Move Forward: Save Scouting

by Aren Cambre

This is a plan for saving BSA.

BSA faces a choice: change or die. Without rapid changes, BSA will keep shrinking:

As BSA rides the edge of insolvency, it’s hard to see how it will last even 10 more years.

If we want another 100 years, BSA must become what youth and families want. This means pivots to relevance, to adventure, and to efficiency.

Apologies for the BSA organization won’t save the Scouting movement. Bold, rapid change will. Rapid will look differently for each proposal. For some, change can happen immediately, such as eliminating the SA name or abolishing the commissioned-bureaucrat system. For others, rapid may mean an immediate signal of change with interim steps, followed by a fast-paced rollout schedule.

Goal 1: Improve program structure & advancement

Legend:
✅ = mission accomplished
🚨 = obstructed
🚧 = in progress
😴 = no action yet
🐄 = sacred cow (hear the whiners?)
❓ = may need reformulation

By modernizing program design, we make fun, engaging Scouting the norm! We prioritize fun adventure, simplify for adult leaders, restore Scouting’s historical strengths, reduce abuse risk, improve advancement quality, unleash genuine leadership opportunity, and create new opportunities for recruitment and retention.

Modernize age bands

😴 Realign BSA programs around coherent developmental stages that mirror societal norms.¹ Optimize programming for each developmental stage.

• Early childhood (Cubs, grades K-2): Continue the current Cub Scout program with revisions to increase outdoor adventure.
• Middle childhood (Falcons, grades 3-5): A junior-troop program oriented around outdoor adventure. It uses a simplified patrol method. Some responsibility placed on youth.
• Early adolescence (🐄 Scouts², grades 6-8): Reflecting Scouts BSA’s strength as a middle-school program, youth enjoy a safer program and appropriate peer relationships. Instead of being babysat by high schoolers, middle schoolers finally own their own program. Scoutcraft is the program emphasis.
• Late adolescence (🐄 Venturing, grades 9-12): No longer infantilized in a middle-school program, high schoolers focus on peer interactions, genuine leadership, and age-appropriate activities.
• Young adulthood (Rovers, post-grade-12 through age 25): Treat young adults like adults! They can form their own adventures with the full benefit of the Scouting infrastructure. (They may also be adult leaders in other programs.)

Strengthen terminal ranks

Each program celebrates a terminal rank: Wolf, Arrow of Light, First Class, Eagle, and Summit. All ranks will be strengthened to be worthy terminal ranks of each program. They will distinguish recipients from peers in age-level ways. Also:

• 😴🐄 The First Class rank recovers Baden-Powell’s original vision, a terminal rank worthy of distinction. The trail to First Class is reimagined as a prescription to age-appropriate adventure, achievable by most Scouts by the early part of 8th grade. Trail to First Class programs at resident camps are abolished, and camps will refocus on fun and adventure.
• 😴🐄 No longer part of a middle-school badge ladder, no longer watered down so that 11-year-olds can earn it³, an enhanced Eagle rank will signify distinction in leadership and life skills. An 85% solution is to restore the current Star, Life, and Eagle ranks and rename the Summit Rank in the Venturing rank system to Eagle⁴.
• 😴 We will consider a young-adult award in the Rovers program. This is framed like the King’s Scout Award in the UK, which is started after one graduates from compulsory-attendance school.⁵

Program enhancements

• 😴🐄 Abolish youth bureaucracy, restore the patrol method. Bureaucracy is not leadership! In the 20th century, BSA ejected the patrol method from Scouts BSA, replacing it with a corporate-bureaucracy simulation, thick with fake-leadership roles that exist mainly to hand out patches. This is a uniquely American disease; peer Scouting movements worldwide have maintained Baden-Powell’s patrol method. We restore the patrol method, where the only youth role that matters is the Patrol Leader, who is directly mentored by the Scoutmaster.
• 😴 Create Guides as a new position of responsibility. As an option for interested youth⁶, a Guide helps younger programs⁷ in a non-supervisory manner.
• 😴 Eliminate redundant activities. Scouting must focus on what is distinct from ordinary life experiences. For example, delete all required-for-rank requirements that mostly duplicate what youth customarily do in schools, families, or church.⁸
• 😴 Advancement prescribes adventure. Instead of being a distraction or competitor, advancement aligns with adventure, to the point where it can be seen as an adventure-prescription system. Active participation in a unit’s adventure program results in completing most advancement.
• 😴 Improved merit-badge system. Instead of being tailored to the ability of sixth-grade Scouts, merit badges will be split between Scouts and Venturing. Generally:
  • 🐄 Middle-school merit badges: Scoutcraft-oriented merit badges will be assigned to Scouts. All these will be revised and streamlined to become markers on the trail to First Class. They replace today’s random, grab-bag, unorganized slop pile of rank requirements. Middle-schoolers will receive immediate recognition as they pass milestones on their path to First Class.
  • 🐄 High-school merit badges: Merit badges relating to advanced adventures, career exploration, or activities that are generally age-appropriate to high schoolers will be assigned to Venturing. They will be revised as needed to assure they are appropriate accomplishments for high schoolers. All adventure-centric merit badges will feed into Venturing’s Ranger Award‘s “challenging electives”.
  • Remaining merit badges: The rest lack value and will be deleted. will be deleted. The Scholarship merit badge is an example; that’s just turning ordinary schoolwork into a badge.
• 😴🐄 Foster leadership and ownership culture among adult leaders. Support leadership culture and creativity at the unit level. Discourage anti-leadership distractions, like administrative bloat, obedience-cult mindsets, and unit bylaws.

Goal 2: Enhance program delivery

Structural adjustments

• 😴 Shift to section/group model. Slash administrative bloat and improve cultural continuity among associated units, transitioning them to sections of a group. Sections share adult leaders and one group committee. Multiple sections of the same program may be used by one group. For example, one group could have multiple troops.
• Digitalize everything. 🚧 First, we digitize and throw everything online: handbooks, merit-badge pamphlets, adult leader guides, all of it. Stop producing paper products!⁹ 😴 Next we digitalize, making our information corpus friendly for digital natives with print-if-needed capability. A component is eliminating almost all use of PDFs.
• 😴🐄 Optimize supplemental youth training. Freed of teaching how to navigate a youth bureaucracy, NYLT refocuses on advanced middle-school topics, such as mastery of the patrol method and beginning leadership concepts. NAYLE becomes the council-delivered high-school leadership training, focusing on supporting high-school-level leadership development. IOLS opens to Venturers and Rovers, intended for those who did not earn First Class. Order of the Arrow’s leadership training is transitioned to Venturing where it may be incorporated into NAYLE, made into a progression of other training opportunities, or retired.
• 😴🐄 Eliminate the chartered-organization model, shift to affiliation agreements. All units become council operations. Affiliation agreements with community organizations allow these organizations to support units without bearing liability and responsibility for unit operations.
• 😴🐄 Improve council quality. Only 15% of youth are in a healthy council. Unhealthy councils with a straightforward, realistic path to viability should be supported in improvement. The rest must be absorbed by or merged with other councils. This will be expedited by 🐄 phasing out council bureaucracy-preservation fees (described more below).

Operational improvements

• 😴 Frictionless licensing of intellectual property. Let units freely use the brand they are actively keeping alive. Today, national uses trademark enforcement to preserve its power, forcing units to jump through silly bureaucratic hoops just to print a local patrol t-shirt. Extend to councils and units the authority to extend a standardized, single-use sub-license to their vendors (printers, patch makers, etc.).
• 😴🐄 Reboot commissioner service. Liberated from today’s make-work regime, commissioners’ sole focus becomes enabling unit-level adventure. Any bureaucratic work is limited to removing barriers to adventure. Professional bureaucrats will be expected to handle the red tape and make-work their own peers created, such as recharter. (If the professional bureaucrats don’t like that, they can tell their own professional buddies in Irving to knock it off. A good deal of red tape is results from bureaucracy-solves-all mindsets, and some is just make-work concocted to justify salary lines.)
• 😴🐄 Embrace third-place ethic for all non-unit roles. All volunteers and professionals in the organization–those not in unit-level roles–must provide clear value to the movement. Eliminate elitist symbols associated with non-unit roles, such as gold epaulets or crests.
• 🚧 Improve the “Barriers to Abuse” (B2A). Streamline to focus exclusively on abuse prevention, removing complexity. This must become BSA’s highest-quality document, an example for the rest of the corpus.
• 🚧 Simplify documentation and rules. Eliminate duplication, complexity, and bloat. Target a Flesch–Kincaid Reading-Ease score of at least 70.
• 😴 Repeal pointless bloat. If it adds burdens or removes adventure, and lacks a benefit that justifies its cost, delete it! For example, repeal NCS rules for short-term council camp programs (e.g., camporees), repeal the September 2024 shooting-sports program changes, and repeal 2023’s arbitrary limit on pack-oriented Cub Scout camping nights. (2026-05-13 update: 🚧 While in the big picture is not addressed, a tiny fissure may be forming. Rules on laser tag, water guns, and pies-in-the-face will be relaxed.)

Goal 3: Remove barriers and expand inclusion

• ✅ Abolish coed ban. Local units may choose coed vs. single-gender. (Mission accomplished: Abolished as of December 15, 2025, although the perfidious National Scouts BSA Committee has never accepted accountability for its delays, misogyny, flippancy, and incompetence.)
• 😴🐄 Abolish gendered rules. Local units will manage all gender-related decisions in ways that are responsive to local norms.¹⁰
• 😴🐄 Abolish the Declaration of Religious Principle. Created in the 1910s as a magnanimous statement of inclusion, religious extremists flogged this into a ban on atheists and agnostics. This is immoral. Also, delegate all religious components of advancement to families and their churches.
• 😴 Slash membership costs. Over three years, cut national annual membership fees by 50% and phase out all council bureaucracy-preservation fees.
• 😴🐄 Rationalize uniforms. Improve affordability and quality through simplification of uniforms and insignia. Only produce or sell clothing or gear when doing so essential to coherent uniforming.¹¹
• 🚧 Shift to a culture of honoring any time in Scouting. Shift alumni focus from ranks-earned to celebrating any Scouting experiences. This is part of why NESA must be abolished (more below).
• 🚨 Cancel SA (Scouting America) brand. SA means sexual assault. Instead, use the BSA initialism for the corporate brand, a la YMCA (M=men’s) and NAACP (C=colored).

Goal 4: Eliminate waste and inefficiency

Leave behind parts without value

• 🚨🐄 Sunset Order of the Arrow. Revitalized high-school and young adult programming, described above, makes OA’s new purpose obsolete. Also, as OA’s identity is tied to its racist mockery of tribes, which it is perpetuating (e.g., its tribal agreements are frauds), and its existence cannibalizes BSA’s programs, OA cannot be redeemed. OA will be retired. 🐄 OA’s training and its council, territory, and national social programs are transferred to Venturing. OA’s youth officers will find new homes in Venturing Officers Associations or be first-movers for Rovers.¹² Councils may conduct their own camp-service initiatives, but they must never offer opportunities similar to the actual Scouting programs.
• 🚨🐄 Terminate all redface minstrel shows. Nearly all use of indigenous culture in Scouting is thieved and inauthentic. Also, native culture is not Scouting. Let tribes be tribes, and let Scouting be Scouting. Native culture will no longer be an enduring, BSA-operated part of any program or extension. This applies to all Scouting activities, including council-run redface minstrel shows, like the (phony) Tribe of Mic-O-Say or faux “Indian villages” at resident camps. People with a genuine interest in tribal culture may work directly with tribes. The only exception is that federally-recognized tribes can be invited to offer experiences at Scout activities.
• 😴🐄 Abolish the National Eagle Scout Association. Its unrepentant, aggressive scams are unacceptable, and its pseudo-independence is arrogance that foments elitism. Eagle Scouts will just be one of several affinity groups in the BSA Alumni Association.¹³
• 😴🐄 Abolish the commissioned-bureaucrat system. Professionals exist solely to serve the base and remove barriers for volunteers. The commissioned-bureaucrat system long ago decided its purpose is to assure career advancement at the expense of the movement, valuing internal loyalty over effective leadership or competence. This culture has infected all of professional Scouting. This culture yields bureaucratic bloat and incompetence. All professional roles, at every level of BSA, must only use competence-based hiring. Role-specific training after hiring may be a required condition of employment, but the lack of that training may not be used to discriminate against otherwise qualified individuals.
• ❓🐄 Abolish the National Scouts BSA Committee. This perfidious committee has harmed the movement and repeatedly squandered trust. Replacing it is a one-year, interim committee to devise improved programs for grades 6-8, grades 9-12, and ages 18¹⁴-25. If it can provide value, a new NSBC might be reconstituted after the interim committee’s job is done.(2025-11-21: While the NSBC’s support of the coed ban’s repeal is good, this committee remains perfidious and incompetent. It has declined to disavow its past toxic, public positions; it should have rejected the coed pilot in 2024; and it badly screwed up communications on the coed-ban’s abolishment. Because of its lack of repentance and consistent demonstrations of incompetence, abolishing this committee is the right path forward. Sometimes a clean-sheet restart is necessary to free something of a legacy of poor performance.)
• Spin off Learning for Life or transfer it to another nonprofit. Effectively a subsidiary of BSA, LFL is a silo whose raison d’être is to shield some programs from BSA’s bigotry.¹⁵ LFL today is a distraction. More than half of it is school-based programs that have drifted from meaningful association with a conventional notion of Scouting. Explorers is the rest of LFL. Explorers has also drifted. Explorers may be repatriated to BSA if it is feasible to quickly reestablish coherent links between it and the Scouting movement.

Bureaucratic streamlining

• 😴 Terminate runaway bureaucratic processes. Some parts of BSA are self-perpetuating bureaucracy, disconnected from creating value or serving the base. Some examples include the bureaucracies behind the National Camp Standards, Guide to Advancement, and Guide to Safe Scouting. These are just examples; there are more. All runaway bureaucracies will be rebooted with durable mandate to serve the base. Their interim mission will be to delete all bloat and simplify what remains.
• 😴 Eliminate most national-level marketing. Stop funding vanity PR, such as professional marketing babysitters for national committee chars, and low-value national advertising campaigns. Redirect remaining funds toward hyper-targeted, digital lead generation, information technology, or dues reductions. The sole metric of success of lead generation must be funneling families directly to units.
• 😴🐄 End abuse of pilot programs. BSA has long weaponized pilots to stall, concoct make-work for bureaucrats, cover for incompetence, and obscure nefarious goals. Also, pilots may lack much value for the foreseeable future as, thanks to national’s 75+ years of neglect of the programs, BSA will spend years not innovating but just catching up. When we’re just adjusting programs to follow the lead of others who have already learned the lessons, pilots are waste. When pilots are absolutely necessary, they only happen when approved by the NEB, be ruthlessly time-boxed and agile, no longer than 90 days, and have transparency with robust success metrics and outcomes. Once the pilot is done, the change being tested will be immediately implemented nationwide.
• 😴 Abolish redundant roles. Eliminate all non-unit roles–volunteer or professional–that do not provide tangible value to the base. The third-place ethic described above will help identify redundant roles.
• 😴🐄 Create culture of accountability. Part of shifting to a culture of competence, rather than simply that of rewarding loyalty, means we must begin to have a sense of accountability for results. Major missteps of professionals or volunteers must begin to have consequences. Serial low performers must exit Scouting or finding different ways to serve the movement.

Financial & structural changes

• 😴🐄 Sell or surrender Summit Bechtel Reserve. Losing millions per year, drowning in $180 million of debt, in an obscure, remote location, and today only serving a single-digit percent of expected youth, SBR is just a tax on an increasingly fragile organization. It was created to support a nefarious cause, and there is no known path to fiscally soundness or commercially viability. We must sell or explore a managed surrender of the property.
• 😴 Sell Irving headquarters. It has so much deferred maintenance, the building value is approaching $0. Transition to a virtual, distributed national organization. Encourage employees to distribute across the country.
• 😴 Ground national employees and volunteers with the base. Overcome current culture of elitism and disconnection from the base. All national employees and volunteers must engage in at least 40 annual hours of unit-level, non-lead¹⁶ service. If a unit has multiple national employees or volunteers, they cannot concurrently earn this credit.¹⁷
• 😴 Reassess restricted funds. Collaborate with donors to optimize proceeds of restricted funds towards improvement and sustainability of the movement.
• 😴🐄 Ground all national committees in producing value for the movement. This will be transformative as the current focus on vanity projects, bureaucratic nonsense, and make-work will end. All committees will become accountable with transparency, publicly providing committee assignments, meeting agendas strategics, and other committee assets. Meetings will be shared over digital platforms, whenever feasible. Committees that cannot pivot to producing value for the movement will be shuttered.
• 😴🐄 Require representatives of the movement in boards of directors. To assure the movement is included in all levels of Scouting governance, unit-level adult volunteers, who are active in their units¹⁸, will hold at least a quarter of seats on the National Executive Board and on every council’s boards of directors.¹⁹ Two youth representatives will also sit on every board.
• 😴 Streamline all processes. Minimize administrative burdens on members and units, starting with member registration and renewal and unit recharter. The definition of “streamlined” will include but is not limited to 1. needs no documentation and 2. no more difficult than purchasing a product from a major online vendor.
• 😴 Adopt monthly membership fees. Membership fees may be paid on a monthly basis, like utility bills. There must be no upcharges or convenience fees. (May 2026 update: This was proposed as a way to fix the broken rolling-membership scheme. This may be reconsidered once a promised, new annual payment scheme is live and evaluated.)
• 😴 Prioritize information technology. Redirect resources freed by above reforms to IT to expedite development of modern, flexible, and agile systems.

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Footnotes

1. Allowances for early crossing-over to the next program need to be considered. This, for example, would enable fifth graders enough time in a troop to assure success at summer camp. ↩︎
2. Due to a trademark settlement with GSUSA, it’s unclear if we can use this name for the middle-school program. However, if we abandon the SA trademark, Scouts BSA could make more sense as a program name. ↩︎
3. A Scout may progress through all ranks in as few as 19 months. Therefore, if a Cub Scout crosses over to a troop within 5 months of turning 10, that Scout can finish Eagle before turning 12. ↩︎
4. Yes, we rename it to “Eagle”, not “Eagle Scout”. ↩︎
5. This is how the UK Scouting Association’s King’s Scout award works. ↩︎
6. The Guide role must never be construed as a workaround for Scoutmasters to pull high schoolers back into the troop to babysit. Outside of episodic assignments of the Scoutmaster, guides do not supervise. Also, this role must never be required. This is simply one of many roles of responsibility available to Scouts. ↩︎
7. This does not substitute for age-appropriate programming. For example, it would be improper for a Venturing crew’s main program be that all members are Guides for a troop. ↩︎
8. If we eliminated redundant activities from all four Citizenship in ____ merit badges, we could consolidate into a single Citizenship merit badge. ↩︎
9. It’s fine for these digital-first products to be printable, should people wish to produce paper copies on their own. ↩︎
10. A bare-minimum set of gendered rules necessary to abuse prevention might be retained, but they must not simply be restating universal cultural norms. ↩︎
11. For example, stop selling Scouts BSA olive pants. Instead, partner with retailers that are already producing pants that look nearly identical from 20 feet away. Also, stop competing REI, Academy, Walmart, et al on commodity camping gear. ↩︎
12. There is no current opportunity for middle schoolers equivalent to OA office holding. Councils may consider providing mentored opportunities to middle schoolers that allow them to perform similar roles at camporees. ↩︎
13. On a technical level, it is likely true that NESA is just an affinity group in Scouting Alumni. However, that NESA has its own, independent website and a disproportionately large staff say otherwise. NESA folks need to stop seeking fragmentation of alumni, instead investing in all of Scouting. NESA must fully subsume to Scouting Alumni, including in structure and appearance. ↩︎
14. This is meant to start at high-school graduation. ↩︎
15. LFL was created in the early 1990s. Back then, BSA was aggressively flexing obsolete, bigoted positions on the three Gs: girls, gays, and God. (As of April 2026, BSA has yet to relax its religious bigotry, and in February 2026, it dialed back reforms regarding anti-gay bigotry while capitulating to a MAGA pressure campaign.) Responsive to societal improvements, public institutions increasingly rejected bigoted stances. To shield programs that rely heavily on public-agency partnerships, BSA set up Learning for Life, Inc. then moved selected programs there. LFL never had BSA’s bigoted positions. Both due to the tendency for everything in BSA’s national organization to be self-optimizing silos and due to LFL’s distinct mission, it has evolved to where today, LFL’s programs have little nominal relationship to a conventional notion of Scouting. ↩︎
16. “Non-lead” means any unit role except for the key three. Exceptions can be granted where the person had a unit-level key-3 role before accepting a national appointment or where there is no other viable candidate for the role. ↩︎
17. For example, if a unit has two national employees or volunteers, and they both attend a Cub Scout campout, only one may count that time towards the 40-hour requirement. ↩︎
18. This should mean at least 40 hours invested in unit-level activities within the past year. ↩︎
19. At least 10% of this class must have never previously been registered in any role out outside the unit level. ↩︎