Boy Scouts In Need of a Chartering Org?

This may be a case of country mouse/city mouse, but a city friend of mine claims his Boy Scout Pack has a Sponsoring Organization for tax purposes because being part of BSA alone does not make them a 503C non-profit org., yatta yatta yatta… HUH?

This is JUST Boy Scouts, not high finance! Maybe a Scouting SDoper can explain in simple terms what’s all this nonsense about? I WAG it’s a political thing among city parents who want to feel important? :confused:

Think of BSA as a franchise operation. Each BSA unit needs a chartering organization - some group that signs an agreement with BSA to allow the unit to run under its aegis, and to follow BSA rules. I’ve learned from BSA adult leader training that the chartering organization owns the unit and all its assets. I’m sure this affects things like 503© status, but in my experience the driver is management and responsibility.

FYI, Boy Scouting is divided into:

Cub Scouts (boys 5-11) - units are called “Packs”, sub-units are called “Dens”.
Boy Scouts (boys 11-18) - units are called “Troops”, sub-units are called “Patrols”
Venturing (boys and girls 15?-21) - units are called “Crews”. I don’t know what sub-units are called as I’ve never been involved in a Venture Crew.

There are also Sea Scouts, similar to Venture Crews. And whatever else the Wikipedia page on Boy Scouts says. I’m too lazy to look it up tonight.

Adult Scouter here.

Every unit MUST have a chartering organization. No ifs, ands or buts. That includes every Pack, Troop, Crew, Ship, Team, or Post.

Like Typo Knig said, the chartering org owns the unit and all it’s assets. Charter Orgs generally have a light hand there - as long as the Troop or Pack doesn’t make trouble, they are left to their own devices.

The charter org is generally responsible for giving the scouts a place to meet, and ensuring that the unit follows the standards of the BSA. If they don’t, the charter gets yanked by National.

It has nothing to do with city v rural. Every unit MUST have a charter org.

Now, I believe National itself is a 503c, and the individual councils are as well, but the units themselves are part of whatever organization is their sponsoring unit. I dunno how that works for tax purposes.

The most common chartering organizations are churches and schools. My troop, for instance, was chartered by a church, and we met in one of the church’s public spaces and stored our supplies there.

It’d be trivial to create a front organization if a bunch of parents want to if they want to be self sponsoring and fulfill the letter of the law. Now, if parents do that, how much would the national organization both investigate and punish if they do so?

If I remember correctly, there wouldn’t be any punishment as it wouldn’t be against the rules. Every unit must be have a chartering organization, and I believe it must be a non-profit but it doesn’t have to be a particular type of non-profit -charter organizations are most commonly churches or schools but athletic associations, civic associations, homeowner associations, parent-teacher organizations, fraternal organizations etc can all be chartering organizations. I believe the main reason for a chartering organization is because the BSA doesn’t want to have individual people holding the charter for packs or troops - you can sometimes end up with unintended results when individuals act on behalf of a group and giving the charter to an individual person makes it difficult to have the program run continuously. If John gets a charter for Pack 75 , what happens to Pack 75 when Johns’s son moves up to Boy Scouts and he charters Troop 75 and loses interest in the pack ? And then what happens when the son ages out of Scouting altogether?

I was under the impression that there are sometimes competing Boy Scouts groups in an area due to actual or perceived policies or viewpoints of the chartering organization. Is this actually true? If a fundamentalist church is the chartering organization for a troop, does this typically influence the troop’s politics and polices? If a troop is chartered by the KKK, would this be likely to result in a troop that enforces a White Only policy and blacks go start your own troop?

E.g., “This troop is sponsored by the Bible Baptist Church of Glendale and adheres to the 1882 Statement of Faith of Fundamentalist Churches. Take your un-biblical practices on divorce and alcohol consumption elsewhere or we shall taunt you a second time. Oh, and your kids are expelled from the troop because they are obviously hellbound. Have a nice day sir.”

From my own Boy Scout days, I don’t remember any influence on politics or policies from chartering organizations. (There were many troops in the area, and they would compete with one another at events like Camporees and First Aid Meets, but that’s not the kind of competition you’re talking about.)

But I do remember reading that recently, when they were considering relaxing the restriction against gay Scouts, they were at least talking for awhile about leaving it up to the chartering organizations.

Perhaps in theory but not so much in practice.

Chartering Organizations can and do require that members of the unit they follow share similar moral principles. You see this most commonly in LDS sponsored units, where all the youth and adults are members of the sponsoring church (Mormons use the BSA as their youth program, which is one of the reasons they have such a large fraction of the membership).

Although in practice (outside of LDS units), this is either quite rare or self-correcting. A Catholic sponsored troop might start every meeting with a Hail Mary and end every meeting with an Our Father. While they are probably not going to specifically bar non-Catholics, if you aren’t Catholic you will probably join another unit. (I specifically know of a troop that does this. Since they recruit out of a pack that recruits out of the church school, there really aren’t many non-catholics in the recruiting pool anyway).

Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way. The troop I got my Eagle in was sponsored by the local Electrical Workers Union, until we got to big for the union hall and moved our charter to the local Catholic Church. There were some fears that the chartering organization would interfere, but the Hindus, Jews, Baptists, and religious-enough-to-be-in-Scouts-although-obviously-more-of-an-atheist scouts stayed members in good standing.

The time the chartering orgs membership policy really comes up (outside of the aforementioned LDS) is when an adult with a felony wants to join. BSA does a background check on all adults - if it’s a violent crime or a crime involving children, BSA will NOT let them join. But, if it’s merely a non-violent felony (like check fraud or whatever), it’s up to the chartering org to decide if they are scout-like enough to be a member.

While every unit MUST have a charter org, not every scouter must have a unit (I am one). It’s rare, but if they only thing you do is at the district or council level, you can register there instead.

ETA: Your question about KKK: I doubt National would grant a charter to the local KKK chapter (the charter application does have to be approved, so NAMBLA isn’t getting a charter either). As far as racial segregation, I believe in the 70s National decreed that attempting to force racial segregation would get a unit’s charter yanked, although I don’t know if that is still part of the standards or in the charter agreement. Those are online, so I suppose I could look it up, but I am supposed to be working now. :slight_smile:

Scoutmaster here.
First of all, agroup of community members could get together and form the chartering organization (CO). We have one CO here that is Friends of Troop XX.

For how it is actually run, you need to divide scouting into Latter-Day Saints (LDS) units and everyone else. In the LDS Church, Scouting is THE youth group for boys and it is tightly run by the stake. Someone who is involved in an LDS unit could probably offer more details. In other units, the CO can range from very hands on to absentee owners. It is up to the CO’s executive officer and chartering organization representatives on how they want to run things.

Lastly, I wouldn’t say that there are competing troops based on viewpoints (although that may change with the whole homosexuality issue). It is more of a lot of people wanting to be very big frogs in very small ponds. So you get a whole bunch of little units rather than a collection of medium to large healthy units. My experience is that many councils have more units than the population can really support.

So it seems that the policies and practices of the chartering organization can have an effect. How typical is it for there to be significant real life issues surrounding this (i.e. in practice, not just theory)? Is it common for youth and adults to be expelled from a troop over doctrinal or political controversies with the sponsoring organization outside of controversies with BSA in general? I believe that BYU the university has a policy of expelling students who were LDS when they enrolled but who renounce the faith or convert to another religion. Will an LDS sponsored troop typically expel people who leave the LDS faith even if they have not violated any general Scouting principles or policies? If they do, can the outcasts take their merit badges, etc. and join another troop, or are they gone from scouting forever or do they have to start over from the ground up with no awards and the lowest rank?

“You’re 15. Why do you want to join Troop 6643 now? I see by the record that you’ve been with Troop 7332 since you were 11. Why the change?”
“Troop 7332 enforces an LDS only policy. They found out that my dad and I are converting to Lutheranism and expelled us. My little brother decided to stay LDS for the moment but he’s lost most of his responsibilities because he is deemed a liability because he’s connected with so many apostates. He might want to join soon.”

There are rare cases where a Scout is expelled from a unit not for doctrinal difference but because the scout or parent creates conflict in the unit. That is not to say there is not doctrinal differences but if so, the scout usually finds a better match on their own.

If you are kicked out of a unit, you are still the same rank and have all of the awards you earned and would pick up from where you left off.

In practice it is very, very rare. More commonly the scouts leaves because of the 'fumes (perfumes and car fumes). I have never, ever heard of a scout being told “you violate tenant #4624 of our church, so you are banned from our troop”.

LDS units are the youth organization of the LDS church. I imagine if you stopped being Methodist you would stop going to Methodist Sunday School, right? Same thing here.

The scout’s advancement record stays with him. I personally moved troops 3 different times as a youth. As long as I had my book with signatures for my rank and my blue cards for merit badges, there was never any issue (and realistically, all of that is supposed to be duplicated in triplicate anyway if a scout wants to move units).

In practice, scouts move all the time, but I have never heard of them being questioned about why they are changing units. Maybe dad got a new job and they moved. Maybe they wanted to do more hiking and less canoeing. Maybe they didn’t get along with one of the other kids in the unit. Most scoutmasters are just glad to have more youth in the unit.

For a long time, until about 3 years ago, part of the District Executive (who is a paid professional scouter responsible mainly for fundraising and the health of units in a geographic area, usually a county or small city), anyway, part of the DE’s performance measure was “how many units were started in your district?”. There was not an equivalent check for “how many units failed in your district?”. So for a long time DEs would stand up a new unit with the minimum number of youth and adults, and then ignore them while they failed, and then do the same thing next year.

Thankfully, somebody at National realized this was insane, and changed the performance metric to “total youth in the program” and “year over year retention”, so lately DEs are more concerned with getting an unhappy scout to transfer to a different unit or support a failing unit or even merging two units together (the district next to ours merged all the venture crews, which are historically quite small, into one super-crew that is doing very well because they have 20-30 members.)

But yes, many churches do like the idea of “well, we sponsor a Boy Scout Troop!”, so there are quite a few units that muddle along rather than merging to form units that could actually implement the patrol method.

Based on my experience (and it’s 25 years or so old) in the part of suburban Houston I grew up in, is that there were several troops in my part of town, and that generally speaking, the parents of each cub scout den would kind of shop around for which troop more or less met their idea of what they should be doing.

My troop was chartered by the local volunteer fire department, and had been around since the late 1950s or early 1960s. Most of the other troops in the area were chartered by churches.

That being said, the deciding factor seemed to be that if your dad had served in the military, you ended up in our troop. Not that we were particularly militaristic, but our scoutmaster’s leadership development philosophy was to push a lot of the decision making (and consequences) to the scouts themselves, rather than have the scoutmasters plan most everything. This meant that we had our share of half-cooked meals, and messed up campouts, but also that when we were done, we were very self-reliant and capable.

Some of the other troops in the area were known for being Eagle Scout mills- that’s what they did. Over the 3 years I was in scouts, I think our troop had 7 of us get Eagle, out of probably a total of 50-60 scouts. Some of the others had a much higher percentage- basically if you stayed in long enough, they’d make sure you got it.

The only reason our number was so high is because me and 5 of my friends from the neighborhood were all really competitive with each other and none of us wanted to NOT be the one of us who didn’t make Eagle Scout.

Just to clear up one legal misunderstanding: Boy Scouts of America is not a 501©3 organization. They have a Congressional Charter as a Title 36 corporation.

I’ve been involved in four troops over the years, and all four were chartered by churches. IME, the churches have played zero role in actually running the troops, and have caused no political/religious interference.

I’ve heard the “fumes” nowadays defined to include marijuana.

And a nitpick: it’s “tenet” (violating a tenant could lead to criminal charges!).

The two are not mutually exclusive. Title 36 chartering is a grant of federal recognition and intellectual property protection, not a tax status.

The purpose of local chartering groups is pretty simple: otherwise all dues and other income would have to be funneled through the national organization.

:smack:

I’m a cub scout den leader :). Our CO is the local elementary school, and we have the largest pack in the district (I think).

The only time I’ve heard of a CO getting involved from a policital/religious angle is the gay issue. Some organizations, including some churches, have stopped sponsoring units because of BSA’s anti-gay policies. On the other hand, now that the BSA is thinking of allowing gays, I’ve heard some other groups (mainly churches) threaten to withdraw their charter. Which is probably why the BSA is thinking about going with a local option.