Girl Scouts Aims to Update Image

Troop leader June Cleaver in a starched green shirtdress -- it’s an enduring yet outdated and disabling image that Girl Scouts of the USA is taking bold steps to replace for the survival of the 90-year-old institution.

Girls by the millions -- 2.8 million, to be exact -- still want to be Scouts. It’s just that their moms and other women can’t or won’t lead troops.

Adult role models shepherding girls toward good citizenship and success are the cornerstone of the organization founded in 1912. And the dearth of such volunteers, especially among the country’s growing Asian and Latino populations, threatens to cripple it.

As 15,000 Girl Scouts and volunteers gather at the Long Beach Convention Center through today for their national convention, strategies for attracting Latina volunteers ages 18 and older will be central to policies delegates will consider. “We are involved in a major effort to recruit Hispanic girls and Asian girls,” said Joannie Ransom, executive director of the Angeles Girl Scout Council and a co-coordinator of the convention. “In order to keep Girl Scouting relevant, it is so important that every girl has an opportunity to become the very best she can be through Girl Scouting.”

For a national organization that was a fixture of white suburbia at its 1969 peak of 4 million girls, shifts in race, ethnicity and cultural mores also have depleted membership, to about 2.8 million as of September 2001. About 75% of those members are white. That number includes girls who are not Scouts in troops but participate in Girl Scout-run programs.

Nearly 11% are African American, and black membership continues to rise, according to Michelle Landa, a national spokeswoman.

But efforts in almost every state have gained new members in the unlikeliest of places -- homeless shelters, migrant farm encampments, Khmer-speaking Cambodian neighborhoods and what would seem to be the capitol of anti-Scout territory, juvenile hall.

Clearly, the Girl Scouts of yesteryear -- those who had to sport the nerdy uniform of green beret and knee socks, who sewed sit-upons of vinyl filled with newspaper, who crafted for light and cooking the buddy burners of wax-dipped rope coiled in tuna cans -- have been replaced.

The founding mission remains: to serve every girl, everywhere. Uniforms have been updated to include not just Girl Scout green but navy and khaki -- there is also a confused garment called a skort -- and they are completely optional. Badges are still earned. But they have names like “Stress Less” and “Global Awareness.”

Most incredibly, the Girl Scouts are now sometimes even -- gasp! -- serving boys.

“Nobody likes to advertise that, but in communities where we are trying to increase membership, like the Cambodian and Hispanic groups, they are family-oriented, and we can’t exclude anyone -- not even boys,” explained Michelle Burton, economic development director for the Girl Scouts Council of Greater Long Beach.

As she says this, a glance at her appearance is telling: She is wearing a Talbots-looking pine green cardigan, modest A-line skirt and sensible pumps. Her hair is in cornrow braids, into which beads have been woven in “the colors of the African flag,” she explained.

Burton said she is a truer picture of the Girl Scout of 2002 than the Betty Crocker stereotype the organization aims to overcome.

“In Girl Scouting, we have the challenge of removing the stigma that we’re an upper-class, white organization, and we haven’t ever been,” said Burton, part of a council that oversees troops and programs in 17 communities, from Catalina Island to Compton.

Standing in front of the convention center Saturday morning, a group of Girl Scouts from Corona, near Riverside, including black, Latina and white members, snapped photographs alongside their mothers and troop leader Barbara Mathews.

Elnora Gomez, 53, a mother of one of the Scouts, said she grew up yearning to be a member, but she could not afford the fees. Another mother, Alma Padilla, 38, said she, too, wanted to be a member but her Latino parents were resistant to the idea because it was unfamiliar to them, and they were wary about letting her go on group field trips.

Now, their daughters are not only learning the values taught by the organization, they are learning about different cultures and foods from their Scouting peers. The Corona troop also has members with Italian, French, Japanese and Hungarian backgrounds.

Mathews, 52, has been a member of the Scouts for 34 years, and she has watched its membership diversify ethnically and among social classes.

“The national organization has made a real effort to try to reach out to other groups,” she said. “It’s great because I hated to see groups feel like they were being excluded.”

National membership of Latino, African American and Asian American girls has increased from 2000 to 2001, the latest figures available, according to Girl Scouts of the USA.

Besides recruiting troop leader volunteers, the convention will focus on strategies to continue reaching out to every girl. The goal is to have Scouting “serve” one of every five girls nationally.

Latina magazine founder Christy Haubegger was Saturday’s keynote speaker. Olympic gold medal gymnast Dominique Dawes, who works with the organization on a self-esteem campaign, met with girls.

Haubegger said she was once a member of the Girl Scouts, and the organization helped her develop self-esteem and courage at a time when she was battling adolescent insecurities. The organization is crucial for helping young women, especially women of color, find role models, she said.

“They’re the snapshot of the future, and they’ve got to be able to reflect and address not only what the population looks like now, but also what it will look like,” she said. “Particularly girls from diverse background need [Girl Scouts] because we’re the ones who don’t get to grow up with our images reflected back on television or in the media.”

At Saturday’s conference, Dawes talked about body image, peer pressure and self-esteem in front of a crowd of nearly 100 Girl Scouts and volunteers.

“Look around this room,” she said. “No one looks like you whatsoever. You are each unique.”

She told them to celebrate their differences and be confident.

“The Girl Scouts of America are working hard to make sure you have a strong foundation and sense of self-esteem,” she said.

Holding the convention in Long Beach was no accident. Besides the multicultural backdrop that Southern California provides, Long Beach is among the country’s most diverse cities. Its population of 461,000 includes the largest Cambodian population outside Asia, which after a generation here is moving out of poverty and whose elders sometimes resist learning English; a growing poverty level and immigrant populations from Mexico, Central America and Samoa, and a white middle and upperclass who aren’t volunteering because both parents work.

The story facing the national organization can be told in this city. By the early 1990s, membership in the 17 communities of the Girl Scouts Council of Greater Long Beach added up to only 4,000 Scouts.

“As demographics have drastically changed in Long Beach and surrounding communities,” said Burton, a paid staffer and mother of two sons, “the population that was once served changed. If we wanted to reach our girls, we had to get out there to translate materials, hire staff and role models that speak their language.”

In 1995, a campaign was launched to aggressively recruit in schools for volunteer leaders, mentor role model leaders and introduce the benefits of Girl Scouting to the Latino and Khmer-speaking populations. It remains a work in progress, Burton said, but seven years later, membership has nearly doubled to 7,000, and about 70% of the members are Latino.

In Long Beach, a Girl Scout troop that fluctuates between 20 and 40 members thrived last year and is about to resume at the city’s public school for children of the homeless or abused. Boys and girls both were served in the classroom by Scout-paid teaching assistants specializing in science. The assistance is funded by private foundations and grants and run by the Long Beach Council.

At five middle schools, nearly 100 girls have joined Scouting programs, and some of them are in traditional troops now. In the somewhat insular Khmer community of central Long Beach that is estimated at 50,000, the Girl Scouts met with a choreographer who leads a dance troupe of young girls at the newly founded Khmer Arts Academy.

Sophiline Shapiro, a central figure in the community’s teaching and performing of traditional Cambodian music and dance, worked with the Long Beach Girl Scout Council to get funding grants for the girls.

The troupe discussed with the Girl Scout Council how the girls might be helped by the Scouts. As a result, the Long Beach Council is about to deliver to the girls a sewing machine with which to make their own performance costumes. The council also provides an after-school tutoring program for girls and boys through the academy, located in a Cambodian church.

The girls don’t wear uniforms, and don’t even consider themselves Scouts, Shapiro said. But the Girl Scout Council hopes they will eventually want to join.

Intense recruiting at schools for volunteers produced mixed results; the Girl Scout Council often has to pay women just above minimum wage to work as troop leaders, a role historically played by an unpaid stay-at-home mother.

“It’s not the Beaver Cleaver Mom who’s at home baking cookies all day, and it never was,” Burton said. “We have many volunteer leaders who don’t have daughters. Our largest troop is led by a Lakewood couple who don’t have children. They exemplify that volunteers [don’t have to be] what people think. We have to meet people halfway, and let them serve Girl Scouting in any way they can. It’s a changing world, and we have to change with it.”

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Times staff writer Erika Hayasaki contributed to this report.