Experiencing Experience Centers
National Operations 9 Comments 
camps, councils, gsusa
Recently, the 2022 Stewardship Report was published on the GSUSA website, and it features a little blurb about the National Property Plan that can be found on pg. 30:
Council Property Portfolio Rebalance Reports
The Property Team is also supporting councils’ immediate real estate decision-making. GSUSA contracted and funded Newmark to complete a property portfolio rebalance report that provides data-informed recommendations for every interested council. The reports provide current assessment and takeaways from a working session, as well as demographic projected population, and density maps to understand how well each location is positioned. The report also includes “scorecard” assessments of each service center and office based on key criteria, as well as a series of high-level recommendations and suggestions to optimize each council portfolio. This work began in fall of 2022 and will be complete in September of 2023.
You might be wondering – there’s a national property plan? Yes, there is. I’m not going to go through it here, but if you want the background on it, you can read this article from GSG and view the webinar that GSUSA hosted in 2020. When you boil down to it, there’s not really a “plan” per se like you hear about council property plans – or at least I don’t see one that’s forward-facing. But obviously I’m not privy to much, so don’t take what I say as gospel. It looks to me like it’s basically just GSUSA providing councils with real estate assessments via a third party (Newmark). This service is completely optional, and it’s up to councils to decide whether they want to participate or not. I don’t know how many have taken GSUSA up on this offer.
There’s another paragraph of interest in the Stewardship Report (also on page 30):
Girl Scout Dream Labs (Our Experience Centers)
The GSUSA Property Team has spent the past year developing a new program delivery and retail space concept internally called the Girl Scout Experience Center and which will be launched as Girl Scout Dream Labs, with the goal of raising the visibility of Girl Scouts and offering great programs and experiences in the communities that Girl Scouts serves. Concept design and development is completed, layouts have been finalized, and GSUSA and a construction project manager will work with the contractor to oversee the first capital project build-outs, for an on-time and onbudget delivery in Denver, Colorado, for the Girl Scouts of Colorado Council in January 2023.
This excerpt was shared in some Facebook groups by yours truly, and it caused a tiny bit of a stir in the Outdoor Journey one. Tensions are already a little high due to more and more councils announcing camp sales with promises of “Experience Centers” taking their place. Seeing that the concept of an Experience Center is a nation-wide vision of GSUSA has made those who fear camp sales in the back of their minds uneasy, especially considering GSUSA is providing councils with a ready-made service to assess their properties.
What are Experience Centers exactly? Well, that’s a good question. What’s out there is a little vague, but the Colorado council recently published a press release about the ones it’s building in its own council and calls it “an all-new way to experience Girl Scouting.” I’ll lift the video for easy reference here:
The Colorado council has also provided a FAQ with more information.
They’re built in partnership with GSUSA in that councils are “highly” encouraged to use the GSUSA designated project manager. I’m assuming this is so they have similar elements from council to council. Also, I don’t have confirmation on this, but I heard that GSUSA is providing some of the funding as well.
What’s happening at these Experience Centers? If you look at the registered trademark description, lots of things. Some of them look like they’re describing standard council-sponsored programming, but there are also public-facing events, like “hosting social entertainment events, namely, birthday parties, [and] celebrations for others.” Some people read through the description and said it sounds like an American Girl store. The Colorado FAQ states that they’ll be open to both troops and community members. It’s not clear exactly how this will work, so I guess we’ll have to wait until the first Colorado one opens in January to find out.
Is there something wrong with these Experience Centers in and of themselves? In my opinion, not really. From what I can tell, they are basically expanded service centers that can possibly house staff offices, offer retail shops (including cookie sales), and additionally, make room available for activities that are open to troops and the public. Maybe we can call them mini-Leadership Centers? Remember when those and STEM Centers were all the rage? But all in all, there’s nothing wrong with reimagining service centers and figuring out how to best serve the membership with convenient locations and building spaces.
The question is what has to happen in order for councils to build them.
Are camps being sold to make way for Experience Centers? Well, in some councils, they are. According to this article, “The Girl Scouts of the Northwestern Great Lakes announced plans to sell the 40-acre area [Camp Winnecomac] as part of a plan to sell multiple properties over the next year and reinvest the funds into four ‘reimagined’ Girl Scout Centers.”
But in other councils, they’re building Experience Centers directly on camp properties. So it just really depends on what your council decides to do and how to go about it.
I think a lot of us can agree that these urban/suburban Experience Centers cannot take the place of camps, no matter what sorts of “outdoor experiences” they claim can go on there. Kudos to those councils who are making both work.
Is GSUSA pushing the concept of Experience Centers? No, not from what I can tell, and not from what I’m hearing from those who are involved with it on the council level. It’s up to the council to decide what it wants to do with its own properties. But it’s starting to become obvious that we’re entering another round of camp sales across the country, and why are some councils choosing to go with Experience Centers over camps? The fact that it’s being said that these will be nationwide insinuates that quite a few councils are opting to go this route. In fact, the Colorado council’s FAQ states that “other Girl Scout councils are lining up to build similar centers.”
On the surface, it looks like this new program delivery and retail space concept is an idea GSUSA is throwing out there, and councils can take it or leave it. But there’s something that makes me wonder if there’s more to it. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it’s because many people across the organization have asked for there to be a national conversation about properties over the past few years, but GSUSA is fully intent on ignoring that request and doing things its own way. Why? And if Experience Centers are “only the beginning of an all-new way to experience Girl Scouting,” what else is in store?
I’m curious to know how the “experience centers” are truly different, beyond some decoration, from our existing service centers which already have meeting spaces available to members and the community, offices, and retail shops.
Maybe the branding of them?
I have noticed how many karate, tutoring and other very specific storefronts there are for kids in suburban shopping centers. If these for profit businesses can thrive, then maybe Girl Scout Experience centers can use this as an example. Why not have regular after school and evening “classes”/”experiences”, etc for members and non-members. They would have to pay the teachers, and it would cost to attend, but that is what these other businesses do. I think a GS Choral experience (singing), GS STEM, GS Leadership, GS team building, badges, babysitting classes, First Aid, etc. They could have activities every night and evening and create quite a vibrant community.
My council is getting set to build one of these experience centers. In our case they sold the two existing service centers as they’ve realized through the pandemic they have less need for office space. We’ve also got a “mobile shop” van stocked with essentials that can travel around the council. The new experience center will be centrally located – as we are not geographically large – and near other major retail areas. (A poll went out early on about what sorts of things adults would like to do while their girls are attending meetings in an experience center.)
Both existing centers had small retail space, and meeting areas that weren’t being utilized efficiently or effectively. The new experience center is supposed to have staffing space that is more flexible in use for an office/home hybrid schedule, more easily navigated retail space, and meeting areas better equipped for either troop meetings or council workshops. Sewing machines, cooking space, science equipment, and I believe an indoor rock wall were discussed. I also recall a leader suggesting a lending library of things like compasses/gps unit and some camping supplies being available in a lending library for troops, especially with a good portion of the council being in low income areas.
That’s great! My council has a Leadership Center which sounds similar, but it’s not open to the public.
As a leader and SU volunteer for an urban SU with a lot of car-free or limited car access families, I love the idea of GS properties where we could access training or buy badges or the girls could attend workshops without needing to find transportation to one of the camps, even the one that’s “only” a half hour drive into the suburbs.
But I do hope it doesn’t come at the cost of camp properties, since my girls also love camping and I really want the girls who don’t have leaders with outdoorsy backgrounds to get more chances to go camping, too.
I 100% agree with Kat! Access is essential and something that we need to focus on in Girl Scouts! Sadly, one of the main reasons GSNWGL is selling Camp Winnecomac that it is located in a city. Selling this easily accessible camp goes against what was recommended by the property analysts.
A camp in the city, especially with wheelchair accessible lodging facilities, is something most councils and outdoor education programs would love! GSNWGL is instead going to expand their main service center that is outside of the city – several miles from a bus route.
I would like GSUSA to review how councils are making decisions. I would also like to see transparency from councils! The latest update from GSNWGL to the public was that they are not selling Camp Winnecomac. However, as of today, they are planning to sell it. They are just delaying the sale.
I am sick that GS National office people think this is the way to go. Going to drive the few girls wanting to join scouting right to the Boy Scouts of America.
The official Grand Opening for the DreamLab (that’s the name we’re going with) in Denver is coming up in March (so not quite on schedule, I don’t know about on budget or not). For background- GSCO sold our larger centrally located service center in Denver in 2013 and have not had a public facing space (except the retail store) since then. Our council offices were in a high-rise office building that was not very customer friendly. With the shift to WFH during the pandemic it was clear that we didn’t need that office space, so the announcement of the experience center was welcomed and exciting. In terms of funding- I don’t know all the details, but I believe that we did get some money from GSUSA and we also sold a camp property last year (that had been on the market since 2014). From a council staff perspective, we currently have 3 other council offices, but only one has true program space that can be used by members, so I would love to see this model be spread to other areas of our council. The office space that we do have has not been used as much in the past three years, so I would rather have spaces that are available and accessible to our members and continue to work at home. One concern that we brought up (that the GSUSA architects and designers did not really think about) was work space and storage. They did not integrate things like a copy room or a space for our servers into this space (the entire space is open to the public with no designated staff only areas). To solve this problem, we are renting a separate off-site location that we’ve nicknamed “Back Stage” that has a workroom, our copy and mailing equipment, a server room, a room for our finance team and storage for membership and program teams. It’s annoying that this is not in the same location as the DreamLab, but I think that it will be ok. It is very close to our current retail shop (which will not be moving) and still convenient for most staff. It’s not expected that staff will come to the back-stage to work all day, but will stop by to print things, put together program supplies, mail things etc. Anyway . . . I am excited for the DreamLab but will reserve judgement for it until it actually opens and we see how it works in our community!