carebear3895

Agreed, but I think they are vital for retention purposes. Anybody can plan a trip with their buddies, the awards and uniforming help make Venturing attractive

One of CSE Surbaughs' big pushes during his tenure was to basically stop young DE's from completely hating their jobs/life and leaving the profession by the dozens. He's been coming up with a few new initiatives to help out the professional folks, I believe this is one of them. The DA position is simply to relieve some of the stress faced by DE's, while helping them achieve the overall goals of the job.

Venture Crews are simply unsustainable. The trend I saw in my old council was that a lot of crews started up to go on a high adventure, but then crashed and burned after. I think the lack of council/national programing and "individuality" is killing it. Getting rid of the Venture promise, sign, and salute in favor of the BSA standard ones was the wrong move. The current award are seen as comical by current venturers. I think the old system of the brone/gold/silver was much better, just needed a little tweaking. TBH, the most successful crews were the ones the had the most Gung-Ho women in them. Scoutreach is good in theory, but oh my lord is it ever abused by Professionals for membership numbers. It's embarrassing

Learning for life kids are not called "Scouts". Like Exploring, they are considered "participants". L4L is such an oddball program. You'll find close to nothing about it on scouting.org, and probably have never seen a "classroom" (their equivalent of a troop, crew, etc.), but as you said, makes up quite a chunk of BSA membership. I would keep in mind that exploring is technically a program of Learning for life and thus that is reflected in membership.

Venturing is easily the most underutilized asset of the BSA. It's comical how forgotten is seems by national. In my honest opinion, I wish they would drop all this STEM/Learning for Life nonsense and refocus all those efforts on building up Venturing.

How did you come across all that information if you don't mind me asking? No one in my council, not even the professional staff, have received anything like that

Get your SPL a stetson.