100th Anniversary - Guest Blog: Graves

Valerie Graves, Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa's CES (Member Database) Manager has blogged for us this week.  Valerie is celebrating her 25th year of being involved with Girl Scouts and has a wealth of knowledge and a passion about the importance of our program.  Thank you Valerie for your your continued contribution and love for Girl Scouting.

If you would like to be our next guest blogger, please email us and let us know! 

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Valerie Graves
Girl Scout Lifetime Member
CES Manager
Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa

You never know how much little girls can touch your heart and cause your hands to move a generation. Well, seven little girls touched my heart in 1988 in Huntsville, Alabama. When my daughter’s Girl Scout troop leader left the troop with three weeks left in the school year. The other moms and I met and decided that three of us would take a week and finish the year. We searched through the girl’s handbook and badge book and found badges we wanted them to earn.

Little did I know that my week as a “leader” would change my life forever. I not only enjoyed planning and delivering “program” to the girls, but went further and enrolled in the leader training over the summer and when the school year began; I became a leader of my first troop. I will never forget the joy I felt having my seven girls so excited about Girl Scouting, and the moms and dads were too. 

Girl Scout’s motto over the years has been to develop girls into leaders – well, Girl Scouts made a leader out of me. Girl Scouts moved me out of my quiet shell and gave me the courage to lead not just girls, but adults too. When I moved back to Atlanta, Georgia in 1994, I didn’t just leave my girls, but my adults too. In six years, I had gone from being a mom of a Girl Scout to a leader of a multi-level troop that included girls in every level (Daisy, Brownie, Junior, Cadette, and Senior), a service unit director, an apprentice trainer, and a CPR trainer. My blood was truly bleeding “green”. I joined the council in Atlanta and became an experienced trainer while continuing as a leader. My first job in Atlanta was as a customer service rep in the council’s Girl Scout store. There I continued to help leaders develop their skills as well as helping the staff to develop their computer skills. The store manager gave me the okay to change their antiquated system (the old cash registers where the numbers printed as you pressed a key) to a network system of 3 computer registers connected to the back office server. Talk about courage – wow! That took guts. But thanks to Girl Scouts, I had the confidence that I would succeed and the council store would be able to serve their customers better. As it turned out – they became the number one Girl Scout store grossing more sales than any other Girl Scout store.
 
I later became the Director of Information Technology and took my computer skills and applied them to every department in the council – keeping the “girls” in the forefront of everything I did. I didn’t just work at Girl Scouts – I was an advocate for Girl Scouts. On the weekends I would wear (and still do) Girl Scout t-shirts and sweat shirts, knowing that someone would stop me and say, “I was a Girl Scout when I was a girl.” And my reply would be, “But you can still be a Girl Scout now. You can register as an adult and help us to continue to develop our girls into leaders”. I would carry my business cards with me and as I recruited new potential leaders, I would write the membership staff name and phone number on the back of the card and tell them if they did not get a call back in a few days, to call me.
 
When the Atlanta council re-organized the staff and removed my department, I asked God to allow me to continue my journey in Girl Scouts and help me find a council where I could use my technology skills and my heart for Girl Scouts. When I saw the job description for the database position at Greater Iowa – I knew that was where I wanted to be. I had never been to Iowa nor did I know anyone who had lived there. But I felt a spirit there and it rang louder as I interviewed. The excitement in the staff’s voice when I accepted the position told me that I had found a new Girl Scout home.
 
As we celebrate Girl Scouts’ 100th birthday (my 25th birthday as a Girl Scout), I challenge the staff, and the volunteers to listen to your heart and feel the words of Juliette Gordon Low; "I've got something for the girls of Savannah, and all of America, and all the world, and we're going to start it tonight!" You can make a difference if you feel in your heart that Girl Scouts is the place where girls develop into strong leaders. The one piece of the Girl Scout Law I always use in every situation is “using my resources wisely” and adults – you are the resource that can help our girls to become great leaders.

- Valerie Graves

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