The other night I read a letter to the editor on-line about the need for Girl Scouts to change. (It wasn’t from Oklahoma.) The letter ranted about the need to stop doing crafts and camping and address really meaty issues for girls like science, technology and environmentalism. (Her daughter was 7 so I imagine she hasn’t gotten into much of the GS experience yet.) As an organization, Girl Scouts relies on volunteers – they are the voice and the face of Girl Scouts to girls. We are in the process as an organization of changing the way we recruit, retain, train and retrain our volunteers. We have a new set of program activities which are focused on leadership experiences for girls. It seems as though, while it is changing, I know sometimes it just doesn’t seem fast enough. As the CEO of another Council suggested in a national meeting, it is hard to turn a big luxury liner out on the high seas around quickly.
One of our challenges is to become more nimble. As a smaller Council, we have an advantage, but we are still grappling with this same issue. The merger brought us four camp properties. With 14,000 girls and about 1000 campers, we need to let go of tools that are no longer serving the needs of our customers (girls). I saw an article in a fundraising journal recently from the CEO of a large Boys and Girls Club. She and their board had a strategy to purge themselves of properties as they were too costly. Their new focus was to be on collaborations in which they could address the needs of youth, without spending so much money on maintenance and the physical upkeep of aging buildings.
If the core of our business at Girl Scouts is leadership development for girls, what role does the outdoors play? We have a legacy for taking girls outside and connecting them with the land for the purposes of teaching them leadership skills. We know there are many ways to do that. Yet, we have yet to have a national discussion as Girl Scouts around the role of the physical environment. Our legacy volunteers would like us to keep our camp properties as they remind them of their wonderful youth experiences there. But our legacy volunteers don’t have deep pockets and for many residential camp properties across the country, the difference in what men make and what women make an hour is no more obvious than the physical condition of our camps.
Becoming more nimble, building collaborations, documenting and then sharing our outcome data, these to me seem to be important for us as a movement as we go forward. There are many ways to connect girls to the land. In order to achieve agility as an organization to keep up with the changing needs of girls, we may need to decide that camp properties are not critical to our overall mission and the future for girls, for Girl Scouts.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
"Cooperative Breeding"
On the occasion of Mother’s Day, I was considering the role of nurturance in our lives and stumbled across sociobiologist, Sarah Blaffer, Hrdy’s new book, Mother’s and Others. Hrdy’s work is somewhat anthropological. Her premise is that human mothers and the species before us, needed “other mothers” to help raise the human infant. She points out that without additional nurturers, our ancestors were more likely to abandon their early offspring in the preservation of survival of the self.
This cooperative breeding culture in which parenting duties were spread out across a network of friends and relatives affected our development as a human species. Earlier anthropologists had believed that our cooperative nature was a response to an early, war-like nature, but according to Hrdy, it was more a function of us as humans, nurturing the infants in the community. This was true of both men and women. The somewhat primeval view of the nuclear family where the dad was out hunting while the mom stayed home in the cave with the children alone, may not have existed.
Hrdy’s work echoes psychiatrist, Allan Schore’s (http://www.thinkbody.co.uk/papers/interview-with-allan-s.htm) work as well in that both believe that this nurturing behavior helped to develop empathy and cooperation in humans. Schore, in one of his works, calls this “right mind” which helps to create persons capable of living in a more civilized society. By nurturing others and being nurtured, the human infant’s brain develops an ability to self-regulate. It is this ability to regulate emotions and feelings that forms the basis of our abilities to live together cooperatively.
It is what psychologists and psychiatrist’s call “attachment.” With it, we understand our effects on others; we develop a shared understanding of each other’s needs and wants. Children who lacks early bonding are said to have “attachment disorder” which leads to difficulties in self regulation as well as self-discipline. In severe cases, it leads to socially deviant and psychopathic behavior.
Emotional bonding and cooperation are touted today (Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and others) as a “new” way of thinking in the workplace. Looking at works like Hrdy’s and Schore’s, makes me think these ideas have been closely held and maintained by the society’s nurturers. Given our current state of world affairs and violence, perhaps we should remember our ancestral heritage and perhaps remember as a species we are all, women and men, nurturers of our next generation.
This cooperative breeding culture in which parenting duties were spread out across a network of friends and relatives affected our development as a human species. Earlier anthropologists had believed that our cooperative nature was a response to an early, war-like nature, but according to Hrdy, it was more a function of us as humans, nurturing the infants in the community. This was true of both men and women. The somewhat primeval view of the nuclear family where the dad was out hunting while the mom stayed home in the cave with the children alone, may not have existed.
Hrdy’s work echoes psychiatrist, Allan Schore’s (http://www.thinkbody.co.uk/papers/interview-with-allan-s.htm) work as well in that both believe that this nurturing behavior helped to develop empathy and cooperation in humans. Schore, in one of his works, calls this “right mind” which helps to create persons capable of living in a more civilized society. By nurturing others and being nurtured, the human infant’s brain develops an ability to self-regulate. It is this ability to regulate emotions and feelings that forms the basis of our abilities to live together cooperatively.
It is what psychologists and psychiatrist’s call “attachment.” With it, we understand our effects on others; we develop a shared understanding of each other’s needs and wants. Children who lacks early bonding are said to have “attachment disorder” which leads to difficulties in self regulation as well as self-discipline. In severe cases, it leads to socially deviant and psychopathic behavior.
Emotional bonding and cooperation are touted today (Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and others) as a “new” way of thinking in the workplace. Looking at works like Hrdy’s and Schore’s, makes me think these ideas have been closely held and maintained by the society’s nurturers. Given our current state of world affairs and violence, perhaps we should remember our ancestral heritage and perhaps remember as a species we are all, women and men, nurturers of our next generation.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
What is Beauty?
The latest buzz regarding Susan Boyle’s stunning performance on Britain’s Got Talent, (stunning only to the people who stereotype what someone with a big voice should look like) has stirred up discussion around body image (see Ellen Goodman’s take on it: http://www.insidebayarea.com/columnists/ci_12292180) and whether or not Susan should have succumbed to the makeover given her after her initial introduction to fame.
An exercise girls do through the Uniquely Me program in Girl Scouts starts by giving girls mirrors in which they are to describe what they see. Initial comments are often negative: “a fat girl,” “a big nose,” etc. Through the program, girls have the opportunity to journal about how they feel about their looks, the messages they get from the media about how they look and ultimately are led around to a discussion and connection with their own inner beauty.
As we are often bombarded with messages, we often don’t distinguish what is our voice, from what is the voice of Madison Avenue, telling us what we should be, how we should look, what we should wear. The Uniquely Me program is designed to help girls find their own voices. The challenge of course, for all women, is to have the courage to choose differently from the popular fashion voice. I know as a grown up that there are choices I make about my appearance that have more to do with the cultural voice and standards than my own. (My staff at the battered women’s shelter in which I worked years ago would tease me that as our financial condition became increasingly dire my “fundraising skirt” became shorter!) I also know there are times that perhaps I am not clear as to what is my voice and what is the fashion standard voice I have unknowingly taken as my own.
Through sponsorship with Dove, Girl Scouts is helping girls get in touch with their own voice, their own standard for how they would like to look, what choices they want to make. Sometimes we may see the compromises we make to fit in and choose to compromise, other times, we might see the path that is clearly laid out for us and choose our own unique pathway. Through this program, girls learn to distinguish those voices, so that when other choices are laid out before them, they make the healthy one. I know that I can’t follow around my daughters (10 and 11) as they grow into their teen years, I can only hope through the Dove program and others, they have learned to discern when they are choosing to go along with the crowd, and when they are courageously forging a new path.
An exercise girls do through the Uniquely Me program in Girl Scouts starts by giving girls mirrors in which they are to describe what they see. Initial comments are often negative: “a fat girl,” “a big nose,” etc. Through the program, girls have the opportunity to journal about how they feel about their looks, the messages they get from the media about how they look and ultimately are led around to a discussion and connection with their own inner beauty.
As we are often bombarded with messages, we often don’t distinguish what is our voice, from what is the voice of Madison Avenue, telling us what we should be, how we should look, what we should wear. The Uniquely Me program is designed to help girls find their own voices. The challenge of course, for all women, is to have the courage to choose differently from the popular fashion voice. I know as a grown up that there are choices I make about my appearance that have more to do with the cultural voice and standards than my own. (My staff at the battered women’s shelter in which I worked years ago would tease me that as our financial condition became increasingly dire my “fundraising skirt” became shorter!) I also know there are times that perhaps I am not clear as to what is my voice and what is the fashion standard voice I have unknowingly taken as my own.
Through sponsorship with Dove, Girl Scouts is helping girls get in touch with their own voice, their own standard for how they would like to look, what choices they want to make. Sometimes we may see the compromises we make to fit in and choose to compromise, other times, we might see the path that is clearly laid out for us and choose our own unique pathway. Through this program, girls learn to distinguish those voices, so that when other choices are laid out before them, they make the healthy one. I know that I can’t follow around my daughters (10 and 11) as they grow into their teen years, I can only hope through the Dove program and others, they have learned to discern when they are choosing to go along with the crowd, and when they are courageously forging a new path.
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