Move Forward: Save Scouting

This is a plan for saving BSA.

BSA keeps shrinking, and it may have zero members by 2034:

BSA faces a choice: change or die. Apologies for the organization won’t save the movement. Bold, rapid change will.

To grow, BSA must be what youth and families want. This means pivots to relevance, adventure, efficiency, and morality.

Contents

Goal 1: Improve program structure & advancement

In overcoming an obsolete program design, BSA reduces abuse risks, recommits to adventure, improves advancement, unleashes genuine leadership opportunity, and creates new opportunities for recruitment and retention.

Revise age cohorts

Align BSA programs with rational age cohorts that follow societal norms. Optimize programming for each cohort.

Cubs, grades K-2: Mostly continue the current Cub Scout program, revised to beef up adventure.
Falcons, grades 3-5: Infantilization is over. Freed from a program that accommodates kindergartners, these youth enjoy a junior troop program that delivers age-appropriate adventure. Falcons uses a simplified patrol method with some responsibility placed on youth.
Scouts¹, grades 6-8: Scouts BSA is a middle-school program. With a new focus on this age cohort, Scouts master the patrol method and Scoutcraft while enjoying improved program safety and appropriate peer relationships.
Venturing, grades 9-12: Instead of being infantilized as babysitters in a middle-school program, high schoolers receive the full benefit of Venturing program with a renewed focus on peer interactions, leadership, and age-appropriate activities.
Rovers, post-grade-12 through age 25: Treat young adults like adults, allowing them to form their own adventures with the full benefit of the Scouting infrastructure. (They may also be adult leaders in other programs.)

Strengthen terminal ranks

Wolf, Arrow of Light, First Class, Eagle, and Summit are now terminal ranks. All should be re-evaluated with a goal of the rank distinguishing its recipients from peers. Also:

The First Class rank recovers Baden-Powell’s original vision, a terminal rank worthy of distinction.
The Eagle Scout rank will, for the first time in BSA’s history, signify leadership ability and mastery of high-school-level life skills.
The Summit rank will be reimagined as a young adult award in the Rovers program.²

Program enhancements

Create Guides as a new position of responsibility. Older youth in a Guide role build up youth in younger programs³, in a servant-leader manner.
Eliminate redundant activities. Scouting must be distinct from routine life experiences. For example, remove academic rank requirements that duplicate schooling.⁴
Advancement prescribes adventure. Repackaged advancement becomes a recipe for a robust adventure program. Active participation results in completing most advancement.
Foster leadership and ownership culture among adult leaders. Support creativity at the unit level while discouraging useless bloat.

Goal 2: Enhance program delivery

Structural adjustments

Shift to section model. Units with shared interests may become sections of a group, sharing adult leaders and one group committee.
Digitalize everything. First, we throw everything online: handbooks, merit-badge pamphlets, adult leader guides, all of it. Stop producing paper products. Next we digitalize, making our information corpus friendly for digital natives, with a first step of winding down use of PDFs.
Optimize supplemental youth training. NYLT transitions to advanced middle-school training, focusing on mastery of the patrol method and beginning leadership concepts. NAYLE transitions to advanced high-school training, focusing on supporting high-school-level leadership development. IOLS opens to Venturers and Rovers, recommended for those who did not earn First Class.
Abolish the chartered-organization model. Units become council operations. Affiliation agreements with community organizations provide meeting space and storage.
Improve council quality. Only 15% of youth are in a healthy council. Unhealthy councils with a critical mass should be supported in improvement, the rest consolidated to create critical mass.

Operational improvements

Freely license intellectual property. Units and councils and their commercial partners may freely use BSA intellectual property in support of any authorized Scouting activity.
Reboot commissioner service. Liberated from the make-work regime, commissioners’ sole focus is enabling unit-level adventure.
Embrace third-place ethic for all non-unit roles. All non-unit roles–professional and volunteer–must provide tangible value to the base. Eliminate symbols of elitism associated with non-unit roles, such as gold epaulets or crests.
Improve the “Barriers to Abuse” (B2A). Streamline to focus exclusively on abuse prevention, removing complexity. This must become BSA’s highest-quality document, an example for the rest of the corpus.
Simplify documentation and rules. Eliminate duplication, complexity, and bloat. Target a Flesch–Kincaid readability score of at least 70.
Repeal pointless bloat. If it adds burdens or removes adventure, and lacks a benefit of much more value, delete it! For example, repeal NCS rules for short-term council camp programs (e.g., camporees), repeal the September 2024 shooting-sports program changes, and repeal 2023’s arbitrary limit on pack-oriented Cub Scout camping.

Goal 3: Remove barriers and expand inclusion

Abolish coed ban. Local units may choose coed vs. single-gender.
Abolish gendered rules. Local units will manage all gender-related decisions. (Exception: When essential to abuse prevention.)
Abolish the Declaration of Religious Principle. Remove bans on atheists and agnostics, delegating religious components to families and churches.
Slash membership costs. Cut national annual membership fees by 50% over three years. Phase out all council membership fees over five years.
Rationalize uniforms. Improve affordability, quality, and simplification of uniforms and insignia.
Shift to a culture of honoring any time in Scouting. Shift focus from earned ranks to overall Scouting experiences.
Cancel SA (Scouting America) DBA. SA means sexual assault. Instead use the BSA initialism for the corporate brand, a la YMCA.

Goal 4: Eliminate waste and inefficiency

Leave behind parts without value

Sunset Order of the Arrow. Revitalizing high-school and young adult programming makes OA’s new purpose obsolete. Transfer camp service to open-access opportunities. OA’s training and its council, territory, and national programs become Venturing activities. OA’s youth officers will find new homes in Venturing Officers Associations or be first-movers for Rovers.
Abolish the National Eagle Scout Association. Its unrepentant, aggressive scams are unacceptable. Eagle Scouts become nothing more than one of many affinity groups in the BSA Alumni Association.
Abolish the commissioned-professional system. It prioritizes bureaucratic bloat and internal loyalty over effective leadership. All roles will be ungated and will have performance-based hiring and role-specific training.
Abolish the National Scouts BSA Committee. This perfidious committee has harmed the movement and repeatedly squandered trust. Replacing it is a one-year, interim committee that guides BSA towards revised programs for grades 6-8 and 9-12 and ages 18-25. The NSBC might be reconstituted after the interim committee’s job is done.

Bureaucratic streamlining

Audit runaway bureaucratic processes. Some parts of BSA are self-perpetuating bureaucracy, disconnected from creating value or serving the base. Selected examples include the bureaucracies behind the National Camp Standards, Guide to Advancement, and Guide to Safe Scouting. All runaway bureaucracies will be rebooted with durable mandate to serve the base. Their interim mission will be to delete all bloat and simplify what remains.
Eliminate most national-level marketing. Focus only on what supports unit-level recruiting or national PR.
End all pilot programs. Implement changes without pilots. No new pilot programs for at least five years.
Abolish redundant roles. Eliminate all non-unit roles–volunteer or professional–that do not provide tangible value to the base.
Create culture of accountability. Major missteps of professionals or volunteers must start to have consequences.

Financial & structural changes

Sell Summit Bechtel Reserve. Redirect saved funds to reducing youth-membership fees.
Sell Irving headquarters. Transition to a virtual, distributed national organization. Require all national employees and volunteers to engage in at least 40 hours of unit-level, non-lead⁵ service annually.
Reassess donor funds. Collaborate with donors to optimize restricted funds to movement growth.
Reorient national program committees. Mandate transparency and service to the base, elimination of make-work.
Require local representation on boards. Ensure unit-level⁶ leaders and youth are included on the National Executive Board and council boards.
Streamline all processes. Minimize administrative burdens on members and units, starting with member registration and renewal and unit recharter.
Prioritize information technology. Redirect resources freed by above reforms to IT to expedite development of modern, flexible, and agile systems.

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Footnotes

Due to a trademark settlement with GSUSA, it’s unclear if we can use this name for the middle-school program. However, if we abandon the SA trademark, Scouts BSA could make more sense as a program name. ↩︎
This is how the UK Scouting Association’s King’s Scout award works. ↩︎
This does not substitute for age-appropriate programming. For example, it would be improper for a Venturing crew’s main program be that all members are Guides for a troop. ↩︎
If we eliminated redundant activities from all four Citizenship in ____ merit badges, we could consolidate into a single Citizenship merit badge. ↩︎
“Non-lead” excludes unit key-3 roles. Exceptions can be granted where one had a unit-level key-3 role before accepting a national appointment or where there is no other candidate for the role. ↩︎
This needs to have a fairly strict eligibility standard, likely someone who has never previously participated outside the unit level. ↩︎