Considering the number of good hams out there, it isn't all that hard to turn things around.
I started a "new ham" meeting at a local church. The local club already has meetings there at 7:30pm so I start my meeting at 6pm. The meeting's purpose is to support people who have a ham license but have been active for under a year. We have lessons on starter issues, making coax cables, measuring SWR, building ground-plans and dipoles, talking on a net, understanding repeaters, making first 40m SSB contact, wiring a power supply (power pole crimping, fusing and wire gauges), using a VOM, common ham-tools, shrink-wrap tubing, FM vs SSB. I made a web page to support this at
http://torborg.com/a and that has lists of curriculum, photos, and support material for the new ham meetings. The meetings attract longer-term hams as well and often we can break off to one on ones to follow-up on things.
To try to retain hams, attract young people, we activated a packet radio chatROOM, and talk about how to get on that. There is a local repeater which was underutilized and we took it over for the new-ham-centric group. We talk about getting on the chatRoom on that repeater and that attracts attention too. Try to make sure somebody in your group is able to answer QRZ? on the repeater and chatRoom. That way people who call in may actually stay around.
When I was in my 20s I was told by an older ham that I was wet-behind-the-ears for thinking that I could own and operate my own repeater. So I did it anyway. Now that I'm an older ham, I try to go out of my way to promote the ideas of the new hams, steering the project to not hurt other ham projects and to be rule abiding (transmitters must be identified, and so on). We've had quite a few dumb ideas around here that were tremendous fun.
This isn't hard. If you think it isn't being done well or enough, start something.
Tadd - KA2DEW