Girl Scouts launching trailblazing badges
Group presses relevance, focuses on STEM fields
Space exploration. Mechanical engineering. Robotics. Cutting-edge fields – for cutting-edge young women.
Girl Scouts of the USA is launching 30 new badges that emphasize skills in innovative areas to propel members to new heights, programs best nurtured in a single-gender environment, agency officials say.
The badge rollout announced Tuesday comes at a tense time for Girl Scouts: Boy Scouts of America said last year it would start accepting girls into its programs in a shift toward inclusivity; as of March, more than 3,000 girls had been enrolled in early adopter programs.
The Girl Scouts opposed the change, which was announced last October. Kathy Hopinkah Hannan, the organization’s president, asked the board of Boy Scouts in August not to recruit girls.
The badge program already was in development when the Boy Scouts announced it would start accepting girls, Girl Scouts CEO Sylvia Acevedo told USA TODAY, and was not a direct re- sponse to the decision.
But it makes the case to keep the “girl” in Girl Scouts, Acevedo says. “This is the only place that you can get these kinds of skills, in this safe, all-girls environment,” she said.
The 30 new badges include programs for multiple age groups in environmental stewardship, robotics, mechanical engineering and space exploration. A new College Knowledge badge prepares girls to tackle the college admissions and financial aid application process.
“We really know how they learn and how they lead, and so they have the opportunity to try, fail, try again, try another way of looking at it,” Acevedo said. “So, they get the confidence and knowhow that they can do it.”
“We really have created that leadership pipeline,” Acevedo said, noting that about half of female elected officials in the USA are former Girl Scouts. “These things you can only get through Girl Scouts.”