I'm a Girl scout leader (who's about to quit!)

[Aroura]

I DO mind half the Girl Scout year being focuses on sales.  AND you cannot opt out.  Well, you can, but if you do opt out of sales, you are disallowed from doing your own fundraising. You can only do your own fundraising if you ALSO sell cookies AND nuts.  Sigh.

When I read that in that OP I immediately suspected that the CEO has made a deal with a corporation who somehow financially benefits from the sale of cookies. Do the girl scouts bake their own cookies or are they supplied? If they are supplied then I bet the CEO personally profits or benefits from this somehow.

Sorry IANM, I did not see this until just now.

They hire a baker (There are actually 2 bakers, one is Keebler, and the other is a company I'm unfamiliar with). Their cookies are slightly different from each other.  Last year, Keebler did not produce enough cookies, and we ran out one week into the season.  Our big order was still there though, so they shipped us 600+ boxes on the last weekend of sales, and we were not allowed to extend booth sales, even though we had shit tons of cookies to sell.  My kid and I just about broke our necks selling door to door and busines to business.  But we did get to try the "other" cookie brand.  I like their Thin Mints, but the rest of their cookies were way worse than the Keeeble made ones.

Girl Scouts baked their own cookie through the start of WW2, I think, but around that time, started hiring large bakeries to make the cookies so they would be easier to market.

My understanding is that the money from each box of cookies is divided thusly: (approx, and it varies a little from council to council)
10% goes straight to the troop.
10% goes directly to the girl who sold it, in the form of "incentives" (I hate incentives, they are cheap ass bribes) and "cookie dough", which can be spent on things like camp, new uniforms, and other cool activities.  I like the Cookie Dough.  That ought to be incentive enough.

About 65% to 70% goes to the local service unit and local council to maintain properties, host camps, and fund events.  A council usually encompasses a state or so (I'm in the Oregon and SW Washington council), and the service unit is your smaller local group of volunteers.  I don't know how council and the SU's split up that 65-70%)

The remaining 10% to 15% pays the baker.

Not one penny goes to the CEO or management, or so they claim.  I have never heard of any scandal in this regard, so I'm inclined to believe this claim.  I do not know how GS's fund the upper management, or maintain their 4 overseas properties (They have one in England, one in Switzerland, one in India, and one in Mexico, if memory serves.)  

It's something I should probably look into. :p  

Hey, on a bright note, my co-leader found us a troop where I can just be a regular mom doing fun GS things, instead of the stress of being Leader.  So, I'm hoping that works out....for my daughters sake. She has enjoyed many aspects of GS's.  Me and my girl just will not sell cookies to the general public, only to family.  Mmmm....Samoas!

[janeway]

I just joined this forum just to reply to this.... wondering if the OP is still around.
I quit as a Girl Scout leader (after 3 years) last May, and I'm now continuing as a "regular Girl Scout parent volunteer" in a different troop. It was a rather ugly break-up because I think my original troop parents expected me to keep providing free childcare and putting up with their abuse for the next 10 years. Now it's 8 months later and I'm still experiencing waves of sadness and anger and guilt over the whole thing. I still have to see the previous troop members' parents all over town and it fills me with anxiety (I'm already an anxious person naturally). As cookie season begins.. for the first time with me not acting as both troop leader and cookie manager (ugg).. the emotions are starting to get more intense again. I feel guilty for "abandoning" my original troop. I feel total rage at all of the parents who failed to help make it work (and then got mad at me for fleeing). I feel deathly uncomfortable about the idea of running into my old troop members (many of whom are still active in local Girl Scouts and who I will definitely run into at events). And I feel blinded by anger at Girl Scouts in general for setting up such a nightmarish process for volunteers. Everything about the organization and its rules seems designed specifically to run troop leaders into the ground and spoil their relationships with other parents.

Anyways... If you are still around... I'd be curious to hear how things went for you and if you're feeling any better about the whole thing a few years later. Right now I'm just struggling to understand why the whole experience is still so painful for me. Am I just that much of a nut?

I'm not sure. This seems like a uniquely appropriate forum to vent about this topic.. since another source of friction in my troop was that an outspoken lunatic parents in my troop was very much a "woman of faith"... her "faith" was "so important" to her... that it really inspired her to want to decimate her quietly agnostic troop leader. Not that I make a show of my lack of faith. But I don't attend any of the big churches in town and she was constantly needling me trying to figure out if I maybe attended a different one?.. and I tried to be vague about it.. but I believe she determined that I wasn't a person of faith and decided that I had to suffer for it.

Basically, I'm sitting her wallowing in misery and feeling angry and sorry for myself to the extent that I googled something along the lines of "feeling guilty for quitting as girl scout leader".. and this forum post came up. So here I am. <3

[Pat Mustard]

I just joined this forum just to reply to this.... wondering if the OP is still around.
I quit as a Girl Scout leader (after 3 years) last May, and I'm now continuing as a "regular Girl Scout parent volunteer" in a different troop. It was a rather ugly break-up because I think my original troop parents expected me to keep providing free childcare and putting up with their abuse for the next 10 years. Now it's 8 months later and I'm still experiencing waves of sadness and anger and guilt over the whole thing. I still have to see the previous troop members' parents all over town and it fills me with anxiety (I'm already an anxious person naturally). As cookie season begins.. for the first time with me not acting as both troop leader and cookie manager (ugg).. the emotions are starting to get more intense again. I feel guilty for "abandoning" my original troop. I feel total rage at all of the parents who failed to help make it work (and then got mad at me for fleeing). I feel deathly uncomfortable about the idea of running into my old troop members (many of whom are still active in local Girl Scouts and who I will definitely run into at events). And I feel blinded by anger at Girl Scouts in general for setting up such a nightmarish process for volunteers. Everything about the organization and its rules seems designed specifically to run troop leaders into the ground and spoil their relationships with other parents.

Anyways... If you are still around... I'd be curious to hear how things went for you and if you're feeling any better about the whole thing a few years later. Right now I'm just struggling to understand why the whole experience is still so painful for me. Am I just that much of a nut?

I'm not sure. This seems like a uniquely appropriate forum to vent about this topic.. since another source of friction in my troop was that an outspoken lunatic parents in my troop was very much a "woman of faith"... her "faith" was "so important" to her... that it really inspired her to want to decimate her quietly agnostic troop leader. Not that I make a show of my lack of faith. But I don't attend any of the big churches in town and she was constantly needling me trying to figure out if I maybe attended a different one?.. and I tried to be vague about it.. but I believe she determined that I wasn't a person of faith and decided that I had to suffer for it.

Basically, I'm sitting her wallowing in misery and feeling angry and sorry for myself to the extent that I googled something along the lines of "feeling guilty for quitting as girl scout leader".. and this forum post came up. So here I am. <3

AFAIK Aroura's still around. In real life she's currently in Germany, living the life of Reilly.

[janeway]

Haha... Thanks.
I wonder if the only way to recover from Girl Scout leadership is to flee the USA.

[brewer]

Joining The League of German Girls may not have been the best option. (snork)

[Minimalist]

You will work hard to plan an event for 10 girls, and only 5 will show up. You will order badges for girls who then quit. It's so much more than you realized when you signed up.

Volunteering for kids' stuff is hard.  Far too many of their parents think you are babysitting them for a couple of hours so they can run errands.  My first year of Little League at the start of a game the other manager and I were exchanging lineups and he had a scowl on his face.  I asked him what was wrong and all he said was "it shows, huh?"  Then he told me how the day before he had called a practice, closed his business in the Bronx early, drove home 2 hours through Long Island traffic and 5 of the 13 kids showed up.  They played like it, too and we crushed them.  He was obviously pissed at his team and it showed.  Later that night I got a call from the league president who said that he gotten complaints about the manager from the parents on the team and what could I tell him about it.  I told him the story and suggested he ask those parents if their kid had been at the practice.  He laughed.

So I get where you are coming from.  It's why I volunteer with dogs.  They wag their tails and lick your face and when they give you shit you expect it and clean it up.

[Fireball]

I had a lengthy reply prepared earlier, but got sidetracked. I volunteered for the BSA for 15 years. We called it 'Baby Sitters of America" as a joke, but when my sons were Cub Scouts, we NEVER let the parents off the hook. You bring your kid to a meeting, you will be staying until the end unless you have a good excuse, and you'd better be back before the meeting is ended. One of my favorite comments, made by a Scout Master when he asked one of the parents to loan him his Suburban (Chevrolet's truck-sized 9-passenger station wagon), and was told, "No". He said, "So, you trust me with your son, but not your vehicle?". Pretty much made the point that you can't just drop your kid off, trusting the adults to act properly. He wasn't a perv, he was just trying to make the point. As a leader with the Boy Scouts, I never let the "two deep leadership" down, ever, even if it meant the outing didn't happen. Every time a child molestation occurred, that "two deep leadership" requirement was not observed.

I don't adhere to the BSA's attitude on religion these days, and haven't, since I realized that I was an atheist. They do a pile of good for youth, but they have a way to go on rights issues.

[janeway]

Yeah... I have issues with the BSA's religious leanings, but I do respect the way they require family involvement for the younger scouts. Girl Scouts is the opposite. The leader training is all about kicking the parents out of the room. We always have to have two registered background-checked adults from different families in the room, but other than that, we're instructed to tell parents that it's "Girl Scouts, not mommy and me" and encourage them to drop their kids off at events. For some of the larger events, we're actually limited to a certain number of chaperones. My first year, I had parents pulling their kids out of events or having fits (direct at me, of course) because I wasn't allowed to bring more than 3 adults... and they all wanted to come... It really puts you in a weird spot. And then when you NEED adults (because you have to cancel events without adequate supervision) everyone has the attitude like "well, you encouraged me to drop off my kids and now I'm comfortable with it...so screw you, I'm leaving". And when I realized that we had gotten to that point, I quit...

If I were able to start over again, with the knowledge that I now have, I would completely ignore 90% of the instructions from the Girl Scout "higher ups" and make the first few years of Girl Scouting more of a family thing. I had no idea what I was getting into, so I listened to the trainers and the guidelines, and it was obviously wrong. Everything in the Girl Scout training sets the leader up in a position that's antagonistic to the parents in many ways. It literally drove me crazy. I signed up to be a leader of children, to help small children have fun and learn things, not to be a wrangler of half-witted cranky lazy adults who were just looking for reasons to get mad at me all the time.

I know it happens with sports too. I was talking to a kids softball coach and he was telling me about how they'll have games at night...and parents will be late to pick up their kids... totally leaving their children standing in a field as it gets darker and darker. And he's terrified because it's a bunch of girls and he's a grown man and his assistant coach will have to leave, so it'll just be him and a bunch of girls standing in a field in the dark.. and they're not answering their phones.. and so far everyone has always shown up. But he's dreading the night where someone no-shows and he has to decide whether to drive the kid home with him, drive her to her own house to see if anyone is there, or drive her to the police station which is the official league policy..but which sounds really messed up.

We were commiserating on how shocking it is that parents will sign their kids up for an activity that is totally run by unpaid volunteers.. and then act badly and completely disrespect the volunteers. In my family, if my kids like an activity, we go out of our way to support the people who are making it happen... whether they're unpaid volunteers or highly paid professionals... My kids' dance teacher goes out of her way to make the class special and fun, so we treat her well (cards, prompt responses to requests, offers to help with special events, always showing up on time and picking our kids up on time, etc.). We also pay quite a bit for the classes.

The parents in my troop were basically like "I don't like you. I don't respect you. Here, take my kid, I'm going to pick her up late and not be contactable at all." .... it was not only massively disrespectful to me, it's absolutely no way to treat a child! If I hated someone even half as much as those other parents seemed to hate me, I'd never leave my child with them. It's baffling.

(I should note, that it wasn't ever parents who openly despised me... just a few...but their cruddy attitudes seemed to spread to the others. Like... no parent is going to go out of their way to help when they see other families being totally useless and getting away with it)

[Whateverist]

Sounds like you put up with a lot of neglect/abuse from these parents, Captain Janeway. I taught middle school for 25 years. Even if you enjoy their energy and are motivated to do them some good, you can eventually get your fill. I don't have anything to do with kids except for my niece and nephew now.

[I_am_not_mafia]

Haha... Thanks.
I wonder if the only way to recover from Girl Scout leadership is to flee the USA.

Well when I lived in Germany I found the only way to cancel an O2 contract for a sim card that I wasn't even using and stop them taking money out my bank account every month was to flee the country.

So you never know, Aroura might need to do the same and return to the US.