Scout councils (Boy Scouts of America)

Board members serve without pay and some are volunteer Scouters working at the unit level.

Thatcher Woods Council in the western suburbs of Chicago, for example, consisted of eleven city blocks and a small county forest tract.

The Katahdin Area Council of north-central Maine consists of nearly 18,000 square miles and represents almost one-third of the population and two-thirds of the land area of the state of Maine; it is the largest council east of the Mississippi River.

In order to better track organizational growth, in the early 1940s the national office undertook a study to determine the best way to manage the myriad councils that now made up the organization.

[16] In 1959, the addition of Alaska and Hawaii as the 49th and 50th states, respectively, disrupted the numbering system and made it much less prominent.

[18] Circa 1960, the BSA renumbered all local Councils in alphabetical order by state and headquarters city.

However, in 1975 the BSA changed its policy and authorized individual councils to provide local numbers as they saw fit.

This system was set in place circa 2000 and has not been adjusted post COVID, LDS departure and the Chapter 11 proceedings.

[citation needed] Each council is also assigned a grade (1-4), similar to the locality adjustment of the US civil service pay scale.

Conversely, due to Scouting population and geographic distance, the Utah National Parks Council is organized into 39 districts divided among 12 geographic sectors,[29] with each led by a volunteer assistant vice president and assistant council commissioner with each sector.

The lower peninsula, excluding parts of Berrien and Cass county, is now all under the Michigan Crossroads Council.

[31] The BSA charters two councils for American Scouts living overseas, largely on military bases in Europe and Asia.

The Transatlantic Council, headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, serves BSA units in much of Europe, Africa, Middle East, and Central Asia.

[32] While the Far East Council, headquartered at Camp Zama in Japan, serves units in the western Pacific areas, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Okinawa, Thailand, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, Cambodia, Indonesia and Bangladesh.

[32][33] The Aloha Council in Hawaii also serves BSA units in the American territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and in the sovereign countries of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau.

[34][35] The Direct Service branch enables U.S. citizens and their dependents abroad to access Scouting programs in other locations and in isolated areas, including the Interamerican Region (North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean).

[37] The local councils have gone through thousands of name changes, merges, splits and re-creations since the establishment of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910.

Cockrell Scout Center of the Sam Houston Area Council
Michigan Crossroads Council Flint Service Center
The Greater New York Council office is located in the Empire State Building
Far East Council areas served