–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–we’re rejecting what Jesus said is the most important of all: loving God and others.
How we solve this
While the DRP was originally a magnanimous statement, religious extremists have warped it to suit their agenda. It is now poisonous, warped beyond recovery.
We don’t need the DRP! We already have the “Reverent” Scout law. That alone is sufficient to justify appropriate, voluntary observations of faith in BSA’s programs.
The DRP must go. Just delete it.
Families must be entrusted to define “Reverent” in the way that makes sense for them. And BSA must stop compelling Christians to behave in ways that contravene Jesus’s words and example.
Finally, BSA’s own mission statement calls it to “prepare young people … by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law”. BSA’s bigotry countermand this, limiting access to those who have already reached some preferred answer. If we’re serious about the instilling part, we have to be open to all, even to those with whom we disagree, with those whose answer is different than our preferences. Otherwise, we’re failing our mission.
Acknowledging my bias
I am a practicing Christian, a lifelong United Methodist. My view of the DRP is expressed through that lens.
Photo of the book holder in the pew in front of me at the 11 AM service on Sunday, August 27, 2023. The United Methodist Hymnal was tragically missing, forcing me to grab a hymnal from the book holder to the left.
As Christianity is the dominant religion in the USA, and certainly of BSA members, it has pervasive influence. I therefore find it helpful to review this Declaration through a Christian lens.
This is not out of disrespect to other religious traditions. It is me expressing myself authentically and avoiding speaking for others.
If you have a different faith perspective that leads you to grace and inclusion, I’d love to hear it! Share your vision for overcoming the DRP’s bigotry in a comment.
BSA’s national organization tried to decimate Cub Scout camping. The base erupted, and national partly backed off! With its reaction, national yet again affirmed how it’s a culturally-rotted enemy of Scouting.
Scouting is among America’s most valuable traditions. We have to save it from the national organization. A necessary step is not allowing national to hide its malfeasance. That’s why I wrote this.
Timeline of BSA’s rule on allowed nights of camping for Cub Scout pack-organized campouts.
A story of arrogance
For decades, BSA did not regulate the length of a Cub Scout pack-organized campouts. It could be as many nights as the pack wanted.
True, BSA’s rules for Cub Scout pack-organized camping included the word “overnight” or “overnighter”. But that was widely understood only to distinguish from “day camp”, a kind of camp that does not include overnight stays. The national office’s own use of this word affirmed this understanding.
In February 2023, BSA blindsided its largest program, secretly adding a word to Cub Scout camping rules: “single overnighter” (August 2022 version, lacking “single”, and February 2023 version). This secret edit decimated camping programs of most packs, demoralizing families and volunteers.
Yet again, BSA’s national organization eroded trust. But this organization does not care: Following its longstanding habit, it acted hubristically, demonstrated hostility, and stalled for a long time before correcting itself. It has yet to apologize. (I’m expecting to see this same culture in Netflix’s upcoming Scouts Honor documentary. Not only is this rotted culture behind decades-long delays in addressing sex abuse, it’s behind this assault on Cub Scouts, it’s why national still clings to a “separate but equal” regime for girls, and it’s why the Order of the Arrow program has rampant brownface cosplay.)
As usual, the top-secret national-level volunteer committees made no public statements. Sitting on their hands is no surprise: too many of these committees are do-nothing, inertia-bound puppets of BSA’s bloated bureaucracy. (Some national committees are exceptions, and I value you! You must be more public and distance yourself from the puppet committees.)
Our national organization is arrogant. Arrogance prevents reform. Until we see clear signs that national wishes to reform, we must keep asking, “What is national’s next blunder?”
Why national thought it could get away with it
(This section is a brief diversion from the article’s topic. It provides context. I will eventually separate it into its own article.)
BSA’s national organization has an anti-leadership culture of mindless rulemongering. This culture expects all BSA members to have an obsession with rules in the mold of the Pharisees of the Bible. This is among the worst attributes of BSA’s moribund bureaucracy.
The national organization also benefits from a myth that rising to national is a sign of extraordinary competence. Place this atop mindless rulemongering, you get a “worship the gold epaulets” mentality. (Employees or volunteers with national roles wear gold epaulets.)
The rulemongering and gold-digging cultural aspects foster a third aspect: UNQUESTIONING OBEDIENCE! Following rules is simply one’s highest calling (again, more anti-leadership claptrap). Faced with ambiguity, the solution is to fabricate yet more rules, which induces a need for yet more bureaucracy. It’s a self-dealing system, creating phony work for long-tenured professionals and volunteers. It also negates concerns of the base, because of course the problem is you peasants declined to obey or follow our rules. (Incidentally, that explains national’s hostility to feedback.)
The alternative to this culture is thoughtful navigation of gray areas. That would be actual work, contradicting a fourth aspect of the national organization’s cultural problems: its main purpose is to provide cushy, make-work roles for those who were loyal to national’s bureaucracy for long enough.
Volunteer or professional, BSA’s career- and volunteer-role-advancement system’s terminal promise is to promote you far past your Peter-principle competence limit to a cushy “my career is here to die”, do-little, competence-optional role. No real performance expectations, just smile and wave. Professionals lightly manage fawning volunteer patsies they hand-selected into some puppet committee. All feign productivity and usefulness by reviewing numbers, signing NDas, and wasting everyone’s time with bureaucratic delaying tactics like pointless pilot programs and endless surveys that never lead to change.
Life is great, brought to you by UNQUESTIONING OBEDIENCE!
This time, it failed. The base erupted. The Cub Scout Volunteers Facebook group and other social-media forums exploded. Rulemongers were shoved aside, so national lost its usual defenders. Scores pledged to openly flout the new rule.
(Heading off a likely response: Rejecting mindless rulemongering is not endorsing anarchy. Many BSA rules are crucial, such as those that protect youth from abuse or the advancement program. Mindless approaches distracts what’s important and harms our ability to navigate gray areas.)
National used stupidthink to fabricate a rule
Insiders with direct knoweldge of the national organization’s thinking shared some insight, revealing how stupidity passes as rational thought in Irving. These insights are part of a false narrative, that national’s secret, February 2023 change was minor, just clarifying a longstanding policy.
Stupidthink #1: Just read the dictionary
In a robust social-media conversation on the secret revision, a national source shared the Merriman-Webster Dictionary and Dictionary.com definitions for “overnight”:
National’s thinking: If a policy is vague, look up its words in a commodity dictionary.
Paraphrase: “You dummies, why didn’t you check the dictionary?”
Let’s check those definitions: Dictionary.com‘s definition of “overnight” includes an adjective form: “done, made, occurring, or continuing during the night”. This definition does not convey a one-night limit. With several definitions that generally do not convey a one-night limit, Merriam-Webster‘s definition also does not clarify.
What this source conveyed, in a backhanded way, is national knew its policy was too vague to connote a one-night limit. In national’s culture, its appears to see its own quality problems as invitations to concoct arbitrary policy.
Stupidthink #2: It’s always been this way
A national-organization source conveyed that national believes the rule was always one-night campouts. The source backed that up by sharing an excerpt from the 1991 Guide to Safe Scouting:
Excerpt from the 1991 Guide to Safe Scouting.
This only affirms that national’s ambiguous language is a decades-old feature, not a bug.
If “overnight” was ever meant to be a single-night limit, that clarity exists only in the fever dream of some 1990s-era bureaucrat. Since this bureaucrat did not document his dream, we do not know his intent. Therefore, this 1991 excerpt does not provide useful guidance.
Stupidthink #3: BALOO conveys a single-night limit
Per a national source, the single-night limit “is reinforced by required BALOO training”. That is false. Nowhere in the BALOO training material is a single-night limit conveyed. While forms of “overnight” are used, they come across in the same way as the pre-February 2023 Guide to Safe Scouting.
The source further reinforced the fake news by sharing that BALOO “uses example of an overnight activity in the training”. While that is true, it is a mere case study in a training program. Case studies are not rules.
Stupidthink #4: National uses “overnight” consistently
Another national source conveyed that national consistently uses “overnight” to mean one night. Yet more fake news!
A trivial inspection of authoritative national documents reveals uses of “overnight” in ways that do not convey a one-night event:
Accompanying the secret revision to the Guide to Safe Scouting was a secret revision to the Language of Scouting. As of February 21, 2023, its definition for “Webelos Scout overnighter” was “[a] one- or two-night campout”. A key national document legitimized an allegedly disallowed form of Cub Scout camping? That document was secretly changed no later than March 7, 2023 to read “[a] one night campout”. Why “secret”? Despite this revision, the document’s revision date, at its top, remains “February 2020”. Someone was covering tracks!
Tenderfoot rank requirement 1.a.: “Present yourself to your leader, prepared for an overnight camping trip.” If the Scout prepared for the troop’s multi-night campout, this requirement cannot satisfied?
Scouting’s Barriers to Abuse: “All adults staying overnight in connection with a Scouting activity must be currently registered as an adult volunteer or an adult program participant.” Wait, so adults staying two or more nights don’t need to be registered?
Guide to Safe Scouting, Camping section: “Local council approval is needed for unit-coordinated overnight camping activities involving other units not chartered by the same organization.” Got it, so I can evade this requirement if I plan a two-night campout? Even more rich: This is the same document that BSA secretly revised in February 2023 to add “single” to the Cub Scout part! The very document that was revised is incoherent about the meaning of “overnight”!
The base never bought it
Fortunately for Scouting, few packs denied adventure to their Cub Scouts: The vast majority provided multi-night adventures before February 2023. My evidence comes from polls in some Facebook groups right after the February 2023 change. They got a huge response:
Survey in huge Cub Scout volunteer social-media groups affirming overwhelming delivery of multi-night, pack-organized campouts.
We were all open about it, not because we were flouting anything, but because multi-night campouts were not prohibited. If you told my council’s Cub Scout leaders that national limited Cub Scouts to one-night campouts, you would have been laughed out of the room.
BALOO training is essential training on Cub Scout pack camping. At least one leader present on a Cub Scout pack-organized campout must have completed that training. In my council, our BALOO trainers did not teach a one-night restriction. In fact, when I took BALOO training, we did a planning exercise for a two-night campout! And that is appropriate as, per above, the BALOO training materials do not convey a single-night limit.
If any council should have been aware of this one-night rule, it’s my council!
Circle Ten is large and reasonably run. Council administrators are aware of and follow national’s rules.
The national office is in our geographic territory:
BSA’s national office is in Circle Ten Council’s territory (source).
The proximity lubricates relationships between council members and national employees and volunteers, many of whom are neighbors. It is common to see a national employees and volunteers at Circle Ten events.
It is also common to see professionals or volunteers move between my council and national positions. Our current Scout Executive came from national in 2017! Even better, he was a national Cub Scout division director! If a one-night limit was a rule, certainly my Scout Executive would have known.
Circle Ten Council has unparalleled proximity to and interplay with the national office. If national truly intended for Cub Scouts to be limited to one-night campouts, Circle Ten Council would have known. But we didn’t, and across the board, our Cub Scout packs openly practiced multi-night, pack-organized campouts! Why? Because there used to be no limit on camping nights!
Wait a second, some bought it
In the above chart, a minority of packs limited their campouts to one night.
Based on social-media discussions, some just preferred this. For example, if your pack is only 10 miles from a campground, a single-night campout can be convenient. That’s fine if it works for you!
But some packs are in councils that concocted a one-night limit. This is mere rulemongerism. Only reflecting local poor practices, it does not advance a case that national had a one-night rule.
Nobody knows why national did this
Why did national make this secret change? It may have been stupidthink. It may have been insurance. We don’t know!
The national organization is invited to explain itself publicly.
How national screwed the pooch
National screwed the pooch:
It never consulted the base before making this change.
It felt entitled to decimate a key program.
It capriciously enacted an arbitrary change.
It showed no remorse for its actions.
Its professionals and volunteers who have responsibility for or influence over this clammed up for six months.
Responsible or accountable parties from national stopped participating in social media, except for denying crisis by posting unrelated PR glurge.
It threatened volunteers, which leads me to the next section…
National threatens adult memberships merely for disagreeing
Imagine you’re an adult leader. You were just blindsided by a devastating announcement: BSA decimated most Cub Scout camping.
In social media, you engage in a robust but respectful discussion to understand what just happened and why.
In that conversation, someone connected with national posts dictionary definitions of “overnight”. (I commented on that above.) A volunteer recognizes the definition-sharer as being connected to national. Without outing this person, that participant provides helpful feedback (top comment is the volunteer’s feedback, bottom comment is the national-affiliated person’s reply):
Color commentary on the national person’s reply:
It starts with a false accusation that the volunteer is contradicting BSA policy. Um, no? There is no policy forbidding disagreement.
Next is fake news, that the one-night limit is “not new policy”. As per above, the one-night rule was created in February 2023. Before then, there was no limit on nights of camping.
Next is an absurd allegation, that Cub Scouts will be harmed by a second night of family camping. National has yet to substantiate why it believes this. Evidence-free assertions do not become rational simply because the person making the assertion wears gold epaulets.
Finally, a threat to expel volunteers for disagreeing with the national organization. This is the reply’s last two sentences. It’s damning commentary on national’s hubris.
A national-affiliated person mentions the Scouter Code of Conduct in this context for one reason: To threaten expulsion of a volunteer.
Disagree with a national-organization epic screwup? Face expulsion!
What the hell is wrong with our national organization?
It’s hard to set aside national’s blunder. It’s mind-bogglingly stupid for an adventure-focused organization to decimate its largest adventure program. It’s even stupider to do it secretly!
Then national amplified its blunder by hurling threat grenades at volunteers, clamming up, seeking no feedback, and not apologizing.
None of this is acceptable performance.
Yes, national finally relented. After stonewalling for half a year, a new, two-night limit on pack-organized camping starts September 1, 2023.
National is so chickenshit, the news had to first be leaked through local representatives. A few weeks after the leaks began, national finally bothered to communicate over an official channel. That mere peasants–err, I mean parents and volunteers–had to first find out via leaks conveys how unimportant our national organization thinks we are.
While it’s great that two nights of camping are now allowed, it’s just a correction of an epic screw up.
At the top, I wrote “partly backed off”. Remember that before February 2023, BSA did not limit camping nights for Cub Scout packs. The new rule bans three-night pack-organized campouts, which makes me sad. I led my old pack on phenomenal three-night adventures to Enchanted Rock/Fredericksburg, Caprock Canyon, and San Antonio. These were safe and reasonable, provided exceptional adventures, and created lifetime memories. We pulled them off without a hitch. Now they are banned.
How do we fix this?
National corrected itself, so move on? Not if you value Scouting!
If we allow the national organization to keep sweeping its blunders this under the rug, we are not holding it accountable. Without accountability, national will keep attacking Scouting!
National has a cloistered culture. Fed by a defective career-advancement system that mainly rewards those most loyal to its moribund bureaucracy, national views itself as its main customer. This is evidenced by its resistance to feedback and endemic throwback-reactionary culture.
We can’t “forgive and forget”. We can’t work within a system designed to protect failure. Either is simply enabling national’s malfeasance.
The current national organization must improve. If it’s willing to, great, we can keep it around. If not, we need to replace it.
Hopefully the national organization will be open about its deficiencies and create a plan to correct them. As long as its executing on this plan, we can work with it. Until then, it’s crucial to hold the national organization publicly accountable for its cultural rot.
Appendix: A note about those who didn’t read “overnight” onerously
As mentioned earlier, BSA has a cultural problem with obsessions over rules. This devalues important rules, makes navigating gray areas onerous, and encourages us to grab complexity from the jaws of simplicity. This makes BSA less safe, and it distracts us from program excellence.
It is healthy to prefer simplicity! That is a longstanding truism:
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” -Leonardo da Vinci
“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” -Dr. Seuss
“Less is more.” -Mies van der Rohe
“Brevity is the soul of wit.” -Shakespeare
This doesn’t mean the simplest answer is always right. But seeking simplicity remains wise and rational.
Part of seeking simplicity is reducing the number of rules we face. This is rational: The more you are regulated, the more of your time is diverted from productive activity. Volunteers want to deliver great programs. Less energy diverted to compliance is more energy to do what we’re here for.
When we navigated the bare word “overnight” in a way that didn’t limit to a one-night event, we eliminated a rule while upholding contextually valid definitions of “overnight”. No pretzeled logic involved! One less rule, more flexibility to deliver great adventures. Win/win!
While I’ve waxed philosophically, this has some precedent in contract law.
Every adult leader is contractually obligated to follow the Guide to Safe Scouting; it’s part of what an adult leader agrees to when signing an adult leader application.
Under the doctrine of contra proferentem, ambiguity in contracts are resolved against the interests of the party who drafted the language. BSA’s use of “overnight” was ambiguous. Through its actions, the national organization demonstrated it believed its interest is aligned with “overnight” conveying a one-night limit. Had this issue been litigated, the contra proferentem doctrine may have harmed BSA’s case.
BSA’s national office just restructured. The changes were described as “strategic reassignments” to address “immediate and long-term needs”.
These changes send two messages:
BSA is betting the farm on raw revenue production and raw asset protection.
The least important concerns are now the unit program–the very thing that makes BSA distinct–and getting new members. I’ll explain more later, but throwing marketing to the bottom is why I wrote “raw revenue production”. This reveals that the revenue-production focus is on measures other than membership growth.
By betting the farm on bureaucrats and casting to the bottom what makes us distinct, BSA signals that its national office may be in a death spiral.
⬇️⬇️Program (Cub Scouting, Scouts BSA, Exploring, program management)
⬇️⬇️Marketing and Communications
⬇️Development (fundraising, alumni, foundation)
⬇️Administration (HR, Scouting U, travel/meeting management, IT, NSC facilities, marcom)
⬇️Youth Development (high adventure, outdoor program)
⬇️Operations (council support, territories)
Winners and losers in the national office’s reorganization. Number of down arrows indicates degree of demotion.
BSA’s old and new models
In the prior organizational model, all the positions on rung 2 were equal, all reporting to the CEO:
BSA org chart before May 2023
Some clarification: CDO is Chief Development Officer. That person leads fundraising. NST is National Service Territory. The two NST VPs nominally divided up duties of BSA’s 16 territories, and they had some other duties:
NST 9-16’s VP also had unit-level program–Cub Scouts, Scouts BSA, Exploring–and Program Management.
NST 1-8’s VP also had Council Services.
The new model, where most areas were demoted one or two rungs:
BSA org chart as of late May 2023. Salaries from 2021 Form 990 provided when available.
In the new model, you have an Office of the CEO, which includes the CEO and two direct reports. Everyone else on the old org chart got knocked down to third and fourth rungs. Per BSA’s internal announcement, the third rung reports not to an individual but to this new Office of the CEO.
NOTE: From here on, I use “program” to refer to unit-level program. It is in a group named “Program”. While there are other programs run out of national, like high adventure and camping, they roll up into differently named groups.
Winners list
First, let’s review the winners.
Legal/Risk Management and Finance won: they stayed on their same rungs while all their peers dropped to lower rungs. These areas each get half the CEO’s attention, far improved from an eighth. Also, a humiliating message was sent to five of their former peers: you now report to us two.
BSA is now defined by two bureaucratic functions. Not program. Not growth. But bureaucracy. Now, everything about the national office is filtered through bureaucratic lenses of income and risk.
Does it cause more Scout Shop sales? Does it make insurance more expensive? Does it make current members pay more? Would someone sue us? Does it scrape money together for its money-losing, Scouting-themed amusement park’s The Summit’s enormous debt? The new model invites questions like these to lead every last action of the national office.
Youth Protection also “won” but only through a title change. It used to be led an “officer” reporting to the Executive VP (EVP) over legal and risk. Now reporting to the Office of the CEO (more on that in the next section), it’s a Senior VP. It’s still on rung 3, and my guess is the legal/risk EVP will be assigned to supervise this function. This small change is part of how BSA is honoring a provision of the bankruptcy settlement.
Losers list
All other concerns are losers. Instead of reporting to the CEO, four concerns were demoted to the third rung, now reporting to the Office of the CEO along with the Youth Protection SVP.
Yes, that is correct, they report to an office, not to a person! But let’s be real: The point of this change is to keep these five out of the CEO’s hair. All but the Youth Protection SVP are now reporting to a former peer, to the CFO or to the EVP over legal/risk. (Since the YP SVP will certainly report to the legal/risk EVP, that’s no change in reporting for that role.)
While these five areas are losers in the reorganization, their executive leads got a minor win. A person reporting to a committee gains less accountability and more power over a kingdom. Given the national office’s rotted culture, I have fox/henhouse concerns.
Two concerns were double-demoted, from rung two to rung four:
Marketing and Communications
Program
Additionally, marcom’s lead is now reduced to a VP instead of an EVP. This is not a problem with the person. The former EVP over this concern retired, and a director was promoted to a VP. It remains that both a huge demotion and a title reduction happened to the role of marcom’s lead.
I am surprised program and marcom were deemed that unimportant. Isn’t our program what distinguishes us from other organizations? Isn’t marketing crucial to growing our program?
Strangely, despite being double-demoted, the lead of program got a title increase. This is vague messaging. The title was formerly VP. It’s now Senior VP.
Now here’s a detail that muddies things. The fourth-rung people also have a dotted-line report to the Office of the CEO. I don’t show that on the chart because all it likely means is the program and marcom leads will occasionally prepare reports for the CEO, EVP legal/risk, and CFO, and they will occasionally get to ask questions. It doesn’t change the unambiguous language in BSA’s internal announcement: these two still directly report to third-rung people. Program and marcom used to nominally get 1/8 of the CEO’s focus. Now they get scraps.
Let me pull together some things above to reemphasize a key point. We have two groups that own concerns that define BSA and most directly cause us to grow. Those groups suffered severe, collective blows:
Dropped two rungs.
Title reduction for the marcom lead role.
Report into areas that now have less accountability.
Report into areas that now have less CEO attention.
Altogether, this is a devastating slap to unit-program and marcom.
To make the effect of the double demotions clear, here’s some other national-office roles on the same rung as the VPs of marcom and program:
Director of Council Services
Senior Document Control Specialist
Director of Tax Accounting
Do you think any of these are as crucial to BSA as program and growth?
Opportunities to correct cultural rot
I want to go into more detail on a few areas: Program, legal/risk management, and development. These areas are responsible for a great deal of the misperformance that, until now, I have characterized as general problems with the national office.
Areas with significant and publicly visible cultural rot are red.
That said, I stand by my general characterization of the national office. It is no better than its premier products. Its premier products are the program itself and the ways it equips volunteer leaders. The development office also has a highly visible function. All these have deep rot.
Program’s rot
First, remember that the old model had two VP roles that split National Service Territories. These roles now have more distinct functions.
One of these VPs got demoted only one rung but got a title boost to Executive VP. I expect that person took on the six territory directors from the other NST VP. The person losing the territory directors got demoted two rungs, is now focused on program, and got a weaker title improvement, from VP to Senior VP.
Now we have a SVP who can focus more on program. This could be a good thing but only if that SVP is willing to expect better from his staff and volunteers.
Here’s the deal: the program SVP owns a national-office function that is overrun with anti-intellectualism and throwback-reactionary culture. That VP’s staff and volunteer committees are behind the epic blunder of the specious coed ban. The Order of the Arrow (OA), which has endemic brownface cosplay, reports into that VP. (To be charitable, I am aware of other dark forces, outside of the SVP Program’s area, that are also preventing OA from improving.)
Also, the SVP Program’s area sat on their hands while Legal/Risk Management eviscerated Cub Scout camping. I can understand wanting to avoid airing dirty laundry, but this staff has been ineffective, for months ignoring legions of bewildered unit leaders who were slammed by the change.
Legal/risk’s rot
And that leads me to Legal/Risk Management. That staff is also associated with cultural rot.
It has a track record of arbitrary and capricious decision-making. By declining to share rationales for the rules it creates, it shows arrogance and declines to equip volunteers for gray areas.
As an example, its recent, ham-fisted evisceration of Cub Scout camping was done in secret. This area has yet to provide a rational justification for this change. This is just par for the course. Transparency and public accountability are crucial concerns of effective groups, and these are clearly not priorities for legal/risk.
This area also delivers poor documentation. It is a large contributor to the national office’s bloated corpus of confusing and contradictory volunteer-facing documents. Their documents are so bad, they cause endless, repetitive questions and confusion across the volunteer landscape.
Development’s rot
Finally, we have Development, with its National Eagle Scout Association, a moribund, do-nothing, bloated clown show. In addition to doing next to nothing, NESA will soon celebrate its eleventh year of hustling families over an expensive who’s who-style yearbook, damaging the brand for little revenue.
Will this help clear the rot?
Legal/Risk’s org-chart promotion conveys how important the CEO believes its function is. I hope that leader uses this as justification to improve performance in its public-facing functions.
The Program’s leader’s title promotion and double-demotion sends mixed messages. I hope this area sees this as an opportunity to double down on improvements and make the case to rise back up.
Other than being demoted with three peers, Development’s standing did not change. No title or role changes were apparent. Development can reclaim the high ground by canceling NESA and folding its brand into an affinity group within BSA Alumni.
Summary
BSA’s dramatic organizational changes invite questions about the national office’s viability.
National would be wise to ditch its history of arrogance and instead be transparent: tell us what motivated this. Why did you anoint selected bureaucratic functions over everything else? Why did you cast to the basement matters related to our core distinction and our growth? What challenge does all this speak to?
Disclaimer, due to national’s extreme secrecy
Part of national’s cultural rot is arrogance: When you wear the gold epaulets, of course your wisdom is so supreme, you have no need to explain yourself to peasants. Hence, transparency must be avoided. (To be clear, many of our national volunteers are great and do not have this ethos. But a bad apple spoils the bunch, and national has way too many rotted apples.)
Among national’s most guarded secrets are the composition and function of its volunteer committees. For example, search Google for “National Cub Scouting Committee”. You’ll get little. All you can do is piece together a loose narrative from information fragments.
It is possible that an interpretation of BSA’s organizational changes could shift if expectations of national’s secret committees recently changed. National is invited to be transparent about its secret committees!
All this notwithstanding, my insider contacts convey that national is mainly staff driven. Most committees are toothless or passive. Not strongly factoring in committees may be the right interpretation.
