ShareThisMany boys today would rather play video games than pitch a tent, but the leaders of the Boy Scouts of America believe the group's founding principles -- to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent -- still can engage and inspire children and their parents.
To make that happen, the group is working to shed its complacency, remake its somewhat stodgy public image and rebuild its membership as the group approaches its 100th anniversary in 2010, said Bob Mazzuca, the chief Scout executive.
"The day those words become irrelevant, then I would believe that we have become irrelevant," Mazzuca said, referring to the Boy Scout creed, in an interview before last week's annual Eagle Scout Recognition Dinner in Pittsburgh. "But as long as those are words to live by and concepts our society needs, then we have an obligation to be creative and innovative in the way we engage people so we can deliver on those ideas."
The Scouts were founded in 1910 by Chicago publisher William D. Boyce, who borrowed the idea from a similar group created in Great Britain. Today's Scouting program retains many of the traditional activities and aims envisioned by Boyce. Scouts camp together, learn wilderness and first-aid skills, help maintain parks and other public grounds, and work toward earning merit badges in more than 100 subjects from lifesaving and leather work to public health and pottery.
Membership in the Boy Scouts of America has dropped dramatically since the group's heyday in the early 1970s, when its rolls topped 5 million boys and young men. By 2005, that number had dipped below 3 million, and has eroded slowly since then -- 10,000 or 20,000 members at a time -- to 2.8 million last year.
Distractions and competitors are everywhere, from computers and television to soccer leagues and football practice. In many cases, both parents work, making it difficult for them to add yet another activity to the roster, and more difficult still to volunteer for the leadership positions and activities that help children earn merit badges. And a controversy over the group's 1991 decision to ban openly gay men from serving in leadership roles -- a decision upheld by the Supreme Court in 2000 -- temporarily made the group's leaders withdraw from the kind of publicity and public outreach that Mazzuca believes is necessary to boost the rolls.
In the past few years the Boy Scouts have been trying to prove to parents that the group has good things to offer to children of many races, classes and backgrounds -- not just to the middle-class white suburbanites who make up its traditional membership.
Most suburban kids, who have supportive parents and access to plentiful recreation and community service activities, would grow up just fine without ever joining the Scouts, he said.
"It's the numbers that aren't that desperately need what Scouting has to offer, especially in urban areas," he said.
A year-old pilot program in Pittsburgh called Cub Scouts 1-2-3 works to create dens, the groups of eight boys and a den leader that make up the group's most basic level of organization, in the city's public housing projects and other struggling neighborhoods using paid den leaders rather than relying solely on parent volunteers.
The group has translated its manual into Spanish and has created a Spanish-language version of its Web site. It also is working to understand cultural attitudes, such as many Latinos' belief that Boy Scouts membership is only for the wealthy, to encourage more Spanish-speaking people to join.
And a program begun in Wisconsin three years ago and spread throughout the Midwest lets boys work on merit badges during den meetings, rather than exclusively at home with their parents. That program, which will be implemented nationally next year, has increased retention rates in the pilot program's area from about 65 percent to nearly 90 percent, Mazzuca said.
The group also has gone high-tech to persuade more busy parents -- especially moms, who make the majority of decisions about what groups and activities children join -- that scouting doesn't have to be complicated or time-consuming, and that it can improve their children's character, physical health and attitudes toward their community.
(Amy McConnell Schaarsmith can be reached at aschaarsmith(at)post-gazette.com. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.)
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