The Girl Scout secret sauce is our special environment and our particular way of building girl leaders. The secret sauce makes Girl Scouts unique from other youth-serving organizations and transforms fun activities into powerful leadership outcomes. You can change girls' lives by putting into practice these five essential ingredients!
1. Safe Space
Welcome girls and their families warmly, make them feel like they belong by validating their unique identities, and create opportunities for connecting with others. When your girls feel included and accepted for who they are, they are free to be themselves and to build authentic friendships with other girls.
2. Supportive Mentorship
Girls need to build relationships with role models and advocates they can rely on. Let your girls know that you care about them and that you are invested in their success. You can do this by listening attentively when they speak, by responding to their questions and concerns, and by letting them know you have confidence in them and their ability to overcome challenges.
3. Girl-led
Making decisions about what to do and how to do it affects girls in profound ways, and many don't have this opportunity anywhere else. Give girls a say in how they participate, encourage multiple ways of doing things, support girls' suggestions, and let them decide how to proceed. Girls can design their own experiences, make plans, follow through, and rely on themselves and one another to figure things out. This develops their independence and helps them see their decisions and actions as meaningful.
4. Cooperative Learning
Teamwork means helping your girls set shared goals, cooperate, and compromise. Show your girls you believe that each one has a way to contribute and that they accomplish more together when they build off of one another's ideas.
5. Learning by Doing
Girls build their skills and discover their passions by learning to do something new or better than before. Foster opportunities for girls to work with materials and concepts and to try out their ideas. Then help them reflect on their actions and results by discussing what worked and what didn't and considering how to learn from setbacks.
When you do these things, you cultivate girl agency, supportive relationships, and a sense of belonging, all of which drive healthy social, emotional, and cognitive learning. Rather than thinking of these ingredients as a checklist, it is helpful to think of them as a way of working. In both your relationships with your girls and in the activities you all share, how can you incorporate these into your approach? The more you do, the more your girls will adopt the secret sauce as their culture and help maintain it as well. Remember, the secret sauce makes everything better!