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Girl Scout camps up for sale
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Jeremy Hobson: The Girls Scouts are selling more than just cookies these days. Money is tight and so the not-for-profit group is taking a cue from corporate America. The Girl Scouts are merging local groups and selling off part of their most valuable asset: land -- as in the scout's much loved summer camps.
Marketplace's Sally Herships has the story.
Sally Herships: Amber Harrison is a 15-year-old Girl Scout in Ohio. Her mom Kathleen is her troop leader. They're standing in front of a local Girl Scout camp, Hilaka, about 45 minutes outside of Cleveland.
Kathleen Harrison: Over here, we have the lodge where all the cooking is done.
Amber Harrison: The latrines.
Kathleen Harrison: And of course, the latrines.
Everything is green and peaceful. But camps are expensive to run. And local Girl Scout councils around the country are selling off camps like Hilaka.
Amber Harrison: I wish we could tell them that this isn't what we want. We don't want this.
Five camps in the Harrison's area have been sold. And five more are on the list, leaving just two. But the local Girl Scout council says it has a plan: to take profits from the sales and give their remaining camps a makeover, creating what it calls premier leadership centers. One of the first things to be renovated would be the latrines.
Kathleen Harrison: If they gave them a survey and said would you like flush toilets, every single one of my girls would say yes. But do they need flush toilets?
Nationally, membership in the Girl Scouts is down.
Brent Gardner: When occupancy is down, you study why occupancy is down and sometimes it's facilities.
Brent Gardner is on the board of directors of the Harrisons' local council. Locally, Gardner says, they're not seeing as many campers as they'd like. He says the camps his council is responsible for are from the 1940s and '50s, when there were 30 girls in a troop.
Gardner: Well today's troops are 10, nine, seven, 13.
Gardner says many of the local camps are in poor shape. Fixing them up would cost the council $30 million. It wants camps to include aquatic
programs, computer labs and communications facilities. The Harrisons are more the latrine type.
Amber Harrison: It wouldn't be the same. Like if we had like hot water and stuff, it would just be like camping at home.
But the Girl Scouts national office says today's parents want camp to include a learning aspect and sometimes the great outdoors might not be enough.
I'm Sally Herships for Marketplace.
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I can tell you that with my oldest daughter, back when there was still a GSLEC, it took me nine, I repeat, nine phone calls to Council to get my daughter signed up as a Girl Scout. I spent her entire year as a Daisy calling Council, all the while stating in every call that I noticed there were no troops at her school (I lived in Parma then) ad that I would love to be a leader and get a troop going. I am very persistant, so I never relented. But, seriously, most people would never call a place nine times to sign their child up for something. That is very poor recruiting, don't you think?
I am sure things have changed over the years. In fact, I am now in the Revere District, and our SUD does a wonderful job with the resources provided us to help girls join Girl Scouts, but there is always room for improvement, and I am sure there are better ways to encourage parents to sign their daughters up. I keep hearing how Council says the numbers have dropped: well that may be true, but there are so many factors to take into consideration: 1. In most households, both parents work, making it more difficult to get their daughters to Scout meetings. 2. The economy. Need I say more? A poster just commented on this page about how expensive she felt Girl Scouts was. I bet she has no idea that Girl Scouts has financial aid for those in need. 3. More competition than when we were young Pixies and Brownies. Nowadays, there are Indian Guides, which allows dads, daughters and sons to all participate together. I'm sure this has affected our numbers a little. 4. Too many extra-curriculars. Kids today have so many activities that many parents just feel they cannot fit Girl Scouts in. And I am sure hearing about Girl Scouts in a negative light, such as this instance, doesn't prompt them to think it would be of benefit to squeeze a bi monthly meeting into their child's schedule. I'm sure there are many more factors many of you can think of, these are the ones that instantly pop into my mind.
I think Girl Scouts is such a positive experience for my girls, and for every girl. I always encourage the moms I meet to get their daughters involved in Girl Scouts.
I think there has to be more innovative ways to gets girls and their parents involved in loving our camps and utilizing them more. I do agree that a weekend trip with a smaller troop can be costly. But, the summer week long experience at Hilaka was so ridiculously cheap, it was crazy. That camp should have been sold out the minute the online registration opened up. I have three children, all avid summer campers, and I have never witnessed a camp that offered SO much for SO little $. RAINBOWS was worth every penny. In fact, I'd go so far as to say, I think it would have been a great deal at just $100 for the week. I don't think I know of a parent who pays less than $100 for a week of daycare, and RAINBOWS offered daily food (ice cream socials, group s'mores, pie irons, etc) and daily take home crafts (tie dye socks, tree pots, picture frames for their group photo, journals, bracelets, swaps, etc). Every troop should be receiving flyers regarding summer Girl Scout camps in their area and the coordinators should get paid to run them. There is no reason why the camp shouldn't be as full as Council wants it to be as much as it wants it to be. It was the tiniest little ad just thrown into a page in the Spring Faces/Places. I actually coldn't find it a few times. Feel free to take a peek, you'll see what I mean, go to www.gsneo.org and look at the Spring Faces/Places. I think it may be on page 41 if memory serves me correctly.
My thought is, at this point, Council doesn't care if there is uccess at camps or not. I'm of the belief that there is always hope. There is hope for our daughters' future, and for Girl Scout Camps. I think that NPR may have done one thing right, which is to bring the subject of losing our camps a bit closer to the surface. Hopefully people are sitting up a little, and paying more attention now. Sometimes just reading a newspaper article doesn't do enough. Hearing it on the radio may hit home a bit more. It's just too bad they threw it together so fast and kept it so one-sided. It is such an important topic that deserved much more research and coverage.
What does the GS Council expect? They hire a couple of very kind scientiss (no offense to scientists as they are very important and needed, but are understandably not experienced in sales and marketing) those two landscape architects from Ohio and Michigan, and those two suggest selling the camps to raise money. No big surprise as what else would they suggest??? They have no sales experience.
Hire a couple of salesmen, fundraisers, PR or marketing experts and you will get a totally different recommendation that won’t mention selling camps. The GS Council needs people with sales, marketing and PR backgrounds to get the word out, increase attendance and raise funds so selling the camps would never be an option. What they have now is a huge lack of marketing/PR/sales experience, hence the reason they wrongly think the only way out is to sell the camps. Anyone with marketing experience would never think of selling the camps to raise funds with all the other innovative fundraising and PR opportunities available. Shame on the GS Council.
Girl Scout numbers are not down because of rustic camp facilities, they are down because the national organization has lost its focus. They are constantly trying new things and have lost our basic programs, including outdoor experiences and service. More than ever girls needs a place to de-stress, turn off the electronics and form friendships in a non-competitive quiet place in nature. Everything else is icing on the cake- including flush toilets.
Its a shame that GSNEO is not listening to its members. I am a Troop Leader of 6th and 7th graders. When I asked them if they wanted the Premier Camps they all said NO!!. They said they do all that in school and everywhere else. Since our President of the Board owns a Reality Co. I wonder who is getting a kickback. If they want more members maybe they should make it easier for the currant members.
What a terribly researched story! I am incredibly disappointed in Marketplace for this kind of sloppy reporting. Hobson has it right that Girl Scouts are taking a cue from corporate America, but as for needing to take this measure, he and Sally Herships couldn't be more wrong. GSNEO has time and again refused to accept the help of volunteers and companies willing to come in and do repair and maintenance for free. Their supposed research that led to this decision included flawed surveys and invented statistics--seriously, do a quick google search of articles about this subject and you'll see that the number of girls who camp vary from 50% to 5%. That's quite the margin of error. Further, our CEO and many board members were never girl scouts themselves. They come from corporate positions, have never participated in our programs, and so do not understand the fundamental values of this organization. They serve in the positions that they do for another line on their resumes, not for the benefit of the girls of the 18 counties they are supposed to represent. The membership has expressed time and again that this is not what they want, but corporate leaders do not have to listen to their membership. The board, CEO, CFO, and COO need to be reminded that this is not a corporation and that they are beholden to the wishes of the girls and volunteers. After all, it is the girls, through their cookie sales who bring in $8 million of our $11 million dollar budget. The girls should have a say equal to what they give to this organization. They want their camps to stay. It's not a coincidence that every story about the camps quotes different girls and volunteers against the sale of the camps but have to keep coming back to Brent Gardner and Daisy Alford-Smith for pro-sale comments.
I'd like everyone reading this to ask themselves about the utility of "leadership centers." Were they a major part of your success story? They certainly played no role in mine. I spent my childhood at camp (winter and summer) and I somehow managed to become a Ph.D. candidate in history without leadership centers. As a historian, I can tell you that no historical figure that I've come across credits her/his leadership abilities to seminars and leadership centers. They used life experiences to help them lead. Give our children the ability to power-off and learn from life experiences. I have a feeling that they'll turn out ok even if they never set foot in a leadership center.
NPR, shame on you! This story is so one sided. The real story is that the majority of the GSNEO girl and adult members DO NOT WANT what the GSNEO Board and staff are trying to shove down the throats of their members. I have been a volunteer leader for 9 years for GSNEO. I know what the girls need and want. They want their current GS camps open and maintained. They want to giggle at a safe all girl camp site with their Girl Scout friends. They want to learn how to cook over a fire, canoe and hike in the woods. They do not want electricity and computers and new buildings farther from home. They want camp close to home so they can go more often because GS camp is a ton of good ol' fashioned FUN. This story is far from over. Follow it!
When Girl Scouts go camping, you leave the electronics at home. There are to be no phones, Ipods, computers, because the girls need to get away from these things and experience the OUTDOORS---the trees, the sounds of nature, the smells, the beauty, and the wonderment of Nature. They need to get dirty, to experience the bugs and birds and animals, to run and enjoy the outdoors, to work together, to share responsibilities, to be "future leaders." Put the computers and the premier centers in the Girl Scout Center in Macedonia .... and keep the irreplacable camps for the future generations of Girl Scouts.
Keep the OUTing in Scouting! We do not need structured and state of the art Premier Leadership Training Center style camp sites. We owe it to our forefathers and to the future generations to "protect and improve" by sustaining our current green spaces- Especially our Girl Scout Camps. GSUSA and GSNEO are not in the red. Families are smaller and girls learn how to get along with others, share cooking, living and sleeping spaces with their peers in a unique way at camp. They come away more mature, self confident, self reliant and ready to become leaders, mothers and the architects of our future. Keep them spoon fed and we have a real problem for generations to come. Proximity for volunteers and Scout families is a priority. Safety is also a major priority. Without back ground checks and registered Girl Scouts at Camps, we place our girls at risk. We were told at the General Assembly meeting in April by the Board of Directors of GSNEO to go to the local State Parks. This is not a well thought out piece of advise coming from a group of people who are supposed to have the greater good of Girl Scouts at heart. The membership of GS is respectfully disagreeing with the decision to close and sell the GS Camps. Adults and girls who do not work for GSNEO and GSUSA are not being heard. Please accept the proposal to place holds on all closures and sales of camps. Thank you.
This was the worst article of all about the sale of camps.BRENT gardner is wrong. We are the underdogs and when we reach out for help-NPR goes to the perpurtrator to get the facts. Something like the one victim of Anthony Sowell that jumped out the window to save her life and when a bystander came by he took Sowell's word that everything is ok.
We are being pillaged of our legacy and the girls are helpless. Please look into the facts. BTW, Crowell-Hilaka HAS flush toliets-duh. Good reporting-not
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