What do you think of Girl Scouts?

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I like the chocolate mint cookies the best.

They seem to do great things for kids, the service that is. They learn valuable skills.
 
Renny said:
I have had a less than pleasant experience being a jr troop leader this year & am wondering if the awful attitudes I have experienced in other girl scout troop leaders here locally is found elsewhere or is the prevailing attitude or just an isolated experience??

I have had some good experiences as well…just looking for feedback here.

I am considering the Pilgrams of the Holy Family program for our family as an alternative.
Thanks,
Renny
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I think Girl Scouting is a wonderful organization and support them as much as I can.

As with any organization, club, even parish, there are good ones and some that are…well, not so much good ones.
 
I really like the idea of an all-Catholic girls’ club for a lot of reasons.

Hey, I tried to do that copy quate thing…not sure I am doing it correctly. Anyway, I understand the all-Catholic club idea. When we joined American Heritage Girls there were several troops in our town. The only Catholic one however was a 20 minute drive. That’s alot when you have 4 kids!! We joined a troop at a different church and have really enjoyed meeting the wonderful Christian families of this church. That being said a few other Catholic moms and I decided to start a troop at our church. It has been a wonderful experience and is going very well. We also have a Girls Scouts at our church/school. However, we have had a great response once people look at the program. It was so well developed and is very “meaty” as one mom said. We do have some GS switching over, but they are not doing it because of the problems pointed out earlier. They just think the AHG program provides more substance. It also has the advantage of having all girls K-12 in one troop so that sisters can all meet at the same time! Obviously I am a little bias to this group, but they truely have a love of God, Family and Country. They also believe that we build our women of intergrity through service to others.
 
HappyMom4 said:
It also has the advantage of having all girls K-12 in one troop so that sisters can all meet at the same time!
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Oh, this is a great thing!! Our daughter in GS is 10 & our next girl is 16 mos…so they may not be able to meet together for awhile, but what a wonderful thing!! Renny
 
I have been a Girl Scout for most of my life, was a Gold Award recipient, a GS camp counselor, and a GS leader. Unfortunately I felt I could no longer support the Girl Scout National Agenda and went looking for alternatives. American Heritage Girls is a fantastic program and I almost started a troop with them 2 years ago. Unfortunately my coleader was LDS and unable to sign their statement of faith. I couldn’t tell her 7 year old daughter that while she would be allowed in my new troop, her mother would no longer be able to help because she did not believe exactly the same way I did.

I decided to start my own organization, Frontier Girls, to fill the gap and provide a clean, moral, scouting experience for any girl who believes in God and is willing to recite and live by our promise and creed. As a homeschooling mom, I wanted to incorporate a love of learning into my program and we are able to offer a badge on nearly any subject a girl wishes to learn about. We currently have a list of more than 150 badges and are the only organization that actually offers badges on character traits such as joy, honesty, and modesty.

Patriotism is a stressed in our program and every meeting starts with a formal flag ceremony. In addition, we offer optional programs such as “Adopt a Platoon” where we match troops with platoons stationed overseas and they send cards and care packages every month. We conduct community flag ceremonies and also offer a program called the “Patriot Program” to girls of military families that move a lot.

One of the greatest benefits to any parent (of boys or girls) is our Level Achievement Award. This award is a list of 30 life skills that every child should be able to do by the end of 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 12 grades. Skills cover home making, finances, navigation, physical skills, and many other life skills. I would encourage any homeschooling parent to get on our website, click on “Awards” and then on “Level Achievement Award” to download the requirements for this award and do through them with each of their children.

In addition to service stars that the girls earn for doing community service, we also offer the “Make a Difference” award for those girls who organize and lead their own service project. This award is available to all age levels with the scope of the project and number of hours needed increasing with each level.

In order to make sure that girls get the most out of our program, we require all troops to earn the Emergency Preparedness badge, the Etiquette badge, and either Patriotism or Our Flag badge once every three years. This ensures that the girls earn these badges at each level of Frontier Girls and at the very least will leave our program as polite young ladies with respect for their country who are calm and capable in an emergency.

Frontier Girls was incorporated in California in Jan. 2007 and we currently have troops in CA, NY, TN, FL, and MO with others just getting started in MI, WI, TX, and WA. We can open troops in any state and girls are also invited to participate as an individual through our Pioneer Program. If you would like further information on Frontier Girls, please visit our website at www.frontiergirls.com.

Sincerely,
Kerry Cordy
President
Frontier Girls
www.frontiergirls.com
 
I’ve never had my girls in girl scouts because I wanted something very, very Catholic oriented.

So, when my dd was 4, I started a Little Flowers group.
We have been running it as a co-op now 9 years later. In a very cool development this year.-our older girls were starting to get bored, so we made them leaders/teachers for the younger group. It has been so awesome to see them using the formation they’ve received to teach the the younger girls.

Little Flowers is oriented in forming specific virtues–esp. using Saints as models.

My dd has also participated in Challenge–a Regnum Christi girls club for girls 10-15.
 
frontiergirls said:
What is Challenge and the Regnum Christi Girls Club?
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challengeclubs.com/

It’s a young group that is an apostolate of the Regnum Chrisi movement. The Regnum Christi movement is a lay (non clerical) arm of the Legionaries of Christ.

It meets for weekly formation. The leaders are teenagers who have had their own training.

If you have heard of Pure Fashion–a modesty in dress movement–it’s also an apostolate of Regnum Christi

purefashion.com/
 
My wife’s a professional girl scout leader and this question is one that she runs into.

The Girl Scouts are much more decentralized than the Boy Scouts. As a former Boy Scout, from what I’ve seen, the organization has relied far too much in recent years on consultants who believe in decentralizing everything. To some extent, this is likely driven by the expense of liability insurance and related liability lawsuits.

There have been errant girl scout troop leaders; their activities have brought a lot of negative publicity for the whole organization. . .

Which is entirely unfair.

There is no “connection” or conspiracy with Planned Parenthood (although I would bet $100 that PP would love to get one going).

I’m a great supporter of scouts, and think that my scouting experience was, pound for pound, the most valuable of my life.
 
Renny,
I had similar concerns about the Girl Scouts a few years ago. I prayed for a more Catholic-friendly alternative to GS and soon learned that Challenge was starting in my parish. After researching Challenge, Regnum Christi, and the LC, I decided to stick with Girl Scouts for my daughters, though. I’m not crazy about GSUSA, but we choose which programs we get involved in, and our association is fairly conservative. Also, the GS have rules about respecting a girl’s religious beliefs (in the Blue Book of Basic Documents). The religious medal programs are good; the Family of God ties in well with First Communion prep, and the Marian medal covers much of the same material as our Confirmation classes.

As with any other program, it mostly depends on the leaders. I think GS gives my girls some great opportunities, and I love being involved with them and their friends. It looks like the GS leadership learned from the recent drop in membership, that you shouldn’t alienate the people who are having children (traditional families).
 
I am a Golden Trefoil (lifelong Girl Scout), member since age 10, leader for 20 years, and trainer. DD has been a member since age 5 (first experiment with Daisies, kind of pre-Brownies), leader for 8 years, now service unit chairman (neither of us has ever been cookie chairman, we are dumb but not stupid). DD#2 was in from grades 2-10, and plans to be a brownie leader as soon as GD is old enough. My mother and sisters have been GS and leaders even tho neither sister has children. All agree our experiences have been uniformly positive, and we none of us have ever had any contact with or given support to PP, directly or indirectly.

none of us were ever into GS as a social protest movement, but rather in the spirt of Lady Baden Powell and Juliet Low, what girls can do for their country, girls developing all their skills and talents, and most of all camping and outdoor skills in general. Accompanied eldest granddaughter’s troop not long ago (her mom is the only one of us who was never a GS) on the annual canoe trip w/cadet GS troops and BS troops, and proud to see her troop (successor of my old cadet troop) is still the only one, boys or girls, who could lift, carry and portage their own canoes.

none of us ever belonged to or led troops sponsored by Catholic schools or parishes, for reasons I don’t really know, except that every troop we have been involved with has included girls from several schools, and has by the way been multiracial, multiethnic, and multi-religion.
 
You know, the problem for the Girl Scouts is the same problem for the Boy Scouts.

It’s tough to teach the same subject, year in, year out, so to speak.

Much more exciting to jump on the bandwagon of some “progressive” idea or group. As an organization, the Girl Scouts haven’t done that, but as I’ve indicated above, individual units have felt the temptation to prove their womanhood by doing PP stuff.

As is ever the case, at the troop level is where it counts. You have excellent boy scout troops and bland ones, etc.
 
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