The Emphasis on Network Alignment

When I first started writing the Tough Cookies Revisited paper, it originally contained much more integrated commentary throughout the text. I eventually decided to go a more formal route and instead presented an objective timeline and survey results with a small section dedicated to my personal thoughts at the end. So now that a few months have passed since I published it, I wanted to flesh out a couple of topics.  Because you know, forty pages wasn’t long enough to explore everything. 😉

If you haven’t read the paper yet, you may want to in order to give this post a little more context. But I know not everybody is down with reading a forty page paper, so I’ll try to summarize things as I go.

The Core Business Strategy was a plan to completely overhaul and redefine Girl Scouting from top to bottom and included parts such as council mergers, a streamline of governance, a new volunteer onboarding and support system, and a major shift in the national programming model. Its development began in 2004 with implementation starting soon after that. Changes happened quickly.

Looking back, it’s obvious that a GSUSA centralization of power was one of the planned outcomes of the CBS under the guise of creating a consistent experience for girls. Instituting “a decisive, agile, and market driven” governance structure was one of the key components of the CBS and the first to be implemented, and reading between the lines, that involved putting more power in fewer people’s hands. In other words – lessening the influence of the democratic process. Sure, the democratic process was mentioned in the CBS plans, but let’s be honest. One of the original CBS committees studied possibly moving from our current federation model to a parent-subsidiary structure, a national entity with chapters, or a shared services model. I have no doubt that if The Powers That Be could have gotten rid of the National Council and National Council Session at that point in time, they would have. But that would have entailed dissolving our Congressional Charter and completely overhauling the GSUSA Constitution – which would have been a massive and most likely unsuccessful endeavor. Instead, the Constitution was changed at each subsequent National Council Session to push more power from the National Council into GSUSA and the National Board’s control. And the National Council went right along with it believing that what GSUSA claimed was for the best. At this point, I question whether the National Council is even truly relevant anymore as a check and balance to GSUSA and the National Board. It has absolutely no power to hold them accountable as it could in the past. If I’m wrong, tell me, because I’d love to hear why that’s not the case.

Another outcome stemming from the CBS involved the mergers of a large number of councils starting in 2006 and was known as “Realignment.” The total number of councils shrunk from 312 to 112 over a period of a few years. Unfortunately, consolidation of smaller councils into larger ones in many cases resulted in wide areas of the country no longer receiving adequate support due to travel distance to service centers and insufficient council resources. If I had to name only one thing that caused the most damage to Girl Scouting over the past 15 years, it would be Realignment. There’s no doubt some mergers needed to happen, but what came out of it was detrimental on multiple levels. But, dealing with fewer councils made things easier for GSUSA to manage and control. And with a few exceptions, everybody fell right in line.

Anna Maria Chávez followed Kathy Cloninger as National CEO in 2011, and under her leadership, a new Core Business Strategy was developed and launched. The phrase “Network Alignment” made its debut as one of the mainstays for the 2015-2018 National Strategy:

Girl Scouts’ network alignment: Define our partnership, align our operations, and clarify the roles and responsibilities among councils and the national organization.

The concept of Network Alignment wasn’t new. In actuality, this phrase pretty much summed up the purpose of the original CBS and was one of its ultimate goals, even if it wasn’t stated outright. In 2012, the National Board modified the Blue Book of Basic Documents to include council strategy alignment as one of its council charter prerequisites. Prior to 2012, there was no mention about council strategy plans in the Blue Book. This language was added to the Credentials/Procedures for Reviewing and Issuing Girl Scout Council Charters section (emphasis added):

1. Council engages in the Strategic Learning process or a similar strategy process resulting in selection of key priorities and the development of a tactical plan and goals that are in alignment with GSUSA priorities and goals.

Key components of the strategy process include:

• • Externally focused situational analysis to learn the status of the council as it compares to the needs and interests of girls, its competitors, nonprofit sector trends, community priorities, and needs.
  • Full analysis of all internal data including financial, girl participation, volunteer engagement, and community support.
  • Alignment of systems, processes and resources to support resulting priorities.
  • Ongoing evaluation of progress with the ability to make mid-course corrections as needed.

In January of 2017, the National Board simplified it to:

The council engages in a strategy process resulting council priorities and goals that are in alignment with GSUSA priorities and goals.

Well then. Councils, just copy and paste the GSUSA strategy in your annual reports. It’ll be much easier for everybody, I suppose.

The 2015-2018 National Strategy placed even more of an obvious emphasis on National Alignment. The 2017 Stewardship Report states:

Aligning our federated network is of the utmost importance to our Movement strategy’s success. The strategy creation team made clear that Girl Scouts needs to come together to define our roles and responsibilities within the Movement to speak with one voice, create more efficient ways of work, and ensure that all girls have a high-quality experience that achieves our mission objectives. This is why we prioritized network alignment in the first year of the strategy.

The 2017 Stewardship Report also mentions that GSUSA published a Girl Scout Network Alignment Guidebook that “acknowledges and highlights each partner’s unique value to our work and includes detailed descriptions of the distinct roles and responsibilities among parties, as well as recommendations for how we will achieve and maintain alignment together.”

As a key part of this renewed emphasis on Network Alignment, the formerly planned council-wide IT platform called Council Enterprise System was phased out, and one named the Customer Engagement Initiative (CEI) took its place starting in 2014. All councils are supposed to use CEI as mandated by their charters. CEI brings every council under the same IT umbrella (with the exception of one holdout). It’s now known as Volunteer Systems 2.0. As such, all data, including membership, troop, financials, websites, and in some cases, cookies figures, are stored on GSUSA managed servers.

Network Alignment continues on as a drumbeat in current strategies and GSUSA communications. The 2021 Stewardship Report has a whole section dedicated to it (pg. 37).

All this said, does Network Alignment bring some benefits to the table? Absolutely. I think there can be a balance within a federation such as ours. Some of the pros really do include stronger branding, consistent messaging, and easy sharing of resources across councils as stated in GSUSA strategies. And even though I have been extremely critical of VS 2.0, a centralized IT platform makes sense – when it’s functional, that is.

But on the flip side, when things go wrong, everybody suffers. Case in point: when VS 2.0 had massive issues this past fall that torpedoed member registration, it affected all councils and hurt Girl Scouting. More control in less people’s hands means it’s easier to make detrimental mistakes if the ones running the show don’t do their homework and are out of touch with what’s going on in the field. Network Alignment guarantees there are less official checks and balances. Councils have less leeway to be able to tailor themselves for regional needs. The Network Alignment process can claim that there’s a partnership with councils, but there’s not one if the entity wielding the power doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain – and there’s nothing you can do about it if that happens.

Some might disagree when I correlate Network Alignment with centralization. But Network Alignment requires that there’s a controlling party who decides what and how everyone will align. And there’s no choice involved. Much of Network Alignment is mandated, and the pressure to conform is great considering a charter is in the balance.

Centralization means GSUSA’s management MUST be top notch and spot on, period. There’s no room for screw ups. Failure equals a big anchor pulling all of us down to the bottom. Network Alignment MUST include decision-influencing constituencies and not just lip service; otherwise, decisions are made in vacuums, and that’s not a good thing. This means volunteers and girls should be viewed as partners in the Movement and not solely as customers as they are currently. I’ve said this ad nauseam over the years to the point where I’m weary about it. But nobody is listening, so at this point, I continue to say it out of principle.

If you look at the history of Girl Scouting and the Blue Book’s evolution through the years, power has slowly shifted from the National Council to the National Board and GSUSA. However, the implementation of the CBS involved a very large power grab in a short period of time due to its emphasis on Network Alignment. Sometimes I feel as if it’s used as an excuse and a mantra to lull councils into doing what GSUSA wants even if it’s not good for councils or Girl Scouting as a whole.

What will be the result if things go too far? Is there an end game with National Alignment? Will councils eventually merge into even larger regional ones with more GSUSA control? Will GSUSA take over completely and councils become in name only? Perhaps one day it’ll be standard business for a Girl Scout leader to interact solely with a distant customer care department, access all materials online, and order insignia and merchandise from the GSUSA online store instead of visiting a brick and mortar location. There will be few, if any, local camps, but of course, there will still be local drop-off stations for cookie pickups. Think this won’t happen? It’s already happening today in a lot of councils. And it’d be interesting to see how membership has fared in those areas over the past 15 years. Not very well, I’d guess.

A warning showed up in a 2007 Nonprofit Quarterly article during the CBS transformation: “While Girl Scouts is altering the dynamics of local control to standardize and document the program’s achievements, the national organization must be careful not to deplete the very system that has, even with huge variations, created the local investment and national prominence that the Girl Scouts enjoy today.” Here we are in 2022. Has National Alignment wrought what was cautioned against?