Top Girl Scout Began as a Brownie
Written by Melinda Ennis-Roughton Tuesday, February 15 2011
Snapshot: Connie L. Lindsey
Connie L. Lindsey is national president, Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA), and executive vice president and head of corporate social responsibility at Northern Trust Co., Chicago.
Prior to joining Northern Trust, she worked at Ameritech Corp. where she held various positions in finance and accounting. She is a member of the Economic Club of Chicago, the Executives' Club of Chicago, the Northwestern Memorial Hospital Feinberg School of Medicine Dean's Advisory Council, and the Board of Governors of the Metropolitan Club of Chicago. She is a Fellow 2001 class-Leadership Greater Chicago and a former board member of the Joffrey Ballet, Women Employed, and Inroads Inc.
Lindsey received her bachelor’s in finance from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and has also completed the Harvard Business School Executive Education Corporate Social Responsibility program.
Womenetics: As national president for GSUSA, you are the highest-ranking volunteer. How did you first become involved with the Girl Scouts?
Connie L. Lindsey: I began as Girl Scout Brownie in my church in Milwaukee, and this laid the foundation for my leadership role in Girl Scouts.
Womenetics: How do volunteers with the Girl Scouts differ from other nonprofit volunteers? Are there more, do they play a bigger role?
Lindsey: Girl Scouts of the USA is the largest organization for girls in the United States, with 3.4 million girls. Girl Scout volunteers are the organization’s front-line troops. They’re the ones who actually deliver Girl Scouting to girls. In many ways, they are the organization. Counting GSUSA headquarters and council staff nationwide, there are approximately 8,000 paid staff in the Girl Scout movement, a number that is dwarfed by the almost 1 million volunteers. Without them, there would be no Girl Scouting.
We are deeply grateful to the moms who volunteer as troop leaders. They are and will continue to be essential, and we continue to recruit them enthusiastically. In addition, we are reaching out to new groups including college students, men, and women who do not necessarily have school-age children. Our volunteers not only bring our programming to girls, but they also bring their own passions and interests. For example, we have volunteers who have engineering backgrounds (or just a love for building things) working with girls all over the country to participate in the first robotics competitions.
Womenetics: What are the main differences between the Girl Scout organization of the past and today’s Girl Scouts.
Lindsey: Girl Scouting came into existence as a response to a desire on the part of girls for an environment in which they could challenge themselves and develop their skills, both as leaders and in specific areas of expertise that attracted them. That is basic to the organization and has not changed.
What has changed most are certain specifics of the program – girls are as likely to be busy with activities in science, math, and computing, for example, as they are with camping and outdoor activities – and in the ways the program is delivered. We continue to expand our offerings through the electronic media that play such a large part in girls’ lives today.
Womenetics: In your own words, what is the key mission of today’s Girl Scout organization?
Lindsey: Our mission is to build girls of courage, confidence, and character who make the world a better place. That says it all.
Womenetics: We know that girls tend to drop out of scouting during their teenage years. What is Girl Scouts doing to update the image and make it more appealing to older girls?
Lindsey: Girls who continue to think of Girl Scouting as a “little girl” activity to be abandoned at adolescence do so mostly because they don’t understand the opportunities – for international travel, for the pursuit of specialized career interests, and for public service – available to them as senior and ambassador Girl Scouts. And they are unaware of these opportunities at least partly because we haven’t done enough to make them aware.
In 2010 we launched a nationwide advertising and public relations campaign called “What Will You Do Today?” to explain to girls what Girl Scouting can do for them. We’re also building greater public recognition for the contributions of our older girls. Earning the Girl Scout Gold Award, for example, is as arduous and demanding as a boy’s becoming an Eagle Scout and deserves the same respect on a young person’s résumé. The uniform requirements have been drastically revised, and in most situations uniforms are optional.
Womenetics: What messages or branding changes have Girl Scouts made for the 21st century to reach this social networking, texting generation?
Lindsey: We go where the girls are, and while we are new to the party, we have an active presence on Facebook and Twitter, and our blog tells both internal and external audiences of all of the wonderful things going on in Girl Scouting. As for the tech-savvy girls themselves, we continue to reach out to them and their families through traditional and new media.
Womenetics: Related to that last question, this is the 100th anniversary year for Girl Scouts. What is the organization preserving from the one founded by Juliette Gordon Low in Savannah, Ga., a century ago?
Lindsey: When Juliette Gordon Low wanted to know what girls wanted or needed, she would ask them. So do we. Our legacy of leadership stems from the fact that we have high expectations of our girls, and we know that each and every girl is important and can make a difference.
We are preserving Juliette’s core message – that Girl Scouting is something for all girls. We have girl members from every socioeconomic class, from every ethnic and racial group, from every level of physical ability, and from all corners of the nation. There are Girl Scout members in every ZIP code in the United States.
In preparation for our 100th anniversary we are building a thoroughly transformed organization around our core values – the Girl Scout Promise and the Girl Scout Law. We have restructured our nationwide network of Girl Scout councils. Girls are different and the world is different, and we’re making ourselves ready to serve them for another hundred years.
Womenetics: Where do you see the organization 100 years from now?
Lindsey: It will still live by the promise and the law, and it will still be an essential force for girls, women, and leadership. It will be bigger and stronger. And it will be what it is now – always the same and always changing.
We in the Girl Scout movement have been fueling this nation’s leadership pipeline with girls who believe in themselves and have the confidence to lead. Just look at the numbers. In the United States, at any given time, about 10 percent of girls are in the Girl Scouts. But 80 percent of female business owners and senior corporate executives are former Girl Scouts. Nearly 100 percent of women astronauts in NASA are former Girl Scouts, and two thirds of women in Congress are former Girl Scouts. But before we get too excited about that, we have to remember that two thirds of too few is not enough.
A veteran of the marketing/advertising business, Melinda Ennis-Roughton is a writer specializing in women’s issues and film criticism, and she is the principal and owner of an Atlanta-based marketing firm called MelWorks Inc. She was a contributing film critic from 2004 to 2007 for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, where she wrote more than 100 film reviews and is still listed as a major critic on the website Rottentomatoes.com
While living in England from 1998 until 2001, she worked with Random House Books and was a contributing writer to Women Abroad magazine, Atlanta Magazine, and Cox Newspapers.
Her career highlights include the position of executive director/chief marketing officer (CMO) for Brand Atlanta, which was responsible for marketing the city under Shirley Franklin’s administration. She served as global CMO for Church's Chicken, supervising marketing direction from China to Costa Rica. Her past also includes marketing/consulting and business writing work with Sylvan Learning Centers, Emory Healthcare, and a 10-year term with Arby’s Restaurants. At Arby’s, she rose to the position of senior vice president, marketing, and was the first female vice president of the organization.
She has two sons, has been married for 27 years, and her passions are her family, film, and politics.
