As a little girl in Arizona, none of the women in my family had a cultural connection with Girl Scouts, but the opportunity resonated with my mother as a platform that would allow me to excel in school.
Too often, nonprofits are viewed as rigid and bureaucratic - less nimble and capable of adapting in this fluid environment than our corporate counterparts. I don't agree.
Many people don't know, but American Girl Scouts get to travel the world, and that's a very good thing, as the more we can expose our young people to other cultures, the better off we'll be in this increasingly globalized environment.
At Girl Scouts, we create leaders.
Girl Scouts is such an iconic organization that it's easy to overlook how daring an idea it was for founder Juliette Gordon Low to gather those first 18 girls in that troop in Savannah, Georgia. It was 1912, after all, and women wouldn't earn the right to vote for another eight years.
Sometimes when I speak to groups or I'm interviewed by a journalist, I ask them to imagine their communities without Girl Scouts - to imagine the thousands of food drives and clothing and toy collections that would never take place if not for Girl Scouts.
