To be a girl-shaped beast

From the desk of GSSNE CEO, Dana Borrelli-Murray:

“But how many women know that they carry a lion inside them?”
-Abi Daré's "And So I Roar"

I didn’t quite know what to expect when I came to work at Girl Scouts, four years ago last month. I knew I had a lot of learning to do, and fresh perspectives to offer, and that my charm and wit would only carry me so far in a world of girls and volunteers who are experts in being girls and volunteers.

So I jumped into the deep end and haven’t come back up for air. The work is broad, which I love since I’m an absolute generalist with no particular skillset beyond encyclopedic New Kids on the Block trivia. The reason for feeling like I am basically on fire all the time is because no one told me that no matter how much you do and how incredible the results are, the world is literally conspiring against girls’ success.

July has been all the work, all the pay-off, and all the feelings here at Girl Scouts of Southeastern New England. Camp participation numbers climbed to their highest level in a decade, while construction progressed on a highly anticipated, multimillion-dollar site renovation project. Our travel troop visited Europe. We thanked our thousands of volunteers with a signature event, and congratulated our recent graduates as they bridged to adulthood. We led a majority-youth national delegation team to our Movement’s triennial National Council Sessions, debating, discussing, and voting on critical topics to our organization’s health and future success. We signed our new bill into law that provides Gold Award Girl Scouts automatic admission to RI public colleges and universities. We finalized a first-of-its-kind partnership with Roger Williams University to provide not only automatic admission for Gold Awards from across the country, but also merit scholarships.

And in the middle of all that, Girl Scouts built a float for the historic Bristol Fourth of July parade. A float committee spent months working with theatrical set designers to draw plans based on mission and vision for our Movement and how it connects to our country’s birthday. Volunteers, staff, and youth solicited in-kind building materials. The RI Women in the Trades mobilized to teach construction through this hands-on collab. And dozens of Girl Scouts showed up in 100-degree heat to paint, hammer, and hoist it all into place.

And then they marched, all 2.5 miles, waving American flags and singing loud and proud the entire way. And along the entire parade route, the response from the crowd was the same:

“Hey, throw me some cookies, little girl!”

“Hey, where are my Samoas?!”

“Ya know, you should have thought about selling some cookies today!”

“Thin Mints! Thin Mints! Thin Mints!”

Literally, cookie cat-calls.

The shouts trivialized not only their float but also called into question their sense of purpose on this otherwise incredible day. But in all honesty, it felt par for the course—my experience as a CEO, a woman, and a mom is that girls are minimized in a world that wants them to shrink. And it’s relentless.

At our Annual Meeting in May, I spoke about this in the context of our country’s growing youth mental health crisis. Recently, GSUSA issued a national State of the Girl Report showing that girls are coming of age in a world changing faster than ever. Girls are carrying expectations that would overwhelm many adults. They are navigating social media, political division, uncertainty about the future, and a culture that too often tells them they're simultaneously too much and not enough.

On our last day of the National Council Sessions in DC, the New York Times posted an opinion piece that did everything it could to steal our Movement’s thunder. It played into tired adages connecting girls to domesticity and boys to adventure and skill-building.

Sometimes this shrinking and minimizing is damningly apparent, and other times more nuanced. Many times, I’ve had to reintroduce myself to men in roles of power, then muscle my way through hard work that is then attributed to male counterparts.

This week, I came across a poem and hung it by my desk:

So fortunate, it must be fate
To be a girl-shaped beast
In this time when the world is most in need
Of girl-shaped beasts.
-JKKennedy

The world seems especially determined to make things harder for girls right now, so perhaps that's simply confirmation that there has never been a more important time to raise these girl-shaped beasts to keep marching, keep singing, keep leading, and keep muscling through the cookie cat-calls.