I’d Need a Time Machine

After our delegate meeting a few weeks back, I spoke with a board member on the way out.  Board members help bring in the money for Girl Scout councils to put it simply.  I asked about that aspect, and she said that she has to get across to whatever company or organization about how much of an impact Girl Scouts has in this world by creating leaders, women of distinction, etc. (I’m paraphrasing a lot, but you get the picture).  So after we finish speaking, I start thinking about this on the way home.  How do you get across to people what kind of impact Girl Scouts has in girls’ and women’s lives?  Do you bring in fancy charts with lots of statistics, percentages, numbers, and names of famous women in history that were in Girl Scouts?  How exactly do you do that?

I’d personally need a time machine.

Preferably a Delorean, but I digress as I’m prone to do.  I’d have to have one though, because I’d have to somehow compare what a woman was like in her adulthood versus her childhood, and then compare her two timelines or parallel universes of being in Girl Scouts vs. not being in Girl Scouts.  Now I’m getting into the many-worlds interpretation of time travel.  This is a good spot for a Big Bang Theory picture.

Would we see an impact?  I’m betting 1.21 gigawatts that we would.  It would probably take you a while to go through all of the instances, in fact.  Perhaps taking that certain trip and meeting other Girl Scouts from around the country breaks open a brand new world for a middle school girl and lets her know that you don’t have to accept what you’re pegged as in your school and peer group.  She could find out that yes, she can be herself, and hey, it’s pretty easy to make friends.  She makes friends pretty easily in fact, and this carries her through high school knowing there are other people out there like her.

Maybe taking a trip to another country and to a Girl Scout World Center lets her see with her own eyes what life is like in another country.  She sees in stark detail what poverty really is.  And once again, she makes new friends from all over the USA and other countries pretty easily like she did the summer.  Hey, maybe life really isn’t so bad!

You’d also have to see how working on certain projects brings her in contact with people of all ages and professions, especially women.  Yet again, this opens up her world, and she begins interacting with other people that aren’t part of her peer group.  It breaks her out of that high school bubble where the only other people she comes in contact with are young adults of her own age and teachers.  She even gets to know a few of these contacts pretty well and continues to stay in touch with them throughout her life.  And one contact turns out to be the mother of another daughter her age, and she becomes a best friend!  It’s crazy how those things turn out.

Once she’s older, she becomes a Girl Scout Leader herself.  She in turn touches other girls’ lives.  We’d have to then take those girls’ timelines in parallel universes and go from there.  And so on, and so on.

I’m not sure I would be a very good fund raiser if I had to go to make a pitch with lots of graphics and to make the case for Girl Scouts.   I might bore them to tears or get off on a tangent about multiple universes or even start talking about the movie Hot Tub Time Machine. Just ask my troop’s parents when I start one of my speeches about Girl Scouts.

And who could discuss time travel movies and forget about Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure?  I mean, come on!  If only they could have gone back in time and picked up Juliette Gordon Low, aka the REAL J-Lo.

Edit:  Oh geez, how could I forgot Sherman and Mr. Peabody and the Wayback Machine??