QC Boy Scout CEO reacts to name change
Jonathan Cartner of Eldridge knows the benefits of including girls in Boy Scouts of America.
The truly boyish CEO of the BSA Illowa Council, based in Davenport, has a daughter who’s been part of Boy Scouts since kindergarten and this week, the national organization formally banished “Boy” from its name, rebranding the 114-year-old organization as Scouting America.
“This is an opportunity to rebrand and reintroduce the scouting program to the nation,” Cartner said Wednesday from the BSA’s national meeting in Orlando, Fla., where the change was announced Tuesday, May 7. “It’s our opportunity also in Iowa and the Quad Cities to reintroduce scouting to the Quad Cities.”
“This kind of gives us the opportunity after a couple of years of the pandemic and the national bankruptcy to bring ourselves back out and rebrand, and importantly in a rebrand that showcases who we are as an organization today,” he said.
The Illowa Council has 130 scouting programs, serving 2,600 kids across 13 counties. Of that total, 16% of membership is female, including Cartner’s 11-year-old daughter.
The name Scouting America “gives us the opportunity to kind of reintroduce and rebrand and support scouting in a more inclusive environment, that is representative who we’ve been for years,” he said.
The BSA has allowed girls starting at age 14 to be part of programs since the mid-1980s, Cartner said.
“That’s been in existence for a long time, but hasn’t been a huge makeup of our population as far as our percentages have been,” he said Wednesday. “When in 2019, when we made the change to allow young ladies into Cub Scouts and then in 2021 to then have female-led Scout troops on the middle school and high school ages. That’s our fastest growing market right now, our young ladies coming into our program.”
The Illowa Council has really grown in terms of female Scouts over the last four years. “If it wasn’t for COVID, I think that number would be a lot higher, but not being able to meet and not being able to operate camps and support our program for 18 to 24 months, I think we would have a whole lot more than that,” Cartner said.
More welcoming, inclusive
Boy Scouts of America president Roger Krone announced Tuesday that the name change (effective next February for the 115th anniversary) is part of an evolution as the organization seeks to ensure that everyone feels welcome.
“We are an organization for all. It’s time our name reflects that,” Krone said during a virtual news conference during its annual meeting in Florida. “Scouting under the name Scouting America will enable us to chart a course towards continued growth, relevance and impact.”
Five years ago, the Boy Scouts opened its programs to girls after allowing LGBTQ youth in 2013, and gay scout leaders in 2015.
The Irving, Texas-based organization emerged from bankruptcy last year after facing more than 82,000 lawsuits from people sexually assaulted by scout leaders as children.
“I think it’s time that we have a game that reflects the youth that we serve today and frankly, the youth that we want to welcome in the future as part of our post-bankruptcy plan for scouting,” said Krone.
BSA, founded in 1910, had been targeted by sexual predators from its earliest days. The Scouts began keeping a secret list of accused predators back in 1919, but the national organization didn’t share the information with local chapters so suspected sexual predators could move from troop to troop.
Last year, BSA established a $2.4 billion fund to settle the flood of claims from sex abuse victims.
The Boy Scouts had more than 2 million members in 2018, but currently serves a little over a million youth with 176,234 girls.
“There’s nothing about scouting that is inherently masculine or inherently feminine,” said Bob Brady, scoutmaster of Troop 1150, an all-girls’ BSA troop in New Jersey.
“The name change is exactly what I would advocate,” said Scouts BSA Program Chair Angie Minett, the first woman to hold the position. “The most important message that people need to understand is that it’s [scouting] for everybody.”
Decline in membership
Since 2016, the QC area BSA has seen a steady decline in participation in the traditional scouting program.
“The pandemic obviously ramped that up and we saw a big dip in membership in 2021,” Cartner said Wednesday, noting 2023 was a growth year, up about 0.5 percent total.
“That was the first time we had overall membership growth since 2016,” he said. “It shows that families are looking for our organization or organizations like us to get back involved, back outside, engage as a family and support the community.”
The drop in BSA membership nationwide was partly due to competition for recreational time among youth, including youth athletics, Cartner said.
“There’s more single-parent households now than there were 15, 20 years ago,” he added. “There’s more two-parent working households now than there were 15 years ago.”
“Folks are busy and that was one of the leading indicators for us to make the shift in ‘19, to allow young ladies into Cub Scouts, which was a decision not necessarily started on a national level,” he said. “That conversation was started by hundreds of thousands of parents and Scouting asking us to make the change, because they wanted to find one program that they could participate in as their entire family.”
That’s true for Cartner’s family, where his daughter and 7-year-old son have been part of BSA. The 40-year-old Missouri native was a Boy Scout and became an Eagle Scout.
“We can all participate in the scouting program together. And we’re not having to go back and forth between different organizations or different programs, different meeting nights when we have limited time to do that,” he said.
Cartner noted that the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts have similar missions.
“Our mission is to teach kids leadership, to help support character education and development, to create participatory citizens, and help support and develop well rounded individuals that are gonna give back to their communities in adulthood,” he said. “We’ve got relatively similar missions, we just deliver that program a little differently.”
“There’s plenty of young girls that are involved in the Girl Scouts and that’s what they love to do and they love that program and they love Camp Liberty and what’s going on with Girl Scouts in Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois,” Cartner said.
“We’ve got a handful of young ladies that enjoy what we do and how we teach the program. It’s just a different delivery method rather than a difference of program,” he said. “We’re relatively the same, we just execute it a little differently and that resonates differently with families.”
No merger with Girl Scouts
Under Scouting America, there have been no talks for an overall merger of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts organizations, Cartner said.
“We look for ways that we can help support each other to grow both programs,” he said. “If that’s a conversation that happens down the road, I’m certain that both organizations can have that respectfully. I don’t know what those conversations are like.”
The reaction so far to the rebranding has been overwhelmingly positive, Cartner said.
“The announcement went out yesterday across the country. We were informed this morning by our national office and our marketing team that the impressions generated from that press release have crossed 5.5 billion media impressions,” he said.
“Ninety percent of the reaction and the response to that being positive. And like I said, we’ve had young ladies in our program, both as youth participants and adult participants for 20-plus years,” he added. “To finally reinvent and rebrand our organization and to now have moms as volunteers to be able to say, ‘I’m a volunteer in Scouting America’ versus ‘I’m a volunteer in the Boy Scouts of America,’ to have young ladies who are youth leaders and youth participants to now say ‘I’m in Scouting America versus Boy Scouts of America’…
“So it’s our opportunity to be a lot more inclusive and we’ve seen a lot of positive feedback from it so far,” Cartner said.
“We’re thrilled about it and excited and pressed forward and continuing to grow our impact in the Quad Cities,” he said. “This will just give us an extra tool in our tool belt to help support that growth.”
The name change is drawing criticism from some conservatives.
“The Left has now taken ‘Boy’ out of Boy Scouts,” Republican U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia said on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Wokeness destroys everything it touches.”
The mission of BSA is “to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law,” according to the Illowa Council website. “We strive each day to bring the best character-building program to young men and women, which will prepare them to be the leaders of tomorrow.”
Cartner became CEO for Illowa Council in April 2023, after working for BSA in Washington, D.C. for five years, last as field service director for the National Capital Area Council, which serves 34,000 Scouts.
For more information on the Illowa Council, click HERE.
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