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jamesqWin, lose or draw, the lawsuit against SCA Inc, is going to be expensive, and the group is already running a deficit. The SCA doesn't have a lot of income streams and the biggest one is membership fees, hence the fee increase.
This is akin to a government raising taxes. The only problem is that your taxes aren't voluntary but membership in the SCA is. I expect a lot of people simply aren't going to renew. Let's look at who buys memberships:
The problem is #5 - a lot of people simply can't afford it anymore, and that number is growing. And if they can't afford $35/year, they certainly can't afford $43. The deficit, the fee increase, the lawsuit, they're all happening during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. We don't see it so much here in Canada, but there are places in the US where the unemployment rate has reach Great Depression levels, and those jobs aren't coming back. Unemployment benefits for millions of Americans are about to expire, and lots of people are losing their homes. In the grand scheme of things, your SCA membership is not going to be a priority.
At the same time, the SCA is an aging organization. I have no numbers to back that up, but it is a testable hypothesis: All you need to do is look at the old membership statistics to see what the average age is each year. Anyone know if those numbers are publicly accessible?
We're going to see a rapid loss of membership if the average age of membership goes much higher. There's just not enough kids to replace us all.
I've made some of these arguments before, but now I'm going to focus on some of them.
Possibility one: The SCA survives it's current legal/financial crisis, but doesn't really change how it operates.
In this case I see the SCA slowly losing membership and it leveling out in 20 years or so somewhere in the neighborhood of 10K-20K memberships. Aside from providing a global umbrella of insurance for branches, the BoD doesn't do much - it simply won't have the funds to do much.
Possibility two: The SCA is bankrupted, either from a drastic loss of income (i.e. lack of memberships) or a huge outside cost (i.e. losing a lawsuit).
Keep in mind that there is really two parts to the SCA, one is the organizational framework provided by the BoD, the other is the rank-and-file members who just want to do their thing. Bankruptcy kills the BoD, but leaves the members intact. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to let the bankruptcy of SCA Inc stop me from going to Quad War. A new SCA could rise from the ashes. It would need to be substantially different, lest it inherit the former groups liabilities (i.e. you can't just lose a lawsuit, declare bankruptcy and change your name to SCA 2.0 - it's been tried before and the courts are well aware of it). An elected BoD, with a well-developed framework for oversight and removal of bad elements would be a start. The governing documents of the Boy Scouts of America would make a good template.
I'd recommend carving off the Canadian branches into an independent group that's affiliated with the global SCA in the same way that Lochac is. I'm not sure of the logistics of that - organizing nationally seems too big for such a sparse group, but doing so Provincially seems to be too small, given it would be ten provinces divided over four (proto-)Kingdoms.
Possibility three: A Hail Mary pass succeeds!
Something happens to "rescue" the SCA. An endowment from a rich eccentric; an outside source of income that takes the strain off the membership; or some large, untapped source for new members is discovered ("Lloyd the Conquorer" becomes a block-buster and the SCA becomes the "it" group to join). I have no idea what this would be, but it would be good in the short term (people don't need to scramble to pick up the pieces of a broken SCA or keep their heads above water in a shrinking SCA), but would be bad in the long term. Such rescues are unlikely to happen once, much less twice or with reliable regularity. Also I believe the SCA is simply badly run and has numerous systemic flaws (for example, non-elected directors) that will prevent it from fixing itself. This would prevent us from taking advantage of the clean slate of a brand new organization.
Needless to say, I don't think a Hail Mary pass is likely. I do like the idea of a reorganized SCA, although the circumstances of this occurring will be painful. I'm not looking forward to that, though I think a stronger group will result. A decentralized organization might be able to withstand the membership shrink I'm predicting.
Regardless, I think it's clear that a storm is coming and everyone should prepare for it. Storms can be destructive, but they can be survived and they do clear the air.
This is akin to a government raising taxes. The only problem is that your taxes aren't voluntary but membership in the SCA is. I expect a lot of people simply aren't going to renew. Let's look at who buys memberships:
- People who can afford it and will do so regardless of any reasonable increase. These are basically affluent SCA "lifers". This is the base membership that the BoD can always depend on being there.
- People who can afford it and will pay so long as they feel they are getting something out of membership. This could be a simple cost/benefit analysis of ( membership fees <= non-member surcharge * number-of-events-per-year ), or it could be a gut feeling that paying the membership fee is the right thing to do. The BoD can probably keep these people so long as it doesn't actively piss them off.
- People who can afford it, but pay it because they feel they have no choice. Officers and people receiving awards who aren't already in category 2. This is the category I'm in - I don't really think the membership give me anything other then a useless newsletter. It's just a hoop I've jumped through to be an officer in the local branch.
- People who probably can't afford it, but do so anyway. Life is full of people who skip the necessities for the luxuries. Mostly they muddle through.
- People who really really can't afford it. They will drop out, regardless of their beliefs in whether it's worth it or not.
The problem is #5 - a lot of people simply can't afford it anymore, and that number is growing. And if they can't afford $35/year, they certainly can't afford $43. The deficit, the fee increase, the lawsuit, they're all happening during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. We don't see it so much here in Canada, but there are places in the US where the unemployment rate has reach Great Depression levels, and those jobs aren't coming back. Unemployment benefits for millions of Americans are about to expire, and lots of people are losing their homes. In the grand scheme of things, your SCA membership is not going to be a priority.
At the same time, the SCA is an aging organization. I have no numbers to back that up, but it is a testable hypothesis: All you need to do is look at the old membership statistics to see what the average age is each year. Anyone know if those numbers are publicly accessible?
We're going to see a rapid loss of membership if the average age of membership goes much higher. There's just not enough kids to replace us all.
I've made some of these arguments before, but now I'm going to focus on some of them.
Possibility one: The SCA survives it's current legal/financial crisis, but doesn't really change how it operates.
In this case I see the SCA slowly losing membership and it leveling out in 20 years or so somewhere in the neighborhood of 10K-20K memberships. Aside from providing a global umbrella of insurance for branches, the BoD doesn't do much - it simply won't have the funds to do much.
Possibility two: The SCA is bankrupted, either from a drastic loss of income (i.e. lack of memberships) or a huge outside cost (i.e. losing a lawsuit).
Keep in mind that there is really two parts to the SCA, one is the organizational framework provided by the BoD, the other is the rank-and-file members who just want to do their thing. Bankruptcy kills the BoD, but leaves the members intact. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to let the bankruptcy of SCA Inc stop me from going to Quad War. A new SCA could rise from the ashes. It would need to be substantially different, lest it inherit the former groups liabilities (i.e. you can't just lose a lawsuit, declare bankruptcy and change your name to SCA 2.0 - it's been tried before and the courts are well aware of it). An elected BoD, with a well-developed framework for oversight and removal of bad elements would be a start. The governing documents of the Boy Scouts of America would make a good template.
I'd recommend carving off the Canadian branches into an independent group that's affiliated with the global SCA in the same way that Lochac is. I'm not sure of the logistics of that - organizing nationally seems too big for such a sparse group, but doing so Provincially seems to be too small, given it would be ten provinces divided over four (proto-)Kingdoms.
Possibility three: A Hail Mary pass succeeds!
Something happens to "rescue" the SCA. An endowment from a rich eccentric; an outside source of income that takes the strain off the membership; or some large, untapped source for new members is discovered ("Lloyd the Conquorer" becomes a block-buster and the SCA becomes the "it" group to join). I have no idea what this would be, but it would be good in the short term (people don't need to scramble to pick up the pieces of a broken SCA or keep their heads above water in a shrinking SCA), but would be bad in the long term. Such rescues are unlikely to happen once, much less twice or with reliable regularity. Also I believe the SCA is simply badly run and has numerous systemic flaws (for example, non-elected directors) that will prevent it from fixing itself. This would prevent us from taking advantage of the clean slate of a brand new organization.
Needless to say, I don't think a Hail Mary pass is likely. I do like the idea of a reorganized SCA, although the circumstances of this occurring will be painful. I'm not looking forward to that, though I think a stronger group will result. A decentralized organization might be able to withstand the membership shrink I'm predicting.
Regardless, I think it's clear that a storm is coming and everyone should prepare for it. Storms can be destructive, but they can be survived and they do clear the air.
