- The organization is dying. Less members each year, less donors, more negative news, camps are shrinking and being closed.
- No reason for higher education beyond a bachelors. This is fine as entry level, but when you realize the Council's Scout Executive and folks at the national level are all wildly undereducated and specialized compared to other non-profits, its amazing that things seem to work that well.
- everything comes down to the volunteer base. Professionals can coordinate and advise with the program, but actually running trainings, fundraising, recruiting at schools, running camps, organizing events, etc. all come down to identifying and organizing passionate volunteers to make projects come together. Sometimes things fit together well, other times you are struggling just to find a warm body to agree to do something basic or get involved to help with anything.
- the politics. Conservatives swear that girls/homosexuals will destroy Scouting, progressives do not want to be involved with the strong church/religious element. Everyone freaks out about minor things, and rumor mills start up all the time. Periodically someone comes in to the office to gripe about whatever nonsense they read on social media and they want to yell about it.
- long, random hours. Weekends, evenings, and holidays are common to work on, but you get to balance that out with random days off.
- work life balance is rough. Some coworkers love Scouting, but don't have the time to even be involved with their own kids' programs.
- It is stressful. You always have to find magical ways to make management happy, and oftentimes that just means working your butt off in overtime because no volunteers care to continue a program that you have to run because someone swears it will be the magic item that recruits a ton of kids.
- volunteers cannot always be counted on, when politics dont go their way, they will walk away, oftentimes leaving you with an even with little plans, nothing prepared, no staff, and a month to figure out how to organize something for hundreds of kids.
- Some volunteers are mean, always grumpy, will personally attack you, treat you like their personal assistant, etc.
- Too many camps. About 250 councils have 900+ camps. About half should be closed so that the others can prosper.
- to promote, you need to move around. Its like the military, and rarely can you just stay in one place and grow in your career. Youll have to move every few years to find new positions that you can grow into. That means making your family move and having a spouse whose career comes second.
- technology is old. We use an online system for our membership management that came out in 1993 and hasnt been updated. Legacy programs built off of that aren't much better.
