Girl Scouts Must Recruit Latinas To Survive

Girl Scouts in Texas are reaching out specifically to Latinas not only to do outreach, but because if they do not, the organization may not survive. The northeast Texas Girl Scouts have created a website, print and television campaigns, as well as several other events to recruit these girls, see that here. Nationally, the Girl Scouts are spending $10 million on this campaign.

I first read about this story last month when Giovanni Rodriguez wrote about it, and this week I found it again in USA Today, here’s an excerpt:

But in order to keep up with these ever-evolving demographic trends, the organization decided to launch a new national Hispanic-focused media campaign to reach “one of the only girl populations in the country that is growing,” according Girl Scout Council of Northern Texas.

In fact, the Northern Texas branch, which currently serves 40,000 girls, localized this effort with it own campaign, featuring Spanish-language recruitment materials, program collateral and Girl Scouting guides.

The director of marketing for the Northeast region of the Girls Scouts, Monica Contreras notes that Latinos in north Texas are the fastest-growing demographic and that this particular branch of the Girls Scouts has quadrupled bilingual staffers from 3 to 12 and the organization is also working to better communication with the Latino community in that part of the state.

Yet, another comment Contreras made speaks to how difficult outreach efforts can be, riddled with cultural nuances that they are:

Even at a very young age, girls must learn self-confidence and self-esteem – both qualities needed to make good decisions for the rest of their lives. Without these skills, they tend to fall behind in their schoolwork, drop out at an early age because they are unfamiliar with the English language and are then unable to find jobs. Couple that with the increased teenage pregnancy trends for the Hispanic population, and so continues the downward spiral into poverty.

Ouch. Doesn’t sound like Contreras thinks very highly of these young Latinas she’s trying to recruit into her organization, but as Rodriguez pointed out when he wrote about this story in April, adapting the culture of an organization founded in 1912 to the demographic and cultural shifts of 2011 is complex, to say the very least.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD