Membership up in Utah

[RememberSchiff]

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865603779/Boy-Scout-numbers-grow-in-Utah-defying-national-trend.html?pg=all

 

Over a year ago, in a survey by the Utah Great Salt Lake Council, 83 percent opposed the membership policy change and 70 percent of local Utah Scouting leaders indicated they would either end or decrease their participation in Scouting if openly gay youths were allowed to participate.

 

Since the policy change and despite that survey, all 3 Utah councils have seen membership growth - Great Salt Lake Council increased 1.5%, Utah National Parks Council increased 4.56%, and Trapper Trails Council increased 2.1 %. Nationwide membership dropped 6%.

 

LDS is credited for the growth and the article also notes there are no competing Trail Life units in Utah.

[King Ding Dong]

Impossible! They are cooking the books! Those statistics are unreliable!

[AZMike]

As it is the official youth activity of LDS, that is probably due to the increase in Mormon evangelization and conversion, as the article notes.

[packsaddle]

@KDD, baaaad dog! bad, BAAAAD, dog!!!

[Peregrinator]

The only way that it could really be categorized as "growth" would be if it were greater than expected from LDS demographic trends or if the growth is being realized in non-LDS troops.

[NJCubScouter]

Yet another example of the unreliability of polls, especially polls about what people say they are going to do, and more especially polls about what people say they are going to do if something happens that hasn't happened yet. And the unreliability is probably enhanced when people say they are going to do something, as opposed to not doing something. Combine the multiple opportunities for people to change their minds with the powerful pull of inertia, and there's your big difference between the poll results and actual reliability. The same is probably true for the polls showing that X percent of Scouters would leave the BSA if local option is provided on the adult leadership issue.

 

But of course, that's just a prediction.

[NJCubScouter]

Just to add, while membership may be up in Utah, we just lost an entire council here in New Jersey. And I don't think that's the end of it. I don't think it is going to make the surrounding districts and councils, which have absorbed the units from the Central New Jersey Council, any healthier financially. If more councils collapse, I see no reason to believe that the remaining councils will be able to absorb what's left. I am not talking about councils merging in an orderly way, with a plan for how to manage a larger number of units and a wider geographic area. What seems to have happened here is simply chaos, and I am afraid that what will follow is even greater chaos.

[Scouter99]

Just to add' date=' while membership may be up in Utah, we just lost an entire council here in New Jersey. And I don't think that's the end of it. I don't think it is going to make the surrounding districts and councils, which have absorbed the units from the Central New Jersey Council, any healthier financially. If more councils collapse, I see no reason to believe that the remaining councils will be able to absorb what's left. I am not talking about councils merging in an orderly way, with a plan for how to manage a larger number of units and a wider geographic area. What seems to have happened here is simply chaos, and I am afraid that what will follow is even greater chaos.[/quote']

 

All according to plan.

[AZMike]

Just to add' date=' while membership may be up in Utah, we just lost an entire council here in New Jersey. And I don't think that's the end of it. I don't think it is going to make the surrounding districts and councils, which have absorbed the units from the Central New Jersey Council, any healthier financially. If more councils collapse, I see no reason to believe that the remaining councils will be able to absorb what's left. I am not talking about councils merging in an orderly way, with a plan for how to manage a larger number of units and a wider geographic area. What seems to have happened here is simply chaos, and I am afraid that what will follow is even greater chaos.[/quote']

 

So what's driving that?

[NJCubScouter]

 

All according to plan.

 

Whose plan, do you think?

[NJCubScouter]

 

So what's driving that?

 

I do not have enough information to give an answer. I only learned this past week that the Central Jersey council had folded, and do not know any of the details other than the fact that it was a financial decision. (Evidently I had not been reading the Council Relations sub-forum for a few months, because it has been discussed there, but even there, there was little detail given, and the links to the council web site (where apparently some detail was given) no longer work.)

 

I suspect that there were a variety of factors, but I am sure one of them is the continued exclusion of certain adult leaders for no good reason. This is, after all, New Jersey and not... well, somewhere else where discrimination against gay people is still thought to be a good idea.

[TAHAWK]

When BSA arrived in Cleveland in 1914, there were already 99 troops (Five thinking they were "Troop 1.")

 

My troop in Calfornia had been operating eight years before BSA arrived in 1916, and shortly thereafter, the council closed for several years. Yet, that troop and Scouting in Orange County went on.

 

It may not be true that there is a 1/1 relationship between BSA employee numbers and Scouting health.

[NJCubScouter]

TAHAWK, if your story is a reaction to mine about the recently-folded council, I agree with you, the folding of a council does not NECESSARILY mean that Scouting is in trouble in a particular area. But the circumstances suggest to me that this latest event WAS driven at least in part by a lack of sufficient units. As I said (maybe not in this thread), this was not a "merger" between two councils that decided they could both do better if they eliminated some overhead. This was a council, in the middle (hence "Central Jersey") of the most densely populated state in the country, that simply went under financially, leaving the local district and unit leaders to go hat in hand to the neighboring councils, like orphans, begging to be "taken in." That does not sound like a particularly healthy situation. (It has also resulted in the map of my district (which I haven't actually seen since this happened, but I can imagine it) looking very strange. Certainly not what someone would have designed if there were other options.)

[Scouter99]

 

Whose plan, do you think?

 

Pascal Tessier, Zach Wahls, David and Geoff McGrath, August and Liam Easton-Calabria, and so on

[Merlyn_LeRoy]

Don't forget Light Yagami, though in his case it would be keikaku.