Category Archives: Girl Scouting

To Lead or Not To Lead?

By Tanha Patel on October 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

Girl Scout Leadership

Last week, my husband and I attended the Girl Scout’s Recruitment Night at my daughter’s school. In our household, we are pro-woman! So, naturally as a parent I want to instill a sense of woman power in my daughter. I am definitely aligned with the goals of Girl Scouts in embedding self-esteem, self-confidence and leadership skills in girls as well as

Ensuring girls feel emotionally and physically safe;
Promoting girls’ involvement in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM);
Developing financial literacy skills (we all know about the relation between woman and money, don’t we?).

As I know myself so well (a person that can never say ‘no’), before we even made it to the recruitment night, I assured my husband that I would not take up a leadership position in the troop, just try to help out, and observe while I learn about girl scouting from the sidelines. In fact, I was encouraging my hubby to become a co-leader or leader of our daughter’s troop as he is so good with children, especially girls. I knew he would be a hit with the troop by creating projects and fun activities for them.

So, here I am sitting in the filled-to-capacity media center listening to the retention specialist and thinking surely there will be many parents wanting to take on this responsibility and make their daughters proud. As the retention specialist finished her talk, she asked all the parents with similar age group kids to gather and form their troops tonight, if possible. And so we gathered around. But, sitting at this table with 10 other moms and a couple of dads (now, let’s not forget them), I am waiting for someone to jump right in. But, no one does. Only a few minutes had passed, but it felt like eternity and my patience was wearing down. I wanted to get up and scream. How can there be no parent wanting to ‘get involved’ in such an important aspect of their daughter’s life. A few moms started to talked about how they were looking forward to girl scout and hoping that a new troop would be formed tonight. Yet, no one was ready to volunteer. Now, in the mix is a mom that I already know (our daughters play together), so we look at each other and knew exactly what the other was thinking at that very moment. Then it happened. In the midst of all the silence and chaos (yes, both at the same time) we both spoke out together, “If you are ready to co-lead, I will do it.”

And that was that. Somehow, I had gotten myself into co-leading a Daisy Girl Scout troop!!!

I am not sure if I will be successful in this new role or not. Only time will tell. One thing is for sure though I am definitely and positively happy that I dared to take on this role and serve as a role model of leadership for my daughter. I have to admit I have never done anything like this before, so it is a little out of my comfort zone, but hey, how can you get involved with actually getting involved!