Scouting Maverick: Scout Better

Without a bold vision, BSA is doomed within a decade. With Move Forward: Save Scouting, we can be relevant to society, improve programming, ditch unsound practices, and streamline the experience.

Move Forward: Save Scouting

by Aren Cambre

This is a plan for saving BSA.

BSA faces a choice: change or die. Without rapid changes, BSA will keep shrinking:

As BSA rides the edge of insolvency, it’s hard to see how it will last even 10 more years.

If we want another 100 years, BSA must become what youth and families want. This means pivots to relevance, to adventure, and to efficiency.

Apologies for the BSA organization won’t save the Scouting movement. Bold, rapid change will. Rapid will look differently for each proposal. For some, change can happen immediately, such as eliminating the SA name or abolishing the commissioned-bureaucrat system. For others, rapid may mean an immediate signal of change with interim steps, followed by a fast-paced rollout schedule.

Goal 1: Improve program structure & advancement

Legend:
✅ = mission accomplished
🚨 = obstructed
🚧 = in progress
😴 = no action yet
🐄 = sacred cow (hear the whiners?)
❓ = may need reformulation

By modernizing program design, BSA reduces abuse risk, enhances adventure at all ages, improves advancement relevance, unleashes genuine leadership opportunity, and creates new opportunities for recruitment and retention.

Revise age cohorts

😴 Realign BSA programs around societal norms.1 Optimize programming for each cohort.

  • Cubs, grades K-2: Continue the current Cub Scout program with revisions to increase outdoor adventure.
  • Falcons, grades 3-5: A junior-troop program oriented around outdoor adventure. It uses a simplified patrol method. Some responsibility placed on youth.
  • 🐄 Scouts2, grades 6-8: Reflecting Scouts BSA’s strength as a middle-school program, youth enjoy a safer program and appropriate peer relationships. Instead of being babysat by high schoolers, middle schoolers finally own their own program. Scoutcraft is the program emphasis.
  • 🐄 Venturing, grades 9-12: No longer infantilized in a middle-school program, high schoolers focus on peer interactions, genuine leadership, and age-appropriate activities.
  • Rovers, post-grade-12 through age 25: Treat young adults like adults! They can form their own adventures with the full benefit of the Scouting infrastructure. (They may also be adult leaders in other programs.)

Strengthen terminal ranks

Each programs celebrates a terminal rank: Wolf, Arrow of Light, First Class, Eagle, and Summit. All ranks will be re-evaluated with a goal distinguishing recipients from peers and being a worthy terminal rank for a program. Also:

Program enhancements

  • 😴🐄 Abolish youth bureaucracy, restore the patrol method. Our troops have devolved into bloated administrative simulations, thick with fake-leadership roles that exist mainly to hand out patches. This is a uniquely American disease; peer Scouting movements worldwide have maintained Baden-Powell’s vision without our administrative bloat. Return to the patrol method, where the only youth role that matters is the Patrol Leader, who is directly mentored by the Scoutmaster. Bureaucracy is not leadership!
  • 😴 Create Guides as a new position of responsibility. As an option for interested youth6, a Guide helps younger programs7 in a non-supervisory manner.
  • 😴 Eliminate redundant activities. Scouting must be distinct from ordinary life experiences. For example, delete all required-for-rank requirements that duplicate what most youth routinely do in schools, families, or church.8
  • 😴 Advancement prescribes adventure. Instead of being a distraction, advancement aligns with adventure. Active participation in a unit’s adventure program results in completing most advancement.
  • 😴 Improved merit-badge system. Instead of being tailored to the ability of sixth-grade Scouts, merit badges will be split between Scouts and Venturing. Generally:
    • 🐄 Middle-school merit badges: Scoutcraft-oriented merit badges will be assigned to Scouts, revised to be markers on the trail to First Class. They replace the random, grab-bag, unorganized mess of rank requirements in the trail to First Class. Middle-schoolers will receive recognition more frequently, as they achieve milestones on their path to First Class.
    • 🐄 High-school merit badges: Generally, vocation-exploration or adventure-centric merit badges will be assigned to Venturing, revised to assure they are appropriate accomplishments for high schoolers. Also, Venturing’s Ranger Award‘s “challenging electives” will simply reference adventure-centric merit badges.
    • 🐄 Remaining merit badges: The rest will be aligned with the program whose advancement or mission is most relevant to the badge’s topic.
  • 😴🐄 Foster leadership and ownership culture among adult leaders. Support leadership culture and creativity at the unit level. Discourage anti-leadership distractions, like administrative bloat, obedience-cult mindsets, and unit bylaws.

Goal 2: Enhance program delivery

Structural adjustments

  • 😴 Shift to section/group model. Reduce administrative burdens and improve cultural continuity among associated units, transitioning them to sections of a group. Sections share adult leaders and one group committee. Multiple sections of the same program may be used by one group. For example, one group could have multiple troops.
  • Digitalize everything. 🚧 First, we digitize and 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 print-if-needed capability. A component is eliminating almost all use of PDFs.
  • 😴🐄 Optimize supplemental youth training. Freed of teaching how to navigate a youth bureaucracy, NYLT refocuses on advanced middle-school topics, such as mastery of the patrol method and beginning leadership concepts. NAYLE refocuses on advanced high-school training, focusing on supporting high-school-level leadership development. IOLS opens to Venturers and Rovers, for those who did not earn First Class. Order of the Arrow’s leadership training is transitioned to Venturing, either reimagined to complement NAYLE or part of a multi-stage progression of training opportunities.
  • 😴🐄 Dismantle the chartered-organization model. All units become council operations. Affiliation agreements with community organizations provide meeting space and storage without transferring liability and responsibility.
  • 😴🐄 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 absorbed by or merged with adjacent councils. This will be expedited by 🐄 phasing out council bureaucracy-preservation fees (described more below).

Operational improvements

  • 😴 Frictionless licensing of intellectual property. National uses trademark enforcement to moat off a lucrative monopoly, forcing units to buy overpriced gear or jump through endless bureaucratic hoops just to print a local patrol t-shirt. Extend to councils and units the authority to extend a standardized, single-use sub-license to their local community vendors (printers, patch makers, etc.). Let units freely use the brand they are actively keeping alive.
  • 😴🐄 Reboot commissioner service. Liberated from today’s make-work regime, commissioners’ sole focus becomes enabling unit-level adventure. Any bureaucratic work is limited to removing barriers to adventure.
  • 😴🐄 Embrace third-place ethic for all non-unit roles. All non-unit volunteers and professionals must provide tangible value to the base. Eliminate elitist symbols 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 Reading-Ease score of at least 70.
  • 😴 Repeal pointless bloat. If it adds burdens or removes adventure, and lacks a benefit that overwhelms its cost, 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 nights.

Goal 3: Remove barriers and expand inclusion

  • ✅ Abolish coed ban. Local units may choose coed vs. single-gender. (Mission accomplished: Abolished as of December 15, 2025.)
  • 😴🐄 Abolish gendered rules. Local units will manage all gender-related decisions in ways that are responsive to local norms.9
  • 😴🐄 Abolish the Declaration of Religious Principle. Meant as a magnanimous statement of inclusion, religious extremists flogged this into a ban on atheists and agnostics. Delegate all religious components of advancement to families and their churches.
  • 😴 Slash membership costs. Over three years, cut national annual membership fees by 50% and phase out all council bureaucracy-preservation fees.
  • 😴🐄 Rationalize uniforms. Improve affordability and quality through simplification of uniforms and insignia. Only produce or sell clothing or gear that is essential to coherent uniforming.10
  • 🚧 Shift to a culture of honoring any time in Scouting. Shift alumni focus from ranks-earned to celebrating any Scouting experiences. This is part of why NESA must be abolished (more below).
  • 🚨 Cancel SA (Scouting America) brand. SA means sexual assault. Instead, use the BSA initialism for the corporate brand, a la YMCA and NAACP.

Goal 4: Eliminate waste and inefficiency

Leave behind parts without value

  • 🚨🐄 Sunset Order of the Arrow. Revitalized high-school and young adult programming makes OA’s new purpose obsolete. 🐄 Transfer camp service to a new extra that has no membership gates. 🐄 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.
  • 🚨🐄 Terminate all redface minstrel shows. Indigenous culture will no longer be a core program element of any program or extension. This applies to all Scouting activities, including council-run redface-cosplay activities, like the Tribe of Mic-O-Say. People with a genuine interest in tribal culture should consult directly with tribes.
  • 😴🐄 Abolish the National Eagle Scout Association. Its unrepentant, aggressive scams are unacceptable. Eagle Scouts are among several affinity groups in the BSA Alumni Association.
  • 😴🐄 Abolish the commissioned-bureaucrat system. Representing institutional staff capture, the system prioritizes bureaucratic bloat and internal loyalty over effective leadership. All professional roles, at every level of BSA, must only have competence-based hiring and role-specific training. Professionals exist solely to serve the base and remove barriers for volunteers, not to manage their own career advancement at the expense of local units.
  • ❓🐄 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 to improve programs for grades 6-8, grades 9-12, and ages 1811-25. If it can provide value, a new NSBC might be reconstituted after the interim committee’s job is done.(2025-11-21: While the NSBC’s support of the coed ban’s repeal is good, this committee remains untrustworthy. It has declined to disavow its past toxic, public positions, and it bungled communications on the coed-ban end. Until we see repentance, abolishing this committee is the right path forward.)

Bureaucratic streamlining

  • 😴 Terminate 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 half of national-level marketing. Stop funding vanity PR and obsolete national campaigns. Redirect remaining funds toward hyper-targeted, digital lead generation. The sole metric of success must be funneling families directly to units.
  • 😴🐄 End abuse of pilot programs. BSA weaponizes pilots to stall, concoct make-work for bureaucrats, cover for incompetence, and obscure nefarious goals. Also, pilots may lack much value for the foreseeable future as, thanks to over 75 years of program neglect, BSA will spend years just trying to catch up. When we’re just adjusting programs to follow the lead of others who have already learned the lessons, we can avoid many pilots. When pilots are absolutely necessary, they will be ruthlessly time-boxed and agile, ideally only 90 days, with transparency with success metrics and outcomes, followed by rapid pivots.
  • 😴 Abolish redundant roles. Eliminate all non-unit roles–volunteer or professional–that do not provide tangible value to the base.
  • 😴🐄 Create culture of accountability. Part of shifting to a culture of competence, rather than simply that of rewarding loyalty, means we must begin to have a sense of accountability for results. Major missteps of professionals or volunteers must begin to have consequences. Serial low performers must exit Scouting or finding different ways to serve the movement.

Financial & structural changes

  • 😴🐄 Sell or surrender Summit Bechtel Reserve. Losing $10 million to $20 million per year, drowning in $185 million of debt, in an obscure, remote location, SBR will never be fiscally sound or commercially viable. It’s just a tax on an increasingly fragile organization. We must sell or explore a managed surrender of the property.
  • 😴 Sell Irving headquarters. Transition to a virtual, distributed national organization. Encourage employees to distribute across the country.
  • 😴 Ground national employees and volunteers with the base. Overcome current culture of elitism and disconnection from the base. All national employees and volunteers must engage in at least 40 annual hours of direct, unit-level, non-lead12 service.
  • 😴 Reassess restricted funds. Collaborate with donors to optimize proceeds of restricted funds towards improvement and sustainability of the movement.
  • 😴🐄 Reorient national program committees. Mandate transparency and service to the base and elimination of vanity projects and make-work.
  • 😴🐄 Require representatives of the movement in boards of directors. To assure the movement is included in all levels of Scouting governance, unit-level adult volunteers, who are active in their units13, will hold at least a quarter of seats on the National Executive Board and on every council’s boards of directors.14 Two youth representatives will also sit on every board.
  • 😴 Streamline all processes. Minimize administrative burdens on members and units, starting with member registration and renewal and unit recharter.
  • 😴 Adopt monthly membership fees. Membership fees may be paid on a monthly basis, like utility bills. There must be no upcharges or convenience fees.
  • 😴 Prioritize information technology. Redirect resources freed by above reforms to IT to expedite development of modern, flexible, and agile systems.

Subscribe: Keep up to date

Move Forward: Save Scouting is an evolving initiative. As new insights emerge, updates will follow.

Want to stay informed? Subscribe!

Footnotes

  1. Allowances for early crossing-over to the next program need to be considered. This, for example, would enable fifth graders enough time in a troop to assure success at summer camp. ↩︎
  2. 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. ↩︎
  3. A Scout may progress through all ranks in as few as 19 months. Therefore, if a Cub Scout crosses over to a troop within 5 months of turning 10, that Scout can finish Eagle before turning 12. ↩︎
  4. Yes, it’s now named “Eagle”, not “Eagle Scout”. ↩︎
  5. This is how the UK Scouting Association’s King’s Scout award works. ↩︎
  6. The Guide role must never be construed as a workaround for Scoutmasters to pull high schoolers back into the troop to babysit. Outside of episodic assignments of the Scoutmaster, guides do not supervise. Also, this role must never be required. This is simply one of many roles of responsibility available to Scouts. ↩︎
  7. 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. ↩︎
  8. If we eliminated redundant activities from all four Citizenship in ____ merit badges, we could consolidate into a single Citizenship merit badge. ↩︎
  9. One might argue that national should have the privilege of creating gendered rules essential to abuse prevention. However, I am unclear of any theoretical national rule that wouldn’t simply be restating a universal cultural norm. ↩︎
  10. For example, stop selling Scouts BSA olive pants. Instead, partner with retailers that are already producing pants that look nearly identical from 20 feet away. Also, stop competing REI, Academy, Walmart, et al on commodity camping gear. ↩︎
  11. This is meant to start at high-school graduation. ↩︎
  12. “Non-lead” means any unit role except for the key three. Exceptions can be granted where the person had a unit-level key-3 role before accepting a national appointment or where there is no other viable candidate for the role. ↩︎
  13. This should mean at least 40 hours invested in unit-level activities within the past year. ↩︎
  14. At least 10% of this class must have never previously been registered in any role out outside the unit level. ↩︎