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Girls Invited to Join in National BSA Jamboree. Why Now?

Rob Meiksins and Louis Altman
July 3, 2013
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BSA

July 1, 2013; Washington Post

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to youth development, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) are back in the headlines. This time, it’s to announce that hundreds of girls will be participating for the first time in the annual Jamboree, an intensive camping-like experience involving all manner of physical activity, including BMX, kayaking, climbing, etc. Girls at a Boy Scout event? Let’s look a little further.

The article in the Washington Post says that the girls who are eligible to attend are part of a program within scouting called Venturing. This is a specialty program designed for youths both male and female, ages 14 through 20, and is based on outdoorsy physical activity. Females have been involved in Venturing since it was created in the 1990s, and in scouting for more than 40 years (according to the BSA), but have not been invited to attend the Jamboree until now. (However, the American scouting movement is just catching up to international scouting—the World Scout Jamboree has previously welcomed female attendees.)

Heralded as groundbreaking, Venturing and its inclusion in the Jamboree “is designed to reach as many young adults—male and female—as possible, instead of just reaching out to a targeted group.” Understandably, many of the female participants in Venturing are very excited about the opportunity to show what they can do, and see if the boys can keep up.

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At the risk of sounding cynical, it seems a little coincidental that the announcement of the girls’ participation in Jamboree comes so closely on the heels of the announcement that openly gay young men will be allowed to participate in scouting (until they turn 18 years old, that is, when they magically become persona non grata again). The recent decision has caused backlash from both sides. Having pleased no one, the Boy Scouts really need some good press, and the Washington Post’s report about the Jamboree is just the ticket. In addition, the decision to allow gay youth in the BSA followed years of pressure for the Boy Scouts to be more inclusive. Encouraging girls to participate in Jamboree is also an image of inclusiveness. The Boy Scouts needed to do something to bring interest back up in their program, and changing their image from being a closed, boys-only society that is openly homophobic to one that is encouraging of young people of all walks of life would make some marketing sense.

The coincidences surrounding this decision to include females in Jamboree date back a little further. The original decision was announced on July 13, 2012, with great hoopla on the Scouting website. As it happens, that joyful announcement of inclusion came at almost exactly the same time that the Boy Scouts of America reaffirmed its policy to exclude openly gay scouts and scout leaders, a story which NPQ reported on July 19, 2012.

All of this follows a decline in membership for scouting groups. In the past 10 years, BSA membership has declined by over 20 percent, from 3.3 million in 2002 to 2.6 million last year.

Concurrently, Girl Scouts of America (GSA) is competing to be the more ill of the two scout groups. NPQ first wrote about its consolidation plans in 2007, questioning what the effects would be. Though not necessarily an indicator of a wrong-headed strategy, the GSA currently has some 2.2 million youth members, a steep plunge from 2.8 million in 2003. GSA’s ledger is awash in a sea of red, as donations in 2011 were down nearly a third from 2007—$104 million and $148 million, respectively. Local GSA councils are fighting over the location of consolidated councils, and many in the GSA community rail against the sale of the traditional hallowed Girl Scout camps. The Venturing enterprise, too, has suffered attrition comparable to overall scout numbers; according to the BSA, Venturing membership has fallen over 10 percent from a high of 260,000 in 2008. It’s enough to say that the grass is pale and yellow on both sides. Is the BSA attempting to make hay when the sun shines, in the form of girls who deeply value the outdoors aspect of scouting? Are we imagining that these coincidences have any meaning?

BSA National Jamboree leader Larry Pritchard said recently that the invitation to Girl Scouts to attend their quadrennial Olympiad-like event is “just the next logical step for us to take, to give those members of our program an opportunity to enjoy what we have here as well, to drink the Kool-Aid and spread the word to the others who are in Venturing, to both young men and young women.” Drink the Kool-Aid­? That’s a very dark, deep, and pathetic statement of undiluted irony—remember the Jonestown Massacre, 34 years ago?—for two youth organizations facing declining numbers.

Is this magnanimous sleight-of-hand meant to divert public indignation over the Boy Scouts’ half-hearted move to allow openly gay scouts, but bar them from adult leadership posts? What, in your opinion, is going on in scouting?—Rob Meiksins and Louis Altman

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About the authors
Rob Meiksins

Rob has served in the nonprofit sector for over 30 years in roles ranging from intern to program manager, executive director to board director, and consultant. Starting out in professional theatre in New York City, Rob moved to Milwaukee to work with Milwaukee Rep as the dramaturg. Later, he started to work more and more helping people and organizations in the nonprofit sector articulate, and then take the next step towards their vision. Currently he is working on a new effort to establish an intentional process for nonprofits to identify their capacity-building needs and then learn about and implement the tools that will help. Ideally this is a partnership between nonprofits, consultants, and the philanthropic community to strengthen the sector we all see as critical.

Louis Altman

Louis Altman is a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor with the Syracuse, New York office of ACCES-VR, a state agency that works with people with disabilities to help them achieve vocational goals and other related objectives. A licensed attorney in New York for over twenty years, Louis is also an adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, teaching Legal & Ethical Issues in Counseling for the University's masters program in Rehabilitation Counseling, a program he graduated from. Louis has been writing newswires for NPQ since 2012. He has a wide variety of interests in the arts, business and sociology, and whatever unique and influential developments NPQ readers might find valuable to know. To leverage his training and experience he is working with NPQ to develop a focus on legal and vocational issues relevant to the nonprofit community.

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