How does Girl Scouts work?

[Anonymous]

Don’t really get how th GS model is around much anymore - Boyscouts (which now includes girls) is a much better set up.

[Anonymous]

It gets better. DD is now a Sr or Ambassador—not sure which. She’s in 10th. We ended up leaving GSCNC and switching to GSCM. GSCM has its own issues but they offer a Mariner and TrailBlazers troop. I think you can join as a Cadet.

Mariners focus on water activities and TrailBlazers focus on land activities. In reality, a lot of the girls do both. It’s the outdoor adventure aspect of GS. Since the girls are older, there is less parental help and more guiding. The troop leaders are awesome but all parents will step into help.

[Anonymous]

I am a Lifetime Girl Scout and am still active as a troop leader and summer camp staff member. Many of these posts make me sad. Girl Scouting has been a positive, powerful part of my life. I am sure that there are struggles with some troops and areas. Keep looking until you find a good fit. Lots of kids are in troops from different schools. There is an awful lot of training, but GS has a lot of safety rules that Boy Scouts don’t. Most of the training is online. There are so many opportunities, especially as girls get older. Please don’t tar the whole organization with the same brush, if you have had a frustrating experience. There is a membership coordinator for each neighborhood that can help you find a good fit.

You can send your child to a GS day or resident camp, even if they are not a Scout. You just register them when you sign up. The camps are affordable and well-run.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I just wish GS would fade away. They make a big push at the beginnging of elementary and get all the girls hyped up. I didn't want to be the parent who said "no we aren't doing girl scouts its dumb" but it is. The activities are boring and lame and I can't wait for DD to agree on her own.

It is what you make of it. If you're not willing to volunteer to make it fun, then no, it won't be fun.

My 9yo's troop does a LOT of fun things - they've been on two ropes courses, two overnight campouts, community service projects, and many other things I can't remember. My daughter LOVES it and her troop leaders are amazing. A lot of other parents volunteer to help chaperone, etc., which helps a lot.

I lead my younger child's troop and we are not as awesome, frankly, but the kids are younger and last year we asked parents to help us plan activities and literally only one parent offered to help. My co-leader and I both work full-time and it's too much for us to plan meetings and activities, we need help and no one wants to help.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am a Lifetime Girl Scout and am still active as a troop leader and summer camp staff member. Many of these posts make me sad. Girl Scouting has been a positive, powerful part of my life. I am sure that there are struggles with some troops and areas. Keep looking until you find a good fit. Lots of kids are in troops from different schools. There is an awful lot of training, but GS has a lot of safety rules that Boy Scouts don’t. Most of the training is online. There are so many opportunities, especially as girls get older. Please don’t tar the whole organization with the same brush, if you have had a frustrating experience. There is a membership coordinator for each neighborhood that can help you find a good fit.

You can send your child to a GS day or resident camp, even if they are not a Scout. You just register them when you sign up. The camps are affordable and well-run.

And really, really hard to get into in the DC area.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Don’t really get how th GS model is around much anymore - Boyscouts (which now includes girls) is a much better set up.

Anytime someone posts about girl scouts, the Boy Scout promoters jump on here and just bash, bash, bash away. OP - I guarantee 50% of the posts on here are from boy scout people posing at girl scouters.

FWIW, I've done both and they're different. Boy scouts expects parents to be much more involved in girl scouts.

[Anonymous]

I’m involved in the BSA and read DCUM postings regarding Scouts (whether GSUSA or BSA) so our Troop stays abreast of current parent thinking. I think we are all entering a period when the operations of youth services organizations are going to evolve fairly significantly. The BSA bankruptcy and COVID (for both organizations) have caused folks to understand the core strengths of the organizations and have laid bare practices that just don’t work as well as they once did. In the BSA, the casting aside of previous discriminatory membership policies has really invigorated things and welcomed large new constituencies. The GSUSA comments I notice most are the ones claiming apparent difficulties about finding and getting a girl into a troop, which I don’t really understand because there are so many GSUSA troops. Both organizations have fierce defenders who are happy with their status quo, but I think 80% of us are looking for improvements in the best interests of our children.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m involved in the BSA and read DCUM postings regarding Scouts (whether GSUSA or BSA) so our Troop stays abreast of current parent thinking. I think we are all entering a period when the operations of youth services organizations are going to evolve fairly significantly. The BSA bankruptcy and COVID (for both organizations) have caused folks to understand the core strengths of the organizations and have laid bare practices that just don’t work as well as they once did. In the BSA, the casting aside of previous discriminatory membership policies has really invigorated things and welcomed large new constituencies. The GSUSA comments I notice most are the ones claiming apparent difficulties about finding and getting a girl into a troop, which I don’t really understand because there are so many GSUSA troops. Both organizations have fierce defenders who are happy with their status quo, but I think 80% of us are looking for improvements in the best interests of our children.

+1

Also, I think the challenge in finding a Girl Scout troop is finding one with people in your community or close by. Many troops include mostly girls from one school and they with fill up quickly or have 1 spot open, and it’s not ideal to be the only kid from another school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don’t really get how th GS model is around much anymore - Boyscouts (which now includes girls) is a much better set up.

Anytime someone posts about girl scouts, the Boy Scout promoters jump on here and just bash, bash, bash away. OP - I guarantee 50% of the posts on here are from boy scout people posing at girl scouters.

FWIW, I've done both and they're different. Boy scouts expects parents to be much more involved in girl scouts.

Oh stop. Maybe one or two with Boy Scouts-only experience posted here but I doubt posters are “posing” as Girl Scouts. No one cares that much or has that kind of time. Lots of people, myself included, have personal experience with both organizations through their children and can speak to the strengths and weaknesses of both organizations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is just something about the GSUSA business model that makes its program more impacted by these factors. Other programs are challenged by similar things, but I don’t see the same level of operating difficulty and volunteer membership churn. I know we are especially busy people in the DMV, but we are probably not as unique as we think we are. Organization program and business approaches need to adapt in order to thrive, and with the exception of the cookie finance strategy, GSUSA volunteers just appear to be trudging an uphill path — and being told everything is okay. Well, enough from me, as I am not informed enough to say much more.

Girl Scouts only allows female adult leaders, right? All other programs/activities that I can think of (including boy scouts) allows for both male and female adult leaders. By limiting themselves to female only, it cuts the number of potential volunteers in half.

I am a GS leader and my co-leader is male. Our cookie manager is male. We have a lot of actively involved dads in our troop.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:One of the biggest surprises dual working parent families seem to have when their oldest hits school age is that all these activities they hear about kids doing require huge amounts of parent volunteer time. Its not like daycare, where you pay a fee and drop off. Almost every single activity your child does will involve a small amount or a large amount of volunteer time.

I send emails for our rec league every season begging for volunteer rec soccer/basketball/softball coaches and every season, without fail, a parent emails me to ask why we don't just hire some coaches. Every season.

Laughing but I totally understand those parents. I am an active volunteer in scouts and other groups .. but I would love to put money in the hat to hire an expert leader for some activities DD does. Some people (me) just do not have the personality or talent for certain activities (sports and theater). So I get it. If $500 would induce someone to coach, me and 4 other parents would have our wallets out already.

I have 3 kids. We pay a lot for tennis - clinic, private lessons and team.

The only activity that we know going in requiring time commitment is science Olympiad. We knew we had to coach.

I did not know or expect scouts was similar.

It sounds like you do private $$$ tennis. Rec sports need volunteers to run everything.

I guess it is private. They have played at the local pool and tennis, local rec center, racquet club and now country club. None of them required parent volunteers minus the pool and tennis club would ask for help organizing parties. It was more a potluck type sign up. Same with soccer. My kids have played both rec and travel soccer. They only asked for snacks.

It is hard enough just getting my kids to practice and games.

That's because you were lucky and those teams had coaches step up and they didn't need to beg the parents. I coached my son's U8 team one season because no one volunteered. That was experience.

Right? Talk about oblivious! That rec soccer team almost certainly had a volunteer parent or four coaching it. It sounds like you were lucky and happened to have a kid the same age/grade as parents that were enthusiastic and volunteered to coach before the organization needed to send out the annual "if we don't get a volunteer you don't get a team" email.

I am a Girl Scout leader. My girls pay $35 per year registration and that's it. Other than that, cookie sales and the volunteer time of an awesome group of parents cover everything. If you want your kid to go hiking and camping and do robotics and participate in democracy and you *don't* want to volunteer, you can do that. You can sign them up for paid courses at REI and the local art center and Pongos and Girls Inc. That will amount to several thousand dollars a year.
Or you can help out and volunteer to be part of a Girl Scout troop.

No, it’s not “$35 per year and that’s it,” that’s like saying breastfeeding is free. There’s the value of your time, the other volunteers’ time, the ways that volunteers end up subsidizing troop activities (buying up surplus cases of cookies, donating supplies to meetings, time spent selling cookies to your colleagues to supplement the cookie sales, hours and hours on largely pointless trainings, etc). And let’s be clear—most of the Girl Scout volunteer duties fall to the moms. The GS organization makes it more difficult for dads to volunteer, dads aren’t allowed to sleep in the same tent as their own daughter on the GS camping trips. I was a GS leader when my daughter was in grade school, so I know from experience how much effort it takes to make it work. I think it’s disingenuous to say it’s simply a $35 investment. It’s not. And sometimes the GS experiences are a bit contrived despite everyone’s best intentions. The most fun and most rewarding GS badges we did were through partnerships with museums or similar organizations that provided specialists to lead the girls through activities. Our troop had to raise a lot of cookie sale money to pay for those experiences (and have parent volunteers subsidize other expenses to preserve the troop budget). The bare bones budget meetings are often the least inspiring ones.

So much wrong in your post. Dads absolutely can sleep in a tent or space with their daughter. I’m a leader and my coleader is a dad. He goes on every camping trip and has slept with his kid. We frequently have dads on campouts when the girls were younger. You don’t like the bare budget meetings? Raise your troop dues. We keep ours to $35 per year so families can afford to participate.

That dad is not following Girl Scout rules if he is doing that.

That is simply not true. A dad can share a tent with his own daughter. He may not share a tent with non-related children. This is very clearly stated in the GS rules.

[Anonymous]

Parents can share tents with their own kids in Girl scouts, say for a family camp outing, BUT it's frowned upon. The ideal is that the girls sleep together and the adults are nearby. The males sleep separately. Even mothers are generally requested not to sleep in the same tent with their daughter.

[Anonymous]

You peddle junky overpriced cookies to friends, neighbors, coworkers that don’t really want them. You don’t even bother actually having kids do it either,just blast your social media about your kid selling cookies and maybe badger co workers in person.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m involved in the BSA and read DCUM postings regarding Scouts (whether GSUSA or BSA) so our Troop stays abreast of current parent thinking. I think we are all entering a period when the operations of youth services organizations are going to evolve fairly significantly. The BSA bankruptcy and COVID (for both organizations) have caused folks to understand the core strengths of the organizations and have laid bare practices that just don’t work as well as they once did. In the BSA, the casting aside of previous discriminatory membership policies has really invigorated things and welcomed large new constituencies. The GSUSA comments I notice most are the ones claiming apparent difficulties about finding and getting a girl into a troop, which I don’t really understand because there are so many GSUSA troops. Both organizations have fierce defenders who are happy with their status quo, but I think 80% of us are looking for improvements in the best interests of our children.

+1

Also, I think the challenge in finding a Girl Scout troop is finding one with people in your community or close by. Many troops include mostly girls from one school and they with fill up quickly or have 1 spot open, and it’s not ideal to be the only kid from another school.

This is what stopped us from joining. The school troop didn’t have room for DD and the whole point of her joining was to make friends at her new school. I just wish they didn’t hype it up so much at the beginning of the year with fliers and social media posts. Or at least make it clear in those ads that no, you can’t just join. You need to form and manage your own troop. DD got so excited last year, but no one else wanted to form a second troop.

[Anonymous]

Forming new small troops every fall from scratch with little more than a seminar to learn "here is how you must do it yourself" regulations. Are these basic issues with the current business model? Seems like forming larger ongoing troops that are capable of welcoming more girls and that are less likely to die-off in a few years might make sense. These small troops seem self-programmed to avoid welcoming new members and dissolve after a few years leaving nothing behind. It might be difficult to build or even maintain GSUSA membership in this new environment when girls have such difficulty accessing the program. When a girl wants to join so many of these other organizations they can easily find out where to go and how to join. There is just something about this that does not work quite right.