Overall Region Numbers
Well another year has come to a close and the final numbers are in for membership.
The total number of youth members in the region as at the end of March 2019 was 527 comprising of 54 Joey Scouts, 213 Cub Scouts, 170 Scouts, 66 Venturer Scouts and 24 Rover Scouts. Unfortunately, this count is down -8.8% since 01 April 2018.
The chart below shows the number throughout the year. The drop off at the end is most likely due to Group Leaders undertaking a membership cleanup of youth members that either haven’t paid membership or are no longer returning to Scouts. Ideally Groups should be resigning members at the beginning of each term that don’t return. If the youth member is resigned and then returns before the end of the financial year, the parents just complete a youth joining form and they are re-instated (membership fee covers the entire Scouting year).
The region youth count target set by the Chief Commissioner of Queensland for the 2018-19 Scouting year was 773 Youth members. This target is updated each to ensure we achieve the goal of 22,000 youth members in QLD in 2022. At present our region is well behind the required target as is QLD overall. At the end of the 2018-19 Scouting year, Scouts QLD only had just over 11,000 youth members.
At the end of March 2019, we also had a total of 209 Adult Members comprising of 1 Assistant Region Commissioner, 3 District Commissioners, 13 District Leaders, 100 group/section Leaders, 63 Support Members (Adult Members & Adult Helpers), 27 Fellowship members and 2 campsite members.
Below is the Region Dashboard for the year as well as the dashboards for the three Districts.
As shown in the dashboards, the region is certainly enrolling a significant number of new members (around 218) but the Churn rate (resignations with respect to recruitment – shown in the last column) is very large and has certainly hurt us this year. If we even just half the Churn rate we would have a substantial growth in membership.
What is pleasing to see is the large number of youth that are linking into new sections (or Units as they are referred to under NYP).
