Its still business as usual with local and regional Boy Scout organizations, despite the national groups recent bankruptcy declaration.

Facing myriad sexual abuse lawsuits, the Boy Scouts of Americas national organization filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week in the hopes of restructuring and creating a Victims Compensation Trust to pay damages to victims.

Recent events at national level will not adversely affect local Boy Scouts programming, Sioux Council Scout Executive Tom Smotherman told the Press & Dakotan.

The Sioux Council, our corporation, is legally separate and independent financially from the national organization, Smotherman said. The national organization has filed for a restructuring under Chapter 11, but that does not affect any of our resources here in the Sioux Council. All of our resources are owned and located inside Sioux Council and theyre governed by our volunteer executive board.

Every individual council is like that, he said.

We pay a service fee to the national office for services that they can provide more economically than we could independently for ourselves, Smotherman said. (Those include( things like creating policies for health and safety for our summer camps, creating promotional materials and marketing.

Local chapters also take advantage of the national organizations engineering and architectural departments for help designing new camp buildings, he said.

They are their own independent corporation, Smotherman said. They have their own executive board, and they determined that they needed to do this restructuring.

The Sioux Council has not filed for bankruptcy, he said.

Meetings and activities, district and council events, other scouting adventures and countless service projects are taking place as usual, Smotherman said. In short, there should be no change to the local scouting experience.

Only the national organization of the Boy Scouts is involved in the chapter 11 filing, he added.

The Sioux Council, which provides programming, financial facilities and administrative support to local units and individual Boy Scouts in our area, is separate and distinct from the national organization, Smotherman said. Our camps, properties and all the local contributions are controlled by our council.

The Sioux Council covers 61 counties from the Rosebud Indian Reservation, North to the North Dakota border, and east to include seven counties in Minnesota and one county in Iowa.

The Sioux Council will not only be continuing with activities as planned, but officials are also excited about 2020 and beyond, he said.

In 2019, we had our best fall membership drive in several years, Smotherman said. In 2019, we increased the number of youth recruited in 2018 by about 37%. So, we believe that families believe that scouting is a great organization for character education, citizenship training and physical fitness.

Having identified approximately $6 million in needed improvements, the Sioux Council launched a capital improvement campaign that has raised over $3 million in the last year or so, he said.

We plan to make some really extensive improvements, not only to our Center for Scouting in Sioux Falls, but at our camp properties, including Lewis and Clark down at Tabor, Smotherman said. Things are moving very quickly and we are excited about our opportunity to serve more and more youth with the scouting program and its beneficial aspects.

He said the group is always looking for more unit leaders and volunteers, too.

We ended the year with more units than the year before, Smotherman said. We added 20 new units with the volunteers that go along with them. So, things are moving well and in the right direction, but we always want to grow more and do more.

The biggest takeaway from the positive trend is that communities believe that the Boy Scouts is still relevant, he said.

They are contributing to the capital improvement campaign, and we depend on community organizations to charter our Cub Scout Packs and our Boy Scout Troops, Smotherman said. So, we had more companies, more businesses and more community organizations coming to us and saying, Hey, lets talk about starting a new Cub Scout Pack or a Boy Scout Troop.

Were in a good position to move forward for a long time to come.

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Local Boy Scouts Not Affected By Bankruptcy Filing - Vermillion Plain Talk