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For a while, the BSA has been about two things - money and membership. The professional organization is a mess. The support for actual units is generally pretty horrible.

Their camp system is good, but there are almost twice the camps needed to serve their members.

Parent demographics didn’t just shift on them, it was almost pulled out from under them. Den mothers used to be stay at home parents of a two parent family.

Now, the key demo is the single parent household. The professionals don’t staff the units. They train volunteers who staff the units.

The key deliverable sought by most families approaching Cub Scouts is father surrogacy. To a lesser extent, single parents of like minds also seek each other out to form new nuclear families.

National aims almost nothing at the parent, which is stupid. Gates is starting to use earned media to change all of that.

Their fundraising system is based on last century’s technology. They have no marketing or political talent working for them at a level high enough to influence national that bucking the trend will do more for them long term than not.

Because CORPORATE dollars drive the National office, they are very sensitive to the perception of having to change or starve.

It’s the POLAR OPPOSITE of what’s being sought at the unit level. At the unit level, Scoutcraft, values, discipline, citizenship, and the opportunity to learn something about outdoor sports like fishing, camping, and shooting.

National screwed up huge recently by going in hock to the tune of almost a half-billion on their Bechtel Summit Camp in WV.

While folks at the National Jamboree had a good time, temps got up beyond 100, with 90 percent humidity. The camp is about 20 times bigger than can be sustained, and that may be an optimistic estimate. Over 60 showerhouses, which gives you an idea of the beginning of the overhead issues.

Getting to WV is pretty difficult too, especially from the West. Philmont is about perfect, and as a camp it is going strong, but it doesn’t have the modern attractions and amenities that Summit does.

Unlike the GSA, the BSA TRIED staying out of the politics. You don’t come to the BSA to have sex, to talk about it, or tie anything involved in what Sir Baden Powell was about into what the BSA was trying to do.

Donors, the big ones, made them take a stand on it because while they understood that predators came to the BSA because ‘that’s where the prey was’, it wasn’t an argument that resonated with Target. or AT&T, etc.

You sponsor groups like the BSA because in some way it burnishes the goodwill of the company and preserves or increases the value of the company to shareholders. When supporting a group like the BSA doesn’t do that - for whatever reason, then you stop supporting it.

Now even the LDS is caving on this crap, and now that we have Pope Che in the Holy See, they are caving too. Baptists are holding firm.

In the end, it’s about bucks. What the units want isn’t what National wants to provide, and like other unions and legacy companies, they are staring at pension liabilities and medical insurance costs that have driven up the cost of providing national staff far faster than inflation.

Gates isn’t a turnaround artist, and neither was Rex Tillerson. They have a great, great product. Their program is outstanding. The company needs to be turned around, and it can be.

I don’t have a problem with membership because our program is very strong, and all over our units are integrated beneath a ‘master unit’. The Pack, Troop, and Crew all work together to provide a program, and recruiting Cubs is a breeze. They become Scouts, find girlfriends, and take them shooting, rafting, climbing, and snowmobiling with the Crew. Informally, they also hunt.

It’s crack for kids looking for adventure and something other than their phones. Believe me, they’re bored too, and the phone thing is getting old. They’ve abandoned Facebook, and now instagram is the thing. Twitter is dead or dying too outside of corporate and entertainment America.

Support for scouting is going a little underground. Big companies are providing ‘matching hours’ that go directly to Councils rather than national anymore. You donate an hour to your unit, you get $15 for your Council (or unit, if you organize your unit under a Non-Profit chartering entity that can accept the donation directly, rather than through somebody like the Elks).

Companies are hungry for Eagle Scouts, and it is still the case that an Eagle on the transcript gets you placed into a separate, shorter stack of applications. An Eagle gets you an extra stripe out of boot camp too.

Boeing organizes their work teams based on Baden Powell’s patrol method (no more than 8 - independent groups - Using EDGE method to train and cross train - answering to a ‘senior patrol leader’ that largely orients the teams to the corporate objectives.)

There are a lot of elite companies using this basic organizational premise too.

Gay is doing what it was designed to do - make it harder to be a country that shares a simple, single set of core beliefs on what we stand for.

The BSA is just another group caught in that crossfire, and there are consequences for holding firm. They are struggling to cut the rope without cutting the rope.

I think the pendulum is starting to swing back in the other direction, and the BSA may get another 20 years to fix itself, but it is going to take more than ‘sticking to their guns’. They need a corporate restructuring, and there is so much invested emotional capital by the folks who run and fund it at the national level that making those changes will not be easy.