AwakeEnergyScouter

Fantastic! It's refreshing to hear a focus on improving and on the future. Not that we shouldn't look backwards to learn from the past, but at some point it's also time to face the future. I'm going to throw out this vision for BSA's future and see how it lands: remember that the wild, free outdoor adventure lies outside the organized, developed, and staffed. Owning land and properties can be good, but can never provide the experience of hoisting your pack up onto your back together with your patrol to head into the wilderness... or push your canoe out from shore to paddle miles downriver with them... or click your cross country ski boots into the bindings with hot chocolate and cinnamon rolls your patrol baked yourselves in your pack. As a side effect, these kinds of expeditions ask more of the scouts and cost less for their parents. @InquisitiveScouter shared an absolutely wonderful trip he just did with his scouts along those lines, and I've read others share how they arranged wilder, grander summer camps for less money than the BSA centrally run camps. The wilderness adventure method of scouting is very, very powerful, and it seems BSA as an organization has drifted away from that. IMHO that's a strategy mistake. Pull on the BSA leaders who are doing this stuff now and encourage others to do it, too!

This is my impression, too, but since I also don't know anyone involved with it or who has been in the program I don't really know if I'm right. I only know it exists because I read about it in the council program booklet. Without knowing if our existing low SES area program is any good, it's hard to say if it makes sense to extend it, possibly with some changes, or whether a pack/troop subsidy type program would be better.

That works well in affluent areas. However, Eagle91-A1 mentioned living in an area where either the median or average income was close to the poverty limit. "Sell more popcorn" is going to result in packs (and presumably troops) in bourgeoisie areas like mine and BetterWithCheddar's flourishing and those in economically disadvantaged areas struggling and/or folding. (People with $25-$40 to spend on pre-popped flavored popcorn aren't struggling, and you need a lot of them around you to raise a lot of money. I see this even neighborhood to neighborhood in our city - we sold well door to door right in our subdivision, other parents report they only sold a few tins in several hours in theirs.) Packs in high SES areas will have an easier time to sell popcorn, even though they also are best able to afford to pay out of pocket. This seems like the default outcome, unless we find a mechanism for supporting scouting in economically disadvantaged areas. How successful is Scoutreach? Do they ever go camping? I'm guessing not. Perhaps one possibility is to beef up Scoutreach to be closer to regular scouting. Or perhaps well to-do packs and troops can directly or indirectly help subsidize those in low SES areas. I'm asking the question to see if we can, by putting our heads together, find a better solution than council.

It sounds like, based on what @Eagle94-A1 and @fred8033 are saying here combined with what @BetterWithCheddar said earlier (and what he said sounds pretty familiar), that scouting with BSA is once again becoming more for the bourgeoisie than the working class or farmers. The factors leading to the cost increases aren't quick to change, due to organization culture if nothing else. So the question becomes what else can be done to make it possible for those struggling to meet for the new cost level to scout.

Are you saying that BSA made cub scouting so expensive to destroy cub scouting because national doesn't want honesty, character, citizenship or wholesome programs and activities taught or given to our children, @Ojoman? Surely not. This has been discussed in other threads already, and this kind of a post is just going to detail this thread from the question of why cub scouting has gotten more expensive. You clearly feel this way and under attack, but since not everyone does just stating all this as fact is inevitably going to result in those who don't connect with this at all to ask for proof and then we're instantly off topic for a long time. If we ever get back, that is.

My husband thought we'd get eaten by alligators when we went camping at a lake with them, so I don't think I'll be showing him this news story 😂

Our pack pays all adult fees and in-person trainings for this reason. (Out of popcorn money.)

What does being part of a conversation mean to you?

We're testing having all the den meetings on the same evening to both help with YPT requirements and to make it possible for leaders to try to run more than one den meeting at a time. I can let you know how that goes shortly. We have very uneven leadership coverage, so while it's a bit crazy, it's not as crazy as it might sound at first. Some dens have two leaders with active parents that could step in to supervise something ongoing, and one den has no one. So, the plan for the leaderless den is basically tag-teaming.

"ALBANY — It’s been five years since girls nationally could join the Boy Scouts — and troops across the Capital Region are booming. The Twin Rivers Council, which includes the entire Capital Region, has 700 more youths overall enrolled this year than last year. Girls are still very much in the minority, but that’s growing, too. “It is continuously on an uptick,” Twin Rivers Director of Membership Tory Carman said. “We started off with maybe 30 or 40 girls and we’re now over 400. About 13 percent of the membership overall is girls.” " https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/upstate-boy-scouts-troops-boom-five-years-girls-18301362.php

We had an Eagle do this very thing last Saturday. It was very sweet. And it reminds current scouts of that there is a wide lineage that they're part of. May I ask, what were the adults angry about? That's very unseemly of the adults, no matter what it was. Even the Russian ambassador gets only a cold shoulder. And especially to attack youth directly is not ok. The time it happened to us I was very grateful that my scout didn't put the underlying message together and was simply confused about why the man was so agitated.

Just read through this thread, and I'm surprised no one brought up the other (to me) obvious example - boating, especially sailboating. Maybe it's because I'm from a country whose name in a whole slew of languages means "the rowers", but I associate knots with boats and ships. You're not going to Velcro your boat to a pier or your sails. Only if you're in a very small personal craft with no sail that you pull up onto land when you arrive won't you need any knots. I got myself one of those reminder/practice cards for knots at the gift shop of the Vasa Museum (museum containing entire original warship from the 1600s) last summer. My troop wasn't a sea scout ship (although it was in my dad's time), we still had sailboats and used them. Knowing knots is, in that way, also a link to our past, at least for me. I would think that the long history of knots in scouting alone should make it similar for other old scouts too, even if they aren't from a place where boating is prominent. Change is inevitable, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't select some old ways to teach the next generation like others have already alluded to.

Thank you, @T2Eagle!

Absolutely! My bad, I should have thought of that. I can't delete the post, and I can no longer edit it. Perhaps a mod can help? It would be fine to just delete it.

Yes, we've had non-parent guardians accompany scouts. Formally, we track this through who's connected to the scout in Scoutbook. Several adults can be listed, and not just parents. Informally, we also make sure we know our scouts' adults, of course, but that's in addition to YPT.

You beat me to it, @InquisitiveScouter. Because of where trying to save face led, I feel honor-bound to ignore BSA's face completely at the only way to save the BSA's face and be loyal to my scouts that I have a duty of care towards, should I get wind of any CSA around me. The scout has to come first, and to heck with what people will say about BSA. When a child under your protection needs help you just do it! Nobody will say anything good about the BSA if we're a bunch of hypocrites. Values first. Be morally straight and keep your honor intact before you do any PR. This pattern is also not at all unique to BSA. There are so many examples of sexual abuse scandals in religious communities that have ripped organizations apart, and the bigger the face-saving effort the bigger the blowup has been. Even sports organizations have this very general pattern - my husband is suspicious of CSA in scouting, but also gymnastics. My scout's gymnastics studio hands a long anti-abuse policy checklist to new parents for a reason. That it's a pattern of wrecking the organization's reputation (a little hyperbolic, all of the organizations affected still are operating and are held in fairly high esteem, but in the context of sexual abuse scandals they all have a black mark) because of what you did to protect it has repeated so many times I have no doubt that this is a situation of if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. The only way to save the reputation is to ignore it completely when sexual abuse is discovered in an organization.

That's absolutely true, 100%. The question is, what is the next best thing that can actually be done? And if that can't be done, what's the next best thing to the next best thing? And so on. Nowhere in that tree of potential actions do I see "survivors stop pursuing legal claims against tortfeasors" popping up. The argument being given for it isn't to create justice for survivors, it's pitting current scouts against survivors, which is a framing of the situation that I don't think is fruitful. And then future-looking, like the mandatory reporting laws. That's a start, but undoubtedly sexual abuse still doesn't always get reported and prosecuted, especially when the survivors are men. So we should ask what else can we do? We can consider the data that it is actually typical for CSA victims to never tell anyone until decades later, perhaps we should consider much longer statutes of limitations. We can remind ourselves that men are also raped, including by women, and that male rape victims deserve 100% of the support we offer female rape victims. We can demand that police believe survivors and really do everything they can to effectively clear rape cases. No years of old rape kits languishing, and so on. But again, in no case is it helpful for survivors to stop what little legal action is still possible.

This isn't how cause and effect work, though. In the abstract, this sounds reasonable. But this is because that is, and that is not because this is not, and this ceases to be because that ceases to be. Multiple causes come together to give multiple results, like an infinite net of jewels that reflect in each other. Telling survivors to not pursue justice with the means the justice system in the abstract provides for them to use just because scouting is for kids is considering just a few jewels in the infinite net. It's also ultimately not moving towards the goal of eliminating this painful situation, because only actions rooted in great compassion for all sentient beings - both current scouts and survivors in this situation - can heal this. Is this really a zero-sum game? The way to truly moving on involves, as a necessary part, survivors pursuing justice to the fullest extent possible within the legal system. We should be grateful for them doing it. One of the causes of this painful situation is precisely that the survivors' cases haven't already gone through the legal system. And had they, there probably wouldn't have been so many of them in the first place. Our speech reflects through the net of jewels, too. We actively shape the situation just by talking here. Speech is a kind of action.

I read about this, but didn't think of how it would apply to the pack! Good call. Thanks for reminding me! First park is in two weeks so just in time 😄

Our pack planned our calendar for 2023-2024 to create the opportunity for our scouts to earn this badge! We're hitting up all the NPS parks within driving distance plus a few printable junior ranger awards that relate to our nature in this part of the country ♥️

Isn't this a pretty common practice? Sounds like a general legal system problem to me. I've certainly read more than a few articles that mention that the reason the suit in question was filed in that jurisdiction was some perceived advantage. Perhaps this is me being from a small country where the laws are the same everywhere and no one thinks that's objectionable, but I personally agree that it's a bit distasteful. However, it seems to be the result of having different laws in different bits of the country; either the legal system is exactly the same everywhere or there's going to be incentive to "shop" if you can. Unless you can write an enforceable federal law against it somehow, although that sounds incredibly hard.

There's no real way out of the tradeoff between ease of signup and thoroughly vetting and supervising volunteers. Yes, more vetting of all volunteers in direct contact with scouts may well make it harder to get volunteers. But there's not really a frictionless, free way to vet them, either. Background checks for all scout-facing volunteers is kind of an obvious way to keep the super-obvious pedophiles out. I mean, keeping kids safe from CSA 101 is don't accept convicted pedophiles into your organization, no? It's not covering all the bases, but not insisting upon it is... less smart, shall we say.

I haven't followed the legal play-by-play - could you give some examples? Does US law generally require the use of legal philosophy from the time of the crime or infraction?

I'm definitely starting to think that the time when COs made sense is past. Many reasons, but assuming that the explanation you got is true, one is that BSA isn't really in control of their volunteers. That's just a hard way to operate. Too many cooks in the kitchen. And I'd say scouting in the US cleared the credibility hurdle a long, long time ago!

That's us, too. We also have grandparents. Adults can outnumber scouts sometimes. Probably related is that most (but not all) adults were scouts themselves. All grandparents that have come have at least one person in the couple who was a scout as a child. Everyone wants to share scouting with their children and grandchildren.