Girl Scouts Adapt to New Era by Stressing Outreach Efforts

With a freight train blaring in the background, Ontario teenager Laura Cano recounts how she sacrificed most extracurricular activities in a mad dash to finish high school early, before her son was born six weeks ago.

The only program the 18-year-old managed to keep squeezing in after school at Valley View High -- the Girl Scouts -- provided her valuable information about how she might be able to pay for classes at a local community college.

“This is the first time I’ve done something like this,” said Cano, speaking from her home in a working-class neighborhood. “I wanted to make things for me and my baby and to have new experiences.”

This isn’t your mother’s Girl Scouts, where a premium was placed on tasks that girls were expected to aspire to: sewing, cooking and handicrafts. Today, girls like Cano, who has been a member for a year, participate in programs that teach self-esteem and leadership skills.

“We have a lot of things in place that aren’t cookies and camp,” said Robin Dennis, acting chief executive officer of the Montclair-based Girl Scouts Spanish Trails Council, which is named for Inland Empire trails used by early missionaries and explorers. “It’s exciting when you look at a group of girls and think to yourself, ‘Is one of those girls going to be the first woman president?’ That’s what we teach them.”

Administrators at the council’s outreach program expect to reach 2,200 girls between the ages of 5 and 17 this year at schools in Pomona, Baldwin Park, La Puente, Ontario and Montclair. These schools don’t have volunteer leaders; Girl Scout staff members recruit and lead the troops. A large proportion of youngsters who participate in the program are lower-income Mexican American girls, Dennis said.

“Most of these kids never thought about Girl Scouts. They say Girl Scouting in Mexico is for rich kids and that they didn’t think they would belong,” said Gloria Miller, membership manager of the Spanish Trails’ 11-year-old outreach program. “But our program helped them make friends. It helped them go places they wouldn’t get to go.”

The council’s outreach program, which costs $284,000 annually, received $10,000 from last year’s Times Holiday Campaign, which is part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund. Without that donation, Dennis said, the council wouldn’t have been able to serve some schools that requested the program.

The Los Angeles Times Family Fund is a fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which will match the first $700,000 raised at 50 cents on the dollar in this year’s campaign. The foundation and The Times absorb all administrative costs.

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