Courage, Confidence and Service
Patricia Diaz Dennis wants to see more Latinas joining the Girl Scouts.
By Analisa Nazareno
With membership numbers ebbing over the past several years, Girl Scouts councils throughout the nation have wondered how to make the 96-year-old institution more relevant to girls in the fastest growing demographic – Latinas.
Patricia Diaz Dennis – the first Latina chairwoman for the national board of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America – believes the organization is coming closer to the answers.
“One thing about the Hispanic culture is you have to be invited. It’s just the way we are,” Diaz Dennis explained during a recent interview at her 11th floor office at the former AT&T headquarters building in San Antonio. “You need to be invited in. And I think we have gone a long way to make it a more inviting organization for Latinas as well.”
In predominantly Latino San Antonio – where Diaz Dennis has worked for the past 13 years as a senior vice president and assistant general counsel for AT&T – the local Girl Scouts council launched a pilot program called “Mi Vida, My Life,” welcoming hundreds of girls and their parents from four elementary schools to dinner to talk about the Girl Scouts. Diaz Dennis attended two of these evening events and greeted parents in English and Spanish.
After the taco dinners, speeches and craft activities, Girl Scouts netted more than 100 new troop members in areas where previously there were no Girl Scouts troops.
“In the Hispanic community, we’re not well-known,” Diaz Dennis said. “People assume that we’re too expensive. Or that it’s for wealthy girls. And in Mexico, that is the case. But in the United States, I’d say it’s for middle-class girls and also disadvantaged girls, because we are really focused on them right now.”
Diaz Dennis has been at the helm of the nation’s top girl organization – with 2.6 million girls and more than 900,000 adults as members – since October 2005. Her term as chairwoman ends this October.
Over the past three years, her main job has been spear-heading major infrastructure changes in the organization meant to strengthen operations and make Girl Scouts more attractive to girls of this generation.
This has meant crisscrossing the nation to explain the consolidation of 300 Girl Scouts councils to 100, as well as the shift to a more “girl-centric” programming emphasis to the volunteers and staff.
It would seem an easy task for this seasoned attorney – she was the first in her family to attend college, the first woman hired to the Los Angeles law firm where she first worked after law school, has held three presidential appointments under the Reagan and George H. Bush administrations, and has overseen at least one of the telecommunications acquisitions that eventually enabled SBC to overtake and purchase AT&T.
But bringing change to the nearly 100-year-old organization hasn’t always been easy.
“A lot of people – and this is understandable – want to keep Girl Scouting like it was when they did it, when it was cookies and camping and crafts,” Diaz Dennis said. “Well we have that. But we’re a lot more than that today, because the world for girls has changed and we have to change with it, while keeping our wonderful values.”
Diaz Dennis, 61, herself participated as a Brownie Scout for three years while her family lived in North Carolina. Her father was an Army sergeant and her mother a government clerical worker. As a military family, they moved several times and lived in Japan and Chile briefly, which made long-term participation as a Girl Scout more difficult.
“First and foremost, Girl Scouts should be a lot of fun. So I had a lot of fun,” Diaz Dennis said about her own Girl Scouts experience. “But it also helped develop strength of character. And that’s one thing I think Girl Scouting does very well, help develop strength of character.”
While the core values of Girl Scouts are the same – courage, confidence and community service – Diaz Dennis said the approach they take has to be different from when she was a little girl during the 1950s.
“Things are much more difficult for kids today,” Diaz Dennis said. “I want Girl Scouts to provide that stability and that nurturing that a lot of children just don’t have today, so that they can succeed beyond their wildest expectations.”
Diaz Dennis said while parents are always welcome as troop leaders and volunteers, Girl Scouts is also recruiting college students and other young women as volunteers.
“The historic way that people experienced Girl Scouting was in troops with mothers being troop leaders,” Diaz Dennis said. “And now we realize that with so many women working, that has changed things.”
Also, Diaz Dennis said starting this October, Girl Scouts has abolished requiring uniforms for their teen-aged Girl Scouts and also relaxed dress codes for younger girls, “So that we don’t have any artificial impediments to girls joining the Girl Scouts.”
Allowing for flexibility on the dress code, she said, helps eliminate the perception of an economic barrier to joining the Girl Scouts. It is a move, she believes, that will help make it easier for girls from economically disadvantaged backgrounds – including Latinas – to join.
Diaz Dennis said she felt especially motivated to get more Latinas into Girl Scouts after reading press accounts a few years ago that cited dire federal statistics on high school dropout, teen pregnancy and suicide rates among Latinas.
“One out of four women in this country will be Latina by the year 2050,” Diaz Dennis said. “And if we don’t change these (dropout, teen pregnancy and suicide) statistics now, we are going to be in for a very frightening time for our country. And we need to do something now to reverse that. And I thought, boy what a great time for Girl Scouts to come in and say, ‘We can do something about this.’”
Through efforts like the Mi Vida campaign in San Antonio, more Latinas have been joining Girl Scouts. In 1999, nearly 160,000 Latinas made up 5.8 percent of all girl members. Last year, more than 279,000 Latinas made up 10.7 percent of membership.
“There has been a conscientious approach to getting the word out that Girl Scouts values girls from Latino homes and that we need them in Girl Scouting,” Diaz Dennis said. “I’m sure it will continue.”
