Girl Scout model rocket changed her career path
Organization’s top officer touts group’s benefits for young women
When it admits girls to its ranks beginning next year, Boy Scouts of America will have a new name to embrace both genders: Scouts USA.
That title will encompass the programs for 11- to 17-year-olds while the Cub Scouts name will be maintained for boys and girls in the program for 7- to 10-year-olds. Members will be split along gender lines with boys and girls pursuing the same activities in different units.
The top officer of Girl Scouts of the USA believes young women are still better off belonging to her organization — the one that helped her see a way to college and build a career as an engineer.
“We are experts in how girls learn and we have outstanding girl outcomes,” said Sylvia Acevedo, chief executive of the program that has provided leadership and adventure skills to its members for 106 years.
In co-educational environments, she said, girls often don’t have a chance — especially if they don’t assert themselves or if they lag behind their male peers in computer skills. “If you want a girl to have the experience tailored to how she develops friendships and potential, you have to join Girl Scouts.”
Ms. Acevedo made her case during a phone interview in advance of her May 18 appearance at the Girl Scouts Western Pennsylvania’s Awards of Distinction luncheon. She will give the keynote address at the event to be held at the Omni William Penn Hotel, Downtown.
Girl Scouts has about 1.8 million members nationwide, including 21,000 in the Western Pennsylvania region that includes 27 counties. Boy Scouts has about 2.3 million members.
Both organizations have seen participation fall in recent years as children and families have more extracurricular activities to choose from and more demands on their time.
Ms. Acevedo is focused on Girl Scouts’ recent outreach to become more diverse, and the introduction of new badges in science and other STEM subjects such as cybersecurity and robotics that will increase girls’ exposure to technical fields.
“We want to give [girls] skills to be inventors, creators and designers of technology, not just users,” she said.
Ms. Acevedo traces her own success as an engineer at NASA, Apple, IBM and Dell to her experience earning a Girl Scout science badge.
She grew up in a poor family in southern New Mexico where many Hispanic girls didn’t finish high school. When she was 7, her family moved from a place without paved roads to a better developed neighborhood. She was introduced to Girl Scouts at her new school.
“It changed my life trajectory,” she said.
By building a model rocket for scouts, she learned science “was a lot like cooking.”
“You’ve got to get the ingredients, the sequence and the heat source right. You do all that and you have success.”
She wasn’t sure her family could afford to send her to college, but with the encouragement of her troop leader, she figured out money management by selling Girl Scouts cookies.
“I learned how to create opportunity … something many people in poverty don’t know.”
She earned a bachelor’s in industrial engineering from New Mexico State University and a master’s in systems engineering at Stanford University.
Among her early career stops was NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where she worked as a rocket scientist.
“So my world came full circle.”
Years later, after selling a successful technology firm she had co-founded, Ms. Acevedo was volunteering to help students read at an elementary school in Austin, Texas, and learned many didn’t have access to dental care.
She decided to use her math skills to organize collections of personal and school supplies. “I know how to scale, so I put my efforts into scalable solutions in education.”
The result was thousands of donated books, mobile libraries and mobile vans that offered dental and vision care.
That community work was among the reasons she was named in 2011 to the White House Commission for Educational Excellence for Hispanics by President Barack Obama.
A dozen years ago, Stanford contacted her about a historical archives project and told her she was among the first students of Hispanic heritage to earn a graduate engineering degree from the university.
The more questions the caller asked about her early math and science education, the more Ms. Acevedo realized, “It had to do with Girl Scouts.”
“That’s when I said I have to do more for the organization than buy cookies.”
She joined the local Girl Scouts council in Austin, served on the national board from 2009 to 2016, and was named chief executive a year ago.
Now based in New York City where Girl Scouts is headquartered, Ms. Acevedo said she purposely picked a spot to live near Central Park so she’d see “something beyond buildings.”
“As someone who grew up looking at the horizon, this is a different view.”