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Eric Scofield here, the Chief Development Officer of Young Life. I want to talk to the SLC. That's right, I want to talk specifically about some things that you might actually want to hear about from the development department if you will.

Specifically, I want to give you some insights as to how we're thinking about KNOWN and the prospects of raising $1.5 billion. That's right, that's not a typo or a “vrbo.” Anyway, between now, 2022 and 2030.

All right, let's start with the big question that I'm always asked. Hey, where does the money go and what's the plan and the timeline?

Well, first of all, let's break up that big $1.5 billion into four categories. First of all, we have $650 million for international. We have $375 million for the United States strategic plan. $250 million for our capital projects, primarily our Young Life camps and $225 million for what I'm calling core strategy, which would be our legacy plan giving commitments as well as a couple of things around the service center, i.e. an ERP.

It's a technology for our human resources and different things to take care of our people as well as a little Service Center upgrade. Nicer offices? Not necessarily. Just taking a building that was built a long time ago and making it appropriate for 2023 and beyond.

Okay, so where does the money go? Didn't I answer that question? I thought I did, but let's go back again. In the international, I mean, here's just a couple things. These are the big buckets -- the i100. Taking our very best leaders from across international, bringing them together that they can begin to share best practices, get to know each other. Certainly learn executive leadership, but it's way more than that. It's moving the culture button of Young Life. It's where Nicaragua meets Tanzania. It's where, well, I could fill in more countries, but why?

Campership is another big bucket. Taking more kids to camp. You know what happens at camp — lives change.

We have DGL. We've already had 1600 students in 14 years go through the DGL program, of which 35% have stayed on staff; it's a big bucket. Staff and country sponsor, and when we can find them, continent sponsors. That's $600,000 by the way.

Countries where we want to accelerate. In fact, we just received a $10 million gift in this area where people are saying, take your very best work internationally and put more money on it because we believe that's the smart way to go and do more. Camp on Wheels, a camp in Haiti, Map Tree List. We want to continue to scale that all the way out. These are some of the large buckets of the international plan.

What about the U.S.? Where does the money go? Well, there's actually 12 areas that the U.S. have in their strategic plan. I like to just focus on the first five. Supporting that area director. We believe that that's such a key role, and so we're raising money to help give what those area directors need around them to be able to do the most important work, which is recruiting volunteer leaders, spending time with kids, get them out of the office. Please get them out of the office.

Next Gen Leader. This is a phenomenal program, of which we have just launched it officially, and we have a plan to launch that again and again and again into the next and it's really going to be the U.S. version of DGL. We want to grow in our DEB work. We want to have spiritual growth and deepening in The Good Way and Developing Kingdom Leaders. We want to be able to volunteer, on-board and train so that all of our volunteers are receiving that great training, and you can trust that a volunteer on this side of the country lines up with a volunteer on that side of the country.

Well, what about this capital initiatives? What's that all about? Well, we have projects at LoneHollow, we have projects at Wild Ridge, we're still closing in on Woodleaf. I don't know if you heard this, but we're going to try and bring Frontier up to the 2023 days with a very big project of lots of things, which is a right to operate. From water to safety to some additional things around the kitchen, and we probably want to move the laundry room out of a dorm. Anyway, stuff like that.

We are also going to continue to have projects at Clearwater, Washington Family Ranch, i.e. paving a 13-mile road, and Haiti, and a COW. Those are all tied up inside of those capital. What about core mission initiatives? Well, we got now funding for Legacy. I told you about the ERP, and we got to do some things around the headquarters just to make it up to “snuff.”

Okay, what's the timeline?​ Well, the timeline is basically that we're going to try and raise this money between now and 2030, and we have it actually broken up into different chunks. And we're going to use The Table, which is our large gathering for large capacity donors, and we're going to do the table in '23, '25, '27 and '29. It's part of our plan.

We're going to do some organizational changes in my department, because we want to make sure that we're doing the right things the right way, and, by the way, this is three times the funding that we were going to do in Forward, so we got to do some things differently.

Now, you might have seen or heard that we have this thing called "8 - 4 - 2 - 1". ​ This means 8 million kids known by name; 4 million kids to camp; 2 million kids meeting Jesus; and 1 million kids being discipled. Where in the world did you get those numbers?

Well, basically we took​ what the United States and the international folks said in their SAT process, and we carried them all the way through. And we dropped 25% attrition each year, and really the numbers are actually there. The next thing we did was in the U.S., kids that go to camp, usually about 35% of those kids meet Jesus for the first time. Internationally, it's a lot higher than that, so we split the difference, knowing it's probably more kids go to camp in international than in the U.S., so we used 50% of that number. We just used the numbers that are already actually there. 8421 by the way, is something that people like to hear about.

And, we're going to have an ECC, an Executive Campaign Committee for KNOWN, just like we did for Forward. We have six people who have committed to that right now, we're looking for our seventh. We're just going to keep walking along, plodding along. We're going to get there.

I guess the last thing I would say is having a Campaigner group of my own on Wednesday mornings of 30 sophomore boys, and as I listen to them every single week process, and think, and try and just get ahold of what it means to follow Jesus, and meet Jesus, and still be a sophomore in high school, and all the different things they're trying to do, I just want to say thank you. All of you that are listening to this for what you do, because there are more kids that are meeting Jesus. There are more kids growing in their faith. I was at weekend camp two weeks ago, 400-plus kids in the club room at Crooked Creek. I'm just telling you, thank you.

What we're doing is eternal. What we're doing is meaningful. I was a sophomore who met the Lord in 1981 and I'm still here, and my faith has changed everything — from who I married, to how I parent, to what I do. Thank you for what you're doing. You can reach me anytime, escofield@sc.younglife.org or you can call me 858-248-1133. I am here to serve you. Thank you SLC, and bless you.