Thanks...sounds like they’re gonna experience another massive exodus.
Out of Egypt.
Yes. The BSA National Executive Committee (i.e., the officers of the National Executive Board) released a summary of the surveys it conducted during MAR 2013. The summary of findings said a policy change would cost the Scouts a minimum of 100,000 to 350,000 (13.5%) members. “It is believed any gain in membership because of a change to the membership policy related to youth and adults would be in the range of 10,000 to 20,000 (<1%) youth.”
Actually, there is more to the disastrous 1970s story ...
1968 – BSA National launched BOYPOWER ’76 in anticipation of the U.S. Bi-centennial. It was an 8-year strategic plan aiming to boost membership and to raise U.S.$65 million. The BOYPOWER campaign failed due to membership padding scandals and was prematurely terminated in 1974. BSA had 4.6 million members (youth + adults across all program groups) in 1976, down 1.1 million (19.6%) from 1969.
Membership padding scandals for local BSA councils 1st became public in the 1920's. From its early days, most local BSA councils had always struggled to meet their operating budgets. Cash flow was always a problem. In the smaller and more rural councils, it was a common practice to take out short term loans just to make payroll in lean stretches. In the late 1950's, the council scout executive of the Greater Cleveland Council was fired over its membership padding. Membership padding was used to falsify grant applications to philanthropic foundations, United Way chapters, and government agencies in order to inflate the number of youth served.
The 1st major BSA membership scandal spotlighted by the national media occurred in 1974. The Chicago Tribune conducted a 4-month investigation into the Chicago Area Council's membership and published a 2-part series of its findings in JUN 1974. By the end of that year, many paid professionals had been fired from across the country, membership figures in at least 14 councils were revised after audits, federal money was returned, and the much vaunted 1968 initiative, Boypower '76, was terminated 2 years before its official deadline.
Boypower '76 was the brainchild of BSA Chief Scout Executive Alden G. Barber (who had coincidentally been the council scout executive in Chicago before advancing to the CSE job). It was an effort to increase declining BSA membership which occurred during the turbulent 1960's. The objectives of Boypower '76 was to raise U.S.$65 million and increase registered youth members by 2 million, so that BSA would have one-third of all eligible boys as registered scouts. To accomplish these targets by 1976, Barber revamped BSA's paid professional staff, so that it included more people with business and marketing backgrounds, rather than Scouting or youth-related experiences. Monthly, quarterly and annual goals were implemented and paid professionals were required to meet their goals in order to keep their job. With such pressure coming from BSA National and given the non-Scouting background of many paid professionals, the temptation to lie to keep a job was difficult to resist. As reported by many former paid professionals in the press, those who refused to lie about their numbers were fired.
In 1964, POTUS # LBJ declared a war on poverty in his State of the Union address. By 1966, Congress approved the Model Cities program. Building upon long-established public housing and urban renewal efforts, Model Cities attempted to integrate physical redevelopment of inner city neighborhoods with a wide range of social services and job opportunities. It went into effect in 1968. The Chicago Area Council took advantage of this social program and obtained over U.S.$341,000 from the federal government for a period of 4 years to provide Scouting to over 40,000 inner-city minority boys.
Paid professionals admitted that they fraudulently registered thousands of nonexistent boys to not only meet their goals, but to obtain the federal funds. By OCT 1974, the Chicago Area Council had entered into an agreement with the federal government to repay those federal funds. During its investigation, the Tribune located a 1968 audit, conducted by Storrs Smith, the council scout executive who replaced Barber, which revealed that instead of the 75,000 registered youth the council claimed, there were actually less than 40,000 registered youth. This audit report was suppressed by both the council and BSA National. National relived Smith as council Scout executive and placed him in National's Finance Service.
Another report never released to the public was conducted by the Institute of Public Affairs in 1971 on Scouting in the NY area. This report concluded that the pressure paid professionals felt from BSA National to meet their goals resulted in a "numbers game and a possible cause of paper (also derisively referred to by volunteers as “phantom or ghost”) troops." So when the Tribune printed its story, BSA National had known for some time of the problems. Even Barber went on record describing his paid professional staff, "Some of our people cheat – quite frankly."
By 1976, Barber had been forced to retire (some sources said that the National President demanded it – the only such case of the 12 CSEs, to date, through 2012) and the public had firm assurances from BSA National that such fraudulent activities, which the Tribune reported, would never happen again. BSA National would put into practice procedures to not only make it more difficult to register phantom youth, but checks on registration rolls to alert BSA of any future misdeeds. All such checks and balances were to be done by BSA paid professionals. No independent organizations would oversee, much less conduct, such audits. Unfortunately, it didn't work as was later revealed during the 1990s-2000s.
During the 1980's, BSA developed the Sustaining Membership Enrollment (SME) program to raise funds. It was a direct, annual solicitation of volunteer members for donations. As with Boypower '76, BSA's paid professionals were assigned goals. Stewart Mayers of Athens, GA, who worked as a paid scouting professional in AR and OK during the 1980's said, "The annual fund-raising drive … was openly referred to by Scouting professionals as Save My Employment." SME was later renamed “Friends of Scouting (FoS).