1 April 2009
GSUSA: Los Angeles Girl Scouts Town Hall Meeting
Posted by admin under: Girl Scout Reorganization .
Although I’ve been absent from the blog I haven’t been absent from Scouting over the last month. Last week my wife and I attended a town hall meeting for the newly formed Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles. The new CEO Lise Luttgens and the Chairwoman for the Board of Directors Janet Braun were there to answer questions from the leaders of our legacy council area. We’ve recently been struggling with merging our service units together, a move none of understood the reasons for, except my wife who saw that there were fewer paid staff who could attend the service unit meetings. It seems weird that something so insignificant to the volunteers would cause a change that affect dozens of leaders and thousands of Girl Scouts, but there you are.
I started off the Q&A by asking what the area of responsibility is for the board of directors and paid staff. I don’t know how decisions are made. Unfortunately, the answer I received didn’t really clarify anything for me. Basically it was: the paid staff receives the concepts of what the paid staff needs to accomplish and then the paid staff implements a plan to achieve those goals. That gave me the impression that all of the recent changes to the GSUSA program were put in place by the paid staff with vague direction from the board. I don’t normally feel like a dunce, but I spoke directly to the top two spots in the council and I still don’t know what each of them really does.
One of the VP’s of the council misspoke at some point and cited the national convention as the authorization for all of the recent program changes and was corrected by a couple of people in the room who were national delegates at both conventions.
At the end of the meeting Ms. Luttgens expressed surprise that there was such dissatisfaction with the recent changes. She said she’d been to all of the legacy councils and ours was the only one to say anything negative about any of the recent changes. This surprised me because there has been widespread dissatisfaction in our area.
At least we were allowed to have our views listened to. I came away with a greater respect for these two women since they actively listened to our views so we at least know they are being heard. With the feedback from the top ladies I knew that they were not hearing these views previously.
I’ve used up my miniscule amount of private time to write this much of the post so anything else will have to wait for another time.
- CEO Named for Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles
- GSGLA First Annual Meeting
- Girl Scouts – Shrinking or Growing?
- Western New York Girl Scouts Merged
- Odd Silence on Girl Scout Convention Proposals
One Comment so far...
Laura B. Says:
2 April 2009 at 12:29 pm.
I somewhat wonder about the surprised bit as well. We got a similar line out here, the new CEO was surprised at some of the things happening at our camps, etc. that leaders knew about and she ‘didn’t’. Seemed a bit fishy, and even more so if you’re getting similar stories. Either communication is worse than we thought, or there’s other problems involved.
