Bringing Home The Bacon.

[Eamonn]

I have just got off the phone from talking to a very close and dear friend.

We of course were talking about Scouting.

Sad to say some years back we talked about individual Scouts, now days we seem to talk about money and the lack of it.

Over the weekend I attended our OA weekend and the topic of conversation was again money.

We were lucky enough to have a gentleman who was active in our Lodge before I was born!!

His take on all of this is that it goes in cycles.

I hope that he is right!!

Still I seem to have this little voice inside of me that keeps telling me that something has gone wrong. My problem is that I'm not sure what?

Over the years that I have been involved at the Board level, I have seen the money that we raise go up. In fact the District I serve is now raising 600% more than it was ten years ago. Still ten years ago we weren't doing a very good job.

We all know how things have gone up over the past few years and I can't help feeling that we have been afraid to pass on the real cost of doing business to the people we serve. By not passing these costs on we were in fact subsidizing the people in the programs at that time and it seems that one day we will have to pay the piper and that day seems to be now.

While I firmly believe that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys, I am starting to question the amount of money that we pay our professional staff. A school teacher in the school district where I live starts out at $22k a DE starts out at $32k. I'm finding it a lot harder to ask families who are struggling to get by to donate to FOS and help pay the wages of a SE who is making more than twice what they as a family bring home. Sure I'm aware that he brings in money from other sources, but wages and salaries now eat up 25% of our budget. Yes I know trying to make sense of the budgets can be hard as all sorts of wages are in there.

By and large the volunteers and families in our Council do support the Council by participating in FOS and selling popcorn.

I really don't want to see us cut programs or cut staff. I do however feel that the time has come for honest and open dialog with our professionals, they need to do more to get out and about and start looking for funding. We as volunteers are doing and will do what we can. But the time has come for them to start bringing home the bacon.

Eamonn.

[Trevorum]

And, IMHO, it's a darn shame that BSA has painted itself into an corner by alienating traditional ouside funding, most notably the United Way.

[ManyIrons]

Okay T, I'll bite. Which "G" (God, Girls, or Gays) are you referring to?