Apologies for the organization won’t save the movement. Bold, rapid change will.
Scouts BSA is a program for ages 10-17. That age span is the problem. The lived experience is a middle-school program that traps high schoolers, then asks them to supervise the middle schoolers. That is a babysitting program decorated with leadership language. High schoolers are simply unpaid staff for the middle-school program. Series note: This is […]
The Scouts BSA corporate-bureaucracy simulation displaced patrol ownership and gave adults a place to hide. The phrase “Ask your SPL” is one symptom. In Scouts BSA culture, it often means an adult has declined to mentor a child, instead routing the Scout into the youth-staffed, troop-office bureaucracy. Adult abdication gets dressed up as youth-led practice, […]
Troop-level positions of responsibility undermine the patrol method. They steal ownership from patrols by taking over decisions that should belong to small teams, and they teach Scouts that real responsibility sits outside the patrol. Even the thin positions matter. They pull youth away from patrol programs and into troop-level duties that are often just make-work. […]
The Scouts BSA corporate-bureaucracy simulation did not appear all at once. Gold loopers did this gradually. They built up the troop-office machinery, wired it into advancement, and then gave that machinery a faux leadership-development theory. In 1972, gold loopers used the Improved Scouting Program to validate their gradual creep and give it a curriculum. The […]
The patrol method is not complicated. That is its strength. The patrol method–the core of Scouting–means small teams of youth pursuing adventures they actually own, with adult support. That’s really it. Genuine leadership happens there: in the patrol, not in a youth-operated troop bureaucracy or a management structure staffed by youth wearing officer patches. While […]
Order of the Arrow, a branded operation of BSA, is known best for 111 years of redface minstrel shows. In an incomplete reform attempt, BSA now requires OA-branded council operations to stop some of their cultural theft, instead putting that cultural use under tribal purview. The purview is to be documented in a written agreement. […]
When the Boy Scouts of America, recently rebranded as Scouting America, gathers in Dallas May 11-15 for its National Annual Meeting, its leaders will confront a crisis that messaging cannot solve. At the end of 2025, the organization’s market share sank to about 1.25 percent of American youth, the lowest since about 1923. The organization […]
In any healthy nonprofit, the professional staff exists to serve the mission. Their value is measured by their effectiveness, their innovation, and their ability to deliver results for the movement. For decades, the Boy Scouts of America (why SA is a bad name) has operated under a different set of rules, an employment model that […]
TL;DR: On October 28, 2025, the National Executive Board removed chartered organizations as automatic voting members of local councils. That matters because chartered organizations were the Scouting movement’s formal pathway into governance, even if that pathway was often unused. With it gone, BSA’s governance becomes even more self-selecting, more insulated, and more vulnerable to capture […]
Per BSA’s data, 85% of Scouts are in unhealthy councils. It’s no surprise. We’ve shrunk 84% below our peak youth count, and we’re still shrinking. This could change with the positive vision in Move Forward: Save Scouting. However, national prefers failure, so it has different priorities like adopting toxic brands, perpetuating cultural theft, appeasing misogynists, […]