Girl Scouts Aint Beanbag

A friend alerts me to this:

 

1. I’ve read on the Girl Scouts website that the current pension deficit issue will cause councils to see a 40% increase in pension expenses starting the day girl scout cookies go on sale, and a 62% increase over the next three years. According to the girl scout.org site “For many Girl Scout councils, this means that the pension expense will suck up money that would normally go toward operating expenses such as staff salaries and benefits, camp maintenance, outreach programs for at-risk girls, scholarship support for low-income girls, and general programming.“

I know you’re currently trying to get congress to grant legislation to help you but I haven’t heard of any progress on that so I’m under the impression that as it stands, cookie sales that previously went to scholarships and camp maintenance will now be used to pay pensions.  I’m reading of many historic camps that are being closed or sold.  It’s a concern for many reasons, but particularly because the girls in our troop were always able to say that cookie sales help at-risk girls and support community camps. We haven’t been able to get any verbiage to respond to people who will ask why girl scout camps are being sold and whether the councils will be able to support scholarships as they have in the past.

 

Girl Scouts is probably not a middle class organization any longer. It probably suffers in the same ways most formerly strong organizations have failed the formerly strong American middle class. We live in an upper middle class neighborhood and the Scout Leader of our girls troop is an aerospace project manager at Northrom Grumman. So this last year when the Last Kid sold her cookies, she made enough money for the troop to sponsor her and her mother on a three day Pacific cruise along with the other top sellers. Both of my daughters have had trips from LA to Disneyworld in Florida with most costs covered by their fundraising activities. In other words, we have a kickass troop, that is not only solvent but profitable. But I know that it kicks ass because we live in close proximity to the kinds of neighborhoods where fundraising is part of the culture and sponsorships are abundant, and because our leader is smart as a whip when it comes to managing time and money.

 

I think our story is very much like the story of America, where things taken for granted by a middle class simply are not economical any longer, and the things that work economically, like Priuses, are overpriced, over complicated and oversold. Nobody has the old drill press job that affords the family of four a new Chevy, because now gas mileage and crash protection are higher priorities than ever in our 'dont try this at home' society. And if that sounds like a crazy stretch of logic, it's because I've been thinking for a long time why America doesn't work the way it used to. The short answer is that we've all adopted what used to be upper class standards and are petrified at what we used to do in the unsupervised, unsafe good old days. How did your grandparents survive without ATM networks and a pocket full of credit cards? They just did. Today a cheeseburger cost 6 dollars. You practically need to finance it. How did your grandparents survive waiting 6 to 8 weeks for mail order delivery? They just did. Today you can't mail anything physical without activating multi-billion dollar logistics networks.

 

Our troop of Girl Scouts is run by somebody who understand those logistics networks, professionally. And I have no doubt we have at least one accountant looking over the books and figuring out how to finance our young ladies' activities. it aint beanbag. That's too bad. We need more beanbag. But can we accept that it's just beanbag and not a set of best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma business case to synergize a consistent set of community activities supporting our mission statement through cultural diversity for STEM awareness, retention and graduation?