Long plagued by declining membership, the Boy Scouts are considering a campaign to recruit in a previously untapped market: girls.
The Girl Scouts aren’t having it.
A feud between the two largest scouting organizations broke into the open Tuesday when the president of Girl Scouts of the USA called the Boy Scouts’ “covert campaign” to recruit girls “reckless” and “unsettling” in a letter obtained by
BuzzFeed News. A Girl Scouts spokesman confirmed the letter in an email to The Washington Post.
“We were disappointed in the lack of transparency as we learned that you are surreptitiously testing the appeal of a girls’ offering to millennial parents,” Girl Scouts President Kathy Hopinkah Hannan wrote in her letter to Boy Scouts President Randall Stephenson. “Furthermore, it is inherently dishonest to claim to be a single gender organization while simultaneously endeavoring upon a co-ed model.”
She said the Boy Scouts’ “well documented” declining membership — its numbers have
dwindled by a third since 2000, to just more than 2 million as of 2016 — is behind its push to include girls.
The Boy Scouts said in a statement to The Washington Post that they are considering including girls in their ranks not to boost their numbers but in response to requests from families who want their daughters to be a part of the same organization as their sons.
“The Boy Scouts of America believes in the benefit of single-gender programs,” said the statement from the Boy Scouts’ director of national communications, Effie Delimarkos
. “But in evaluating the possibility of serving the whole family, we’ve been having conversations with our members and volunteers to see how to make Scouting accessible for families.”
