50% of GSNEO Girls Camp!

The following is from an E-mail message written by Lynn Richardson on June 15th, 2010:

I have been pondering the statement from Girl Scouts of North East Ohio that only 10% of GSNEO girl membership use the camps - especially since it was again repeated in the Akron Beacon Journal recently.  It just does not seem realistic, and in fact it's not.  The true percentage is around 50%. 

The 10% figure is the members who participate in GSNEO-sponsored camp programming.

The Vision 2012 survey results indicated that the greatest camp usage was in troop camping. Among the materials we were given in the Vision 2012 process is a document showing the actual counts. The title is "Non council sponsored site usage Oct 2008 - Sept 2009."  This is the most recent data possible.

The total is 15,606 girls out of a total membership of c. 37,000, which is about 42%.  Add to that the 10% of council sponsored camp activity and you get 52%

SOME VARIABLE FACTORS:

1. For whatever reason, there was no listing for Wintergreen cabin.  (The document does show the rest of the relinquished properties since girls were still using them at the time.)  But although this would have raised the number, it would only be by a small amount.

2. From this document, there is no way to tell how many of the girls camped more than once.  I do not have access to this data, but it would lower the total number of individual girls.

3. Also not included were girls who camped at NON-GSNEO owned sites because they couldn't get into GSNEO camps.  These represent an unknown quantity.  Based on my experience of hearing leaders complain about the unavailability of space at camp (as well as snarky comments from Boy Scouts complaining about too many Girl Scouts camping on their turf), I believe this would represent a statistically significant number. 

Without complete records we cannot know the impact of factors 2 and 3.  But for the sake of making life simple, let's assume they cancel each other out.  Of the remaining 50% of the TOTAL girl membership - roughly 18,500 - about 8,000 of them are Daisies who are too young to be doing much camping.  Of the entire girl membership, Camp appears to be far and away the most utilized program component.  In addition, it is the "flagship" program of Girl Scouting:  what parents expect when they sign their daughters up; the one that we know has had a deep, lasting impact on former girl campers, now adults; the one that can encompass financial literacy, STEM, and other program elements GSUSA espouses; and what makes us different from "just another class". 

Given the importance of camping in our council, our question should not be "which camps are expendable?", but "how can we make ALL of our camps even more attractive, and accessible to all of our members?"

Lynn Scholle Richardson