GoKawiilWithout a bold vision, BSA is doomed within a decade. With Move Forward: Save Scouting, we can be relevant to society, improve programming, ditch unsound practices, and streamline the experience.
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 has not strung together a multi-year recovery in 25 years.
BSA’s decline is not the generic story of a youth organization losing ground to phones, sports, or overscheduling. Those affect everyone. BSA’s problem is more specific. Its historic advantages—brand recognition, inexpensive outdoor access, and the prestige of Eagle Scout—once masked program defects. As those advantages diminish, families see the defects more clearly.
The obstacle is BSA’s national culture. Inside BSA, career advancement and volunteer appointments are too often detached from producing better youth programs. Instead, they are commonly prestige markers awarded to those who avoid candor. Accountability is optional; institutional deference is not. The result is a class of insiders who deny decline with cheerful press releases while treating internal critics as disloyal.
This culture validates bad ideas. The clearest example is the program Americans still picture when they hear “Boy Scouts”: Scouts BSA, the tan-uniform program that runs from 10-year-old fifth-graders to high-school seniors. No school, sports league, or serious youth-development program would treat children leaving elementary school and young adults preparing to graduate as one developmental audience. BSA does.
This pattern extends to BSA’s other programs. Cub Scouts makes fifth graders share a program that also accommodates kindergartners. Venturing and Sea Scouts run from eighth graders to 20-year-old adults. The pattern is not developmental clarity. It is administrative convenience.
BSA is an outlier in world Scouting. International peer organizations typically use age spans of three to five years, and none merge middle schoolers and high schoolers into one program. Those age bands are where development moves fastest, and BSA chose to blur it.
All of BSA’s international peers organize programs around coherent developmental stages, and they do not pit programs against each other. BSA’s bad program design makes it an outlier.
The cost falls on both ends of Scouts BSA. That program is optimal for middle schoolers, but middle schoolers are not trusted to own it. They are managed by older youth instead. High schoolers fare no better. Instead of receiving programming built around autonomy, peer challenge, advanced outdoor adventure, and responsibility suited to their age, the vast majority are trapped in a middle-school program where their main role is supervising the younger Scouts. BSA romanticizes this as mentoring. Teenagers see it as babysitting. They know the difference, and they leave.
That culture’s deepest failure is conceptual. Leadership is a key Scouting promise, the only item common to its methods and aims, and the promise BSA often invokes to justify Eagle Scout, youth offices, patrols, and adult training. But leadership is not a patch. It is not a title, office, authority, or chain of command. Leadership is influence: persuading voluntary followers to move toward a shared vision for change.
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