Moving Forward Under A New Strategic Plan
 
On Wednesday, April 16, 2025, the Council’s Executive Board adopted a new Strategic Plan for the High Desert Council. That action was the final step in a process that began in January, 2024, when a task force was assembled from volunteers all over the Council to create a new Plan and recommend it to the Board. The result of the hard work by the 10 members of that task force is a living document that will guide the Council as we take flight under our new name!
 
The Strategic Plan is both practical and ambitious:
• Practical because it recognizes that we cannot do everything we might like to do and we have to be selective in how we spend our time, effort, and money. 
• Ambitious because it sets a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal to grow Cub Scout membership from its current rate of 0.6% of Total Available Youth-now about 1,300 Cubs-to 1.0% of TAY by the end of 2030, about 2,600 Cubs.

There are several reasons for making Cub Scout growth the key priority for the Council:
• we compete with many other possible activities that parents could choose for their children, and those choices are made at an early age;
• research shows that the longer a youth is in Scouting, the more positive the long-terms benefits are; and.
• Packs provide the largest portion of boys and girls entering Troops. 
 
Placing emphasis on attracting, recruiting, and retaining Cub Scouts and their families will pay long-term benefits to the Council, including better community support, improved finances, and more stable membership as those youth move up in the Program after their Pack experience. Simply put, more Cub Scouts in Packs now means more Troops and Crews with growing membership in the next few years. 
 
To make that membership growth goal a success, the Plan calls for diversifying the sources of the Council’s revenue and growing the operating budget, improving program quality to increase Cub Scout retention, simplifying the unit-level adult volunteer experience, creating Council-level programming that directly supports units, and creating a unified Value Proposition for the Council to use in advertising, public education, and internal communications. Responsibility for those actions will rest both with Council operating committees and in our base of dedicated, engaged adults. 
 
The Strategic Plan is posted on the Council website, and I encourage you to review it - it’s less than 10 pages long! It is not a document that will be put onto a shelf and forgotten. The Board will be reviewing our progress in all the areas identified in the Plan several times a year, to make sure that we are moving forward in a timely manner. Working together, we can achieve the goals of the Plan in a thriving High Desert Council!
 
—Chris Sandberg, High Desert Council Executive Board Chair