100,000 Cybersecurity Badges

The Girl Scouts has been around for more than a hundred years. It has a rich sense of tradition, of history, but it's also seeing a decline in membership. How difficult is it to reconcile that sense of tradition with the fresh approaches that you're trying to take to move it forward into the next century?

So you know, the first thing is I focused on is how do I make, how do we make this relevant for girls? If you can make it fun, relevant and safe for girls, that's where you start. And that's why we focused on our programming because we have to have programming that they want to do. I'll tell you we're such a success, like right now in our first year, our cybersecurity badges alone, a hundred thousand badges being earned. I mean that's ten thousand a month and it's not just in areas like San Francisco or Boston. It's in North Dakota. It's in Alaska. It's in rural areas of Alabama and it's because we know how to make programming that is really compelling to girls and the way girls learn and lead.

So for us, that's where we started and when you look at the measures of success, of turning membership around, one of the first indicators are retention rates and relevancy, and I've got to tell you both numbers and indicators are way up. We're seeing our relevancy rates really rise. Then it's introducing Girl Scouts so that people realize we're not just girls who cookie, but we're girls who do so many other things about leadership, outdoors, you know, wonderful STEM and clearly entrepreneurship as well. And so that's the second part, but our indicators of turning that around are way up and the first, is is it fun, safe and relevant for girls? And girls are telling us yes.