Northeast Illinois Council > Annual Youth Registration Fee

Annual Youth Registration Fee

Announcement of New Annual Youth Registration Fee

 

 

Local councils have raised their own funds and sustained themselves through giving campaigns with Scouting units. However, the manner in which people support Non-Profit programs has changed — dramatically. The NEIC has worked tirelessly to keep the cost of Scouting as low as possible for our families. Our council is fiscally sound; however, it is crucial that we continuously review our financial structure in order to guarantee the longevity of our local programs. Year after year, our council has subsidized rising core costs from other sources to keep individual fees as low as possible and has been forced to make changes to expenses while seeing these traditional revenue sources change.

 

Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to subsidize core costs at past levels. As a result, the NEIC—like a number of other local councils—must implement an enhanced individual fee in order to pay for existing facilities, programs, and staff.

 

Accordingly, an Annual Youth Registration Fee, or AYR Fee, of $240 will be assessed to each youth member, beginning January 1, 2023.

  • The $240 AYR Fee will be charged to all youth (other than in our Discover Scouts and Exploring programs).
  • The AYR Fee will be payable by families in one of two ways:
    • An upfront payment of $240 in January 2023.
    • Via recurring monthly installments of $20 charged to a credit or debit card (plus $0.70/month for credit cards). These monthly payments will be collected automatically, meeting the needs of today’s families.
  • The AYR Fee will eliminate the $15 NEIC insurance fee for 2023.
  • The AYR Fee will cover the BSA membership fee that will be due in the 2023 rechartering cycle, leaving no payments by families at the end of next year and easing the stress on the unit of the recharter process. 

What additional benefits will members and their units receive in 2023 for this annual investment?

  • Free campsite rentals at Camps Sol R. Crown and Oakarro
  • A set of free Council and District Scouting activities, including open programs at Camp Crown on select weekends
  • Free rank advancement patches
  • Elimination of Family Friends of Scouting/Compass Point unit presentations
  • Accident & Liability Insurance coverages
  • Free basic adult leader training
  • 10% in-store discount off Scout uniforms in September and October

We recognize the timing of this fee increase creates challenges as units have already begun collecting fees for their 2023 registration renewal process, and we would not make this difficult decision if it were not absolutely necessary. We are committed to supporting you through this change and are making necessary adjustments to the online rechartering system to support units through the recharter process.

 

Additionally, we realize that there will be families that have financial situations that could prevent them from benefiting from Scouting.  We will help with that need through the creation of a confidential financial aid program that will provide substantial assistance to such families.  Details of this program will be forthcoming shortly. 

 

Frequently Asked Questions

A Message from the NEIC Key 4: Why the New Annual Youth Registration Fee is Needed

Scouting in the Northeast Illinois Council has recently faced difficult challenges that have greatly impacted recruiting, membership and program activities of troops, packs and other units, including the 2019 storm at Ma-Ka-Ja-Wan Scout Reservation, the COVID-19 pandemic and the bankruptcy proceedings of the Boy Scouts of America, Inc.

Equally important, but far less visible to our membership, are the financial challenges that the council has faced during this time. Costs have increased in many areas, ranging from food service at Ma-Ka-Ja-Wan to compensation for entry-level professional positions. Even more significantly, our mainstay Family Friends of Scouting fundraising campaign (FFOS) has dramatically underperformed.

The leadership of the NEIC—the four of us signing this letter, who hold the senior volunteer and professional positions in the council, and the rest of our council’s Executive Board—have worked endlessly to permit the council to continue to deliver the Scouting program in our service area at roughly the same cost to members. We have scrutinized budgets, implemented staff reductions, obtained government support, launched novel fundraising programs and taken many other actions to operate within our means and preserve the wonderful programs that facilitate the mission of the BSA.

However, we have concluded that we had to implement the Annual Youth Registration Fee in order to sustain the council’s operations.

The details of the Annual Youth Registration Fee are explained in great detail elsewhere NEIC AYR Announcement, and we will not repeat those details here. Rather, in the interests of transparency, we want to explain why we made this decision.

We recognize that the imposition of this membership fee is not welcome news for our membership. One of the many benefits of the Scouting program is that participation has been very low cost, particularly in comparison to many other organized activities in which youth are involved. While we strongly believe that Scouting remains a relative bargain, this membership fee undeniably diminishes that advantage in some measure.

But we simply do not have another viable option to replace the funding that formerly sustained the council. Here are relevant factors that led the Executive Board to approve this new fee:

  • The Family Friends of Scouting campaign—rebranded this year as Compass Point—has long been a significant source of contributions to support NEIC operations. But FFOS has run out of steam. The amount raised from FFOS has fallen by nearly 50% over the past five years, and the participation rate in that period has plummeted from nearly half of all families to barely more than 10% this year. Further, FFOS has required an enormous time commitment from the council’s field staff.
  • In each of the past three fiscal years, the NEIC received unanticipated, but vital, infusions of $200,000 or more from federal government pandemic-era programs such as the Paycheck Protection Program. These funds made up for significant shortfalls from FFOS and other support channels for the council in those years. However, no such governmental support is going to be forthcoming next year or likely beyond.
  • In 2020, we raised nearly $500,000 in operating funds thanks to a special “Good Turn” campaign that solicited our council’s most generous donors for one-time gifts. Such a campaign cannot be repeated, though; these donors already give large amounts on a regular basis to the NEIC.
  • In late 2020, the NEIC implemented a significant headcount reduction in its paid staff, in an effort to stabilize the budgetary situation. However, we could not and did not reduce the overall amount of work that the staff was asked to do, nor have we hired back to our pre-pandemic levels. As a result, our staff is at a breaking point, and we cannot continue to place such great demands upon them. We must increase our staff headcount in a responsible fashion.
  • The combination of overwork of the staff, a very tight labor market and inflationary pressures has made it even harder, and more expensive, to keep existing staff and to hire new staff. You may have noticed that the council has had vacancies in the key role of District Executive for each of our three districts this year, lasting one month (and counting) in Aptakisic, three months in North Star (just filled) and five months in Potawatomi (also just filled). And we are now also searching for a new Director of Field Services to step into the role so ably filled by Cynthia Gentleman for many years.

One might be tempted to think that the NEIC should try to find more charitable donations, rather than charging new fees to its members. Indeed, we tried exactly that strategy this year. The NEIC launched two new “special event” fundraisers, the Down & Derby party in May and a Sporting Clays event in October. However, these events do not remotely replace the funding formerly derived from FFOS. Further, these two new events, along with the Good Scout Dinner, Youth Leadership Awards, Scouting Golf Classic and Eagle Challenge, mean we have six special events we are running each year, which requires enormous amounts of volunteer and staff time.

In these circumstances, it was incumbent upon the NEIC Executive Board to take steps to sustain the council’s operations without further cutbacks. We concluded that the prudent course of action would be to obtain that incremental revenue from the families that benefit from Scouting.

We want to point out that, while this new annual fee does increase the cost of Scouting, it is not as large as it appears on the surface. This fee will eliminate the separate insurance fee that the NEIC has been charging for youth ($15 this year), and it will cover the BSA youth membership fee that would otherwise be payable in 2023 (that fee is $75 this year, but it could well increase next year). In other words, of the $240 total AYR Fee, at least $90 would otherwise have been payable in late 2023 for each youth member. And the AYR Fee also has eliminated the $15 per registered adult fee for 2023 and beyond.

Many packs and troops charge their members for dues, and then used the resulting collections to pay the annual NEIC and BSA youth membership fees and NEIC insurance fees. Such units presumably will be able to lower, or in some cases eliminate, their annual dues, inasmuch as these costs will now be covered by the AYR Fee that families will be paying directly instead of indirectly through those dues.

We are also acutely aware that this fee could push Scouting out of reach for families with financial challenges. The NEIC is absolutely committed to making Scouting available to all interested youth, including in those communities that have been historically underserved by Scouting. We do not want this new fee to be a barrier. Therefore, we are committed to establishing a financial aid program that will provide a means for such families to request and obtain assistance to cover these fees. This program is currently under development; it will be finalized and made available well before any payments of the new fees are sought.

We also understand that the timing of this new fee announcement falls in the middle of our busy recruiting season, particularly for Cub Scouts. We apologize for that timing, but it was largely unavoidable. Once we recognized in late June that FFOS was not going to bounce back to prior levels, and that we were burning out our staff, we knew we had to do something different.

We moved as fast as we could, but this has been a very complex process. We did not want to release the details until we had worked them out. Many council volunteers and staff spent an enormous amount of time in a short period researching and evaluating alternatives, selecting a course of action and establishing the terms of this new fee arrangement. We did post a message back on August 1 on the council Facebook page–in conjunction with the announcement of fall 2022 joining fees–that indicated that a “significantly higher annual membership fee for youth members” was under consideration.

Beyond the benefits that the council and districts will be providing to members and units, as detailed in last week’s announcement, we think there will be additional salutary effects:

  • Unit treasurers and other leaders will not have to spend as much time soliciting members for end-of-year contributions
  • NEIC field staff can focus on supporting units and building membership instead of working on FFOS presentations

None of us wants to make Scouting unaffordable, and we all want Scouting to thrive in the Northeast Illinois Council. Our current path was unsustainable. We hope that you understand we have taken this major step in an effort to preserve the programs that we all know and love. Even with this new fee, we are convinced that Scouting remains one of the best investments that a family can make in its children.

We thank you for your continued support.