I heard most United Ways Have Dropped BSA funding, is it true?
Description
This article is from the Scouting FAQ, by Bill Nelson nelsonb@nospam.aztec.asu.edu, Soaring Golden Eagle eagle@rangernet.org and Alan Houser troop24@emf.net with numerous contributions by others.
I heard most United Ways Have Dropped BSA funding, is it true?
Date: 23 Oct 2002
There are a number of lists of United Way agencies that are said to not
support the BSA being circulated around the Internet. Political
interest groups of either conservative or liberal orientation are using
these lists to communicate a message slanted to their agenda. Almost all
of these lists are inaccurate.
The United Way is a system of 1,400 separately incorporated,
independent organizations. Each raises money in an annual fund-raising
campaign and allocates funds to local health and human service
agencies. During the height of the homosexual policy controversy in
the United States (1999-2001) and with a lot of pressure from
homosexual political advocacy groups, a very, very small number of
United Ways, about 40 of the 1,040 agencies (approx. 3 percent),
announced that they were removing funding from BSA traditional
Scouting operations. However, the majority of the BSA's funding from
United Ways already didn't go to the BSA traditional Scouting
operation but rather to the "other programs" the BSA Councils conduct
to fund at-risk,special needs, handicapped, and in-school
programs...most of which fall under the Learning for Life umbrella
now. It should not be surprising then to find that out of the 40 or
so United Ways that announced they did not support the BSA over half
continue to support the BSA Learning for Life program or have resumed
simply donating funds to their local councils to be used as the local
councils see fit. This leaves approximately 1 percent of the
independent United Way agencies not supporting the BSA in any way. As
you can see, we are talking about very small numbers here.
Related sites:
http://national.unitedway.org/aboutuw/boyscouts.cfm
http://www.scouting.org/nav/enter.jsp?s=3Dmc&c=3Dps
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