December 16 2020

GSUSA Executive Turnover

National Operations    5 Comments    ,

In a little over a year, these people left the GSUSA Executive Team (in no particular order):

Sylvia Acevedo
National CEO

Andrea Bastiani Archibald
Chief Girl and Family Engagement Officer

Amy Berkowitz
Chief Information Officer

Anthony Doye
Chief Operating/Strategy Officer

Lynn Godfrey
Chief Marketing and Communications Officer

Lynelle McKay
Chief Customer Officer

Annette Freytag
Chief of Staff

Perhaps this might shed some light on why there are issues.  Needless to say, we can’t afford to screw up yet another National CEO hire.  Continue reading

December 15 2020

Moving from Membership Dues to Membership Cards

National Operations    13 Comments    , , , ,

Recently GSUSA updated myGS and the system was down for a couple of weeks.  But volunteers didn’t notice, because nobody really uses it anyway.  There was a big to-do about the upgrades, and they were covered during our recent Town Hall.  But after a while, my brain started to wander as it normally does for Zoom meetings so I didn’t catch everything.  Once I actually fell asleep during a Zoom Town Hall.  Embarrassing.  I knew I should have turned off my video.

Anyway, back to myGS.  So the system came back online again, which again, no volunteers really noticed because they forgot it was down in the first place.  But my IT curiosity got the best of me, and I logged in to see what the big fuss was about.  I started clicking around and came across a place where you could print off membership cards for your troop’s girls and leaders (note: I’ve blurred all member ID numbers):

Continue reading

December 7 2020

None of These are Like the Other

Experiences as a Leader    5 Comments    ,

When I first started as a leader back in the fall of 2010, the new program centered around Journeys and an entirely new set of badges had just rolled out.  Last year when I was cleaning out my badge inventory, I noticed that badges cost $1.50 my first few years when I checked the price tag.  The cost creeped up to $2.00 and then to $2.50 along the way.  A few years later, there were some complaints about the badges being made in China, so GSUSA brought production back to the United States.  The cost rose to $3 per badge, and there was a distinguishable difference between the Chinese and USA badges.  Some of the embroidered designs looked distorted.  The merrow edging (the embroidered border) on the Chinese badges was thicker and bled all the way to the edge of the badge.  The USA badges have a small border of fabric at the edging.

Recently, a friend of mine sent me a picture of three badges including the new Cadette STEM Career Exploration Badge that her daughter recently received at an event.  The first one is the newest STEM badge, the second one is from a USA vendor, and the third is a China-made badge.  Continue reading