Thoughts on the MGAT Report

For the 2023 National Council Session (NCS), a number of councils submitted governance related proposals including one written by yours truly. Inspired by similar action taken by the National Board in 1993, my proposal aimed to create a national task group to study governance on both the council and national level. These specific proposals didn’t make the 2023 NCS agenda, but the National Board took action of its own anyway and appointed a task group called the Movement Governance Advisory Team (MGAT). The MGAT launched in November of 2023 and began work on several charges from the National Board centering around national governance. You can review the entirety of the original charge in the GSUSA press release on GSG.

The MGAT recently released its report. If you’ve followed my blog through the years, you’ll know that I’ve been an enthusiastic advocate for the democratic process in Girl Scouting for quite some time, so I’ve been highly anticipating this. In addition to publishing the report, the National Board Office (NBO) also hosted a webinar for National Delegates in April to review the MGAT’s findings and recommendations. The webinar and report are found on the GSUSA National Delegate website which is only open to current National Delegates and related staff. However, I received a copy of the report due to authoring a related 2023 NCS proposal, and I waited to share my thoughts until enough time had passed for National Delegates to read the report, view the webinar, and share the results with their local memberships.

If you’re interested in this topic, I highly encourage you to read through both the report and the appendix. The appendix is just as important and informative as the report itself, so take some time to download both and settle in for a read. I can’t possibly review everything that’s covered in both files, and I’m only going to give a very high-level overview along with some of my random thoughts. I feel that I don’t even come close to doing it justice in this blog post, so you’re missing out on an enormous amount if you only go by what I write.

Overall, the MGAT determined our current model of national governance best serves our organization and felt that optimizing it should be the path forward. To accomplish this, the MGAT developed four recommendations. The MGAT shared its recommendations before the report was officially released, and as such, GSUSA and the National Board acted upon some of them during the current triennium (2023-2026) instead of waiting until the report came out. The four recommendations are:

1.     Increase [National] Delegate Engagement throughout the Triennium: In the past, National Delegates duties were limited to the time immediately before and after an NCS. The MGAT suggested that there should be additional opportunities throughout the triennium for delegates to submit questions and share perspectives outside of the NCS. In response, GSUSA and the National Board hosted State of the Movement sessions and additional delegate engagement webinars.

2.     Increase Communication and Partnership between the National Board and National Council: Based on findings from surveys and interviews with National Council members and council leadership, the NCS proposal process was revised and renamed to the NCS Agenda Influencing Process. It was implemented for the 2026 NCS cycle and further tweaking will take place for the next triennium.

3.     Clear Expectations for [National] Delegates and the Support Expected from Councils and GSUSA: Feedback showed that there were inconsistencies across councils when it came to National Delegate selection, training, and preparation. The MGAT revised the National Delegate Recruitment, Selection, and Onboarding Toolkit to set a standard expectation. When it came to National Delegate training, the NBO and the NCS Advisory Team developed a number of delegate training and proposal webinars available on the delegate website. Delegate participation was tracked by the NBO and reported to councils.

4.     Support Councils in Optimizing Core Governance Practices: The MGAT noted that there are variances in council governance practices and recognized that strong governance plays a critical role in our organization’s strategy, and as a response, added this fourth recommendation later.

Now here are my thoughts in no certain order (because admittedly I had a hard time organizing them because there’s so much to process):

First, I’d like to say that at least from my vantage point, the MGAT’s work was thorough in what it was charged to do, and this is evident in its summary and especially in the appendix. The work it did on the National Delegate Toolkit is excellent, and hopefully councils will use it effectively. I am also very encouraged by current national leadership who seem to be open and willing to implement most of the MGAT’s recommendations and are committed to continuing it through the 2026-2029 triennium.

However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that I was a little disappointed that the MGAT’s charge was limited to national governance. The 1993-1996 task group widened its scope to both the national and council levels, and recommendations from this task group covered both. So, I sort of feel like we missed a prime opportunity. I’ve said it before in past blog posts, but I believe that if council governance is dysfunctional, then it will ultimately have an impact on the effectiveness of national governance. While I realize the MGAT acknowledged this in its fourth recommendation, if you read through the report, the vast majority of what’s covered under this recommendation is still national in scope. Granted, I am not privy to really anything that happens on the national level, but I get the sense that GSUSA doesn’t stress or emphasize that councils should employ the democratic process on the local level. Perhaps GSUSA feels that it’s out of their hands since we have a federated model? Does national leadership feel like the enormous amount of work recently done on the national level will trickle down to councils? I’m a little skeptical that will happen if that is the case, but I would love to be proven wrong.

Speaking of the council level, I feel that there needs to be at least one person who is an enthusiastic advocate for the democratic process and strong governance for it to take root. But that person must have a certain amount of clout and be in a position of leadership. Based on my personal experience and observations, I feel that by and large, operational volunteers are not in a position to make effective change in governance nor are they necessarily taken seriously unless there is someone in place within council leadership that is already open to the idea and willing to implement it. There are always exceptions, of course, but it takes a consolidated and dedicated effort on the part of multiple volunteers for that to happen.

My biggest question looking at the work of the MGAT is can it be sustained? The National Board has stated that it will continue the work through the National Council Advisory Team through 2029, but what about beyond that? I think back to the amazing work of the 1993-1996 task group which resulted in an array of thorough publications and monographs centered on governance and the democratic process released in the late 1990s. But less than a decade later, all of that work was tossed out the window leading to a good number of the problems of today and the charge of the MGAT. What’s to keep that from happening again?

While I have been extremely critical of GSUSA and the National Board in the past, I do feel like they both have been forthcoming with this work, and the fact that it was done in the first place is a huge step forward. I also must point out a lot of the success of this work is dependent on councils and individual National Delegates holding up their end of the bargain. The MGAT has done a great deal of work, but you know what they say about leading a horse to water. If councils don’t use the National Delegate Toolkit or take the NCS Agenda Influencing Process seriously, then it’s a waste. If National Delegates don’t treat the position with respect and fulfill their duties including reporting back to the membership, then the democratic process breaks down. And that’s not GSUSA or the National Board’s fault. I’m pointing the finger right at us: the membership.

That said, one of the biggest obstacles to the success of the democratic process across the Movement is that we’ve now fully implemented a model where girls, parents, and volunteers are now customers instead of members. I wrote about this many years ago, and it’s only gotten worse. We are now an organization that designs its services, communications, and decision-making around satisfying customers rather than engaging members. Apparently what I’m describing is called “the customerization of membership,” and it describes the shift from viewing members as active participants in a mission-driven organization to viewing them primarily as purchasers of services and benefits. Customers do not believe they are part of something bigger and do not involve themselves past a transactional experience. It’s a very shallow engagement, and there is no shared mission. Customers do not see the importance of serving in decision-influencing roles in governance nor are they even interested in anything stemming from it unless it directly hits their pocketbook. Instead of voice and representation, it’s about choice and convenience. The MGAT’s fourth recommendation states that strong governance “supports and accelerates” our Movement strategy, but on the flip side, I believe our customer-centric strategy is not conducive to a democratically based governance system. Perhaps I’ll expound upon this in another blog post.

I have a host of other thoughts about the report ranging from the MGAT’s recommendation to GSUSA to publish a public facing website related to governance (GSG, anyone?) to delegate training on parliamentary procedure, but I’ll stop here. In case you’re wondering whatever happened to the partnership with Harvard, you can find a summary and references in the MGAT report and appendix.

I hope I’m not ending this on a down note. I think the work of the MGAT is amazing, and in some ways, I viewed it as personally validating of many observations and concerns I’ve brought up on this blog and GSG through the years. It was exciting to see an idea that I campaigned for in a NCS proposal come to fruition even if its scope was not the same. I’ve been an advocate of the democratic process for a long time, and I believe this was a huge step. I just hope we can sustain it and continue to build on it.