A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
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leader issues, service unit, volunteers
I would like to share something our service unit is using for our recruitment efforts this year. Our catchphrase is “We Got It Goin’ On!” and we hit the ground running when it came to our Back to School booths. A few months ago, I spoke with our SU’s Recruiting Coordinator about a few thoughts I had on the subject.
Later on, I rolled some ideas over in my head. Our numbers were actually UP this past year – 14%, in fact! This was after a steady decline since the merger, so we were very excited. We live in an area that’s growing pretty quickly, so there’s no reason why our numbers shouldn’t grow too. But even with the growth, we still didn’t create many new troops, and we feel that’s the lifeblood for continuing our increase. Right now many of our troops are full, and we need to spread the wealth. So this year, we wanted to put an emphasis on getting new leaders.
But how do we do this? That was the $64,000 question. Everybody these days is struggling to get volunteers. Many parents want to find troops, but there aren’t very many that want to step up and take the reigns to start a brand new one. I realized that we needed to take a new approach. In the past, it seems like our organization just relied on recruiting girls but crossing our fingers that the leaders and new troops would follow. We needed to be more aggressive. We go all out to show that Girl Scouts gives girls opportunities and an experience that they wouldn’t necessarily have elsewhere. Well, what if we showed women that they’ll also get that in return if they become a leader? Side note: I realize men can be leaders too. In fact, we have a male leader in our service unit! But for this, we specifically targeted women.
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You may have noticed I’ve been AWOL lately. It’s been one crazy summer, but not like the John Cusack movie. June started off kinda slow, but then July has gone into overdrive. Here’s what I’m in the middle of right now, and I’ll keep it somewhat short because I’m going in a thousand directions all at once. But I wanted to briefly check in so that you all didn’t think the Girl Scout mafia finally caught up to me.
GSUSA has recently put a focus on bringing civics education to the forefront. On June 3rd, they hosted a webcast that was livestreamed entitled Civics Education: Preparing the Next Generation of Informed and Engaged Citizens. It’s described on GSUSA’s website as such: “This nonpartisan event is an opportunity for community leaders, public officials, and education experts to consider how out-of-school civics programs can prepare the next generation to be involved citizens with a deeper understanding of their government —both now and for the rest of their lives.” It’s archived on their website and can be found here: 
This is a reformat of the Cadette Think Like an Engineer Journey that’s found in the Volunteer Toolkit. Compared to the six PDFs from VTK totaling 135 pages, the reformat is 56 pages. So it’s still lengthy, but at least this will save you some paper. Nothing has been modified, except that the word “SAY” has been replaced with “Suggested conversation,” and I took out some extra spacing that I didn’t think was necessary. This reformat includes all of the handouts with the exception of the Cadette Take Action PDF, which I’ve also linked directly from the GSUSA website. Please note that I do not claim this as my own invention. Basically all I did was reformat this Journey to make it easier to read and also to keep your printer from melting down if you need to print it out (like I do). 
In case you’re not up to speed and have no idea what I’m talking about, about two years ago, the Farthest North council out of Fairbanks, Alaska, 