 Core Strategy | Leadership From the Inside Out
GSUSA Partners with The Ashland Institute
On August 20-23, 2007, program facilitators from Girl Scouts of Arizona Cactus-Pine Council and The Ashland Institute, an Oregon-based organization that specializes in personal development programs for women, led 29 council volunteers and staff, National Operational Volunteers (NOVs), and GSUSA staff in "Coming Into Your Own" (CIYO) at the Edith Macy Conference Center in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. Additional CIYO meetings will be conducted in November and February 2008 at the Conference Center.
Coming Into Your Own is an adult leadership development program customized for Girl Scouts by The Ashland Institute. Its aim is to create a team of adult champions who will model a search for integrated leadership that springs from a deep sense of self-knowledge. This team will bring its CIYO experience into the fabric of GSUSA's 2008 Spring conferences where participants will have the opportunity to explore the Discover, Connect and Take Action components of the New Girl Scout Leadership Experience.
By infusing parts of CIYO, participants will get to explore the "how" of the New Leadership Experience for girls as well as the "what" as members of the movement prepare to embrace the girl-led, experiential and collaborative leadership experience for girls.
Infusing Interior Leadership
A first step in "infusing interior leadership" in the Girl Scout movement, the Coming Into Your Own program guides participants as they:
- Explore ages and stages unique to women's lives
- Review their own lives as well as share and witness in small groups
- Understand different archetypal dimensions of themselves
- Identify and strengthen undeveloped capabilities
- Use a "symbols process" to see each person's current situation from different archetypal perspectives and reshape them to release potential that is emerging
- Identify important intentions they would like to make real in their lives
Enhancing Girl Scout Adult Leadership
As Tamara J. Woodbury, CEO at Girl Scouts-Arizona Cactus-Pine Council, wrote about the purpose of enhancing Girl Scout adult leadership, "The world around young women teaches them to focus their attention on their exterior, giving over-weighted value to the opinions of others versus their opinion about themselves. In most schools, youth groups, religious communities and even families, we unintentionally discourage girls from discovering their true self. Research shows that the drive to support girls to conform to acceptable images and to make life choices that are predictable and defer to social expectations overpowers even the most conscientious parents, teachers and mentors."
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Transformative Circle
The Ashland Institute's approach works with the whole individual—the physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual dimensions—to encourage deeper introspection. Facilitators combine the attention of one-on-one relationship with small-group work and the transforming power of the circle. They employ short presentations, dialogues, video, journaling, archetypes and symbols to address aspects of life such as work, relationships, health and family.
Program facilitators Barbara Cecil, Glennifer Gillespie, Beth Jandernoa of The Ashland Institute and Tamara Woodbury, CEO at Girl Scouts-Arizona, Cactus-Pine Council, have been leading innovative and successful women's programs for over 25 years. Small-group guides Maria Ort (Board Chair for Arizona-Cactus Pine Council), Mary Mitchell (Volunteer Recruitment manager at Arizona-Cactus Pine Council), Jo Norris (volunteer with Arizona-Cactus Pine Council), and Ashland Institute consultants Peri Chickering, Dorian Baroni and Christine Whitney-Sanchez, who have extensive experience in leadership and personal development work, led as well. The Ashland Institute has supported Arizona Cactus-Pine Council since May 2006 in the development of an inner leadership approach for staff, volunteers and elders.
For more about Coming Into Your Own and the work of The Ashland Institute, visit www.ashlandinstitute.org.
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