Tough Cookies Revisited

Back in 2015, I became curious about what on earth happened to Girl Scouting because when I started as a leader in 2010, I felt like I had walked onto a battlefield. Compared to what I had grown up with as a Girl Scout, the programming and “feel” of the organization seemed foreign to me. I decided to do a deep dive and began to research the Core Business Strategy (CBS) which, in 2004, prompted the transformation of Girl Scouting. Someone pointed me toward Kathy Cloninger’s book Tough Cookies to see where it all started. Cloninger was the National CEO from November 2003 to November 2011 and is unofficially known as who kicked all this off. Well, there’s more to the story.

In September of 2016, I wrote a blog post that questioned the justification of the CBS based on the claim that membership numbers were declining. The post went viral, but after researching it a little more after the fact, I realized I hadn’t dug down far enough. I always meant to go back and revisit it, but I never did — until recently. And well, because I have that type of Sheldon personality, I took it to the extreme, and instead of a blog post, I wrote a 40 page paper. It’s about the background and history of the CBS, its legacy, and my thoughts on all of it. If you had told me in school that I would have written a white paper and a thesis on Girl Scouting for the fun of it, I wouldn’t have believed you for one second.

Thanks to ALL to helped me with this project — the survey respondents, the ones who sent me documentation, the editors, the supporters, and everyone else I’ve forgotten.

I’m going to reproduce the executive summary here, and then if you want to jump into the paper itself, you can download the PDF file below it.

Edit 1/24/22: Found a type-o in the paper where I wrote FY2020 instead of FY2021. This has been fixed and uploaded.

Edit 1/27/22: Found yet another type-o. I only edited the paper a million times and had others edit it too.  We all missed it!  On page 21, I stated that the decline was temporary, and I meant the leveling out was temporary.

Tough Cookies Revisited: The Implementation of Girl Scouting’s Core Business Strategy and Its Fallout
Executive Summary

In 2004, Girl Scouts of the United States of America (GSUSA) began a transformation called the Core Business Strategy (CBS). GSUSA leadership felt that Girl Scouting did not have a unified message, purpose, or mission, and in response, aimed to restructure the organization on all levels in order to nationally align. The rollout was completed unofficially by 2012, but its legacy and outcomes still influence us today. It is my assertion that the CBS negatively affected Girl Scouting in a variety of ways — most notably in rapidly declining membership numbers — and its effects continue to hamper our organization.

This paper is broken out into four parts:

1. A review of the history and implementation of the CBS
2. The legacy of the CBS
3. Survey results from volunteers who served during the CBS rollout
4. Personal reflections and solutions

The CBS’s framework consisted of:

1. Program Model and Pathways: Building the best-integrated personal leadership development model for girls 5-17, differentiated by age level, offering defined activities, outcomes, and flexible pathways for participation.
2. Volunteerism: Developing a nimble, state-of-the-art model of volunteerism that mobilizes a variety of volunteers committed to the Girl Scout Mission.
3. Brand: Transforming the Girl Scout image with a compelling, contemporary brand.
4. Funding: Substantially increasing contributed income to fund a vibrant Girl Scout organization.
5. Organizational Structure and Governance: Creating an efficient and effective organizational structure and democratic governance system.

There was originally an additional sixth component:

Culture: Leading the transformation of our culture, which is a key component of the broader transformation of Girl Scouts.

In 2006, GSUSA and the National Board implemented a consolidation plan for 312 councils to merge into 109 by the year 2010, although the final number ended at 112. In many areas, this consolidation plan resulted in a chaotic upheaval that has been difficult to recover from and has led to the destabilization of volunteer support.

While the mergers were being carried out, GSUSA developed a new programming structure based on a leadership development model called the Girl Scout Leadership Experience (GSLE) which aimed to create “an evidence-based, outcome driven learning experience.” Discover, Connect, and Take Action is what’s known as the Three Keys to Leadership. Girls use three processes while participating in the GLSE: Girl-led, Learning by Doing, and Cooperative Learning. Originally, there were fifteen outcomes used to measure the GLSE (one for each of the three keys to leadership), but in 2017, they were summarized into five.

GSUSA released a new programming format known as Journeys in 2008 in order to deliver the GSLE. Journeys were very unpopular with girls and volunteers when they were first launched and created controversy due to the move away from traditional badge programming.  After volunteers and girls expressed their dissatisfaction with this decision, GSUSA published a set of badges in 2011 for each level. In the years following, GSUSA has tweaked Journeys to make them more flexible and released new ones. It has also published a number of new badges since the original rollout in 2011.

Funding and Branding each had their own initiatives. Volunteerism involved a complete overhaul of the way adults onboarded as new volunteers and to GSUSA’s training model, each of which has had a negative effect on volunteer support and contributed to the significant membership decline.

Girl membership numbers should be the measure we use to grade the CBS because GSUSA leadership cited declining troop membership as one of the justifications for this overhaul. From 1997 to 2003 (prior to the CBS), Girl Scouts gained 7% in overall girl membership due to the growth of short-term, staff-run outreach programs. Girl membership in troops, led by volunteers, declined 2.9% from 1997 to 2003 after a few years of growth. But beginning from the advent of the CBS in 2006, overall girl membership figures dropped 37%. These numbers do not take into account the effect of COVID-19 for 2020’s membership year.

This paper includes the results of a survey of almost 300 volunteers who served during the rollout of the CBS. Most responses were negative when asked about a variety of topics relating to the CBS and the changes it brought to Girl Scouting.

At the end of the paper, I share my impressions, plus I suggest a number of solutions that could help reverse some of the damage caused by the CBS. They include:

• reviving the democratic process
• changing fully to a hands-on, skill based programming model
• reevaluating council jurisdictions or come up with creative solutions for those that are too large to successful service all areas
• examining GSUSA and council work environments
• realizing we’re in a rebuilding mode instead of “business as usual”

Amy M. Brown
Girl Scout Volunteer, Author of the Girl Scout with a Cause blog,
and Administrator of GirlScoutGovernance.com
January 2022