Their Savvy and Vibrant 21^st Century Programs Go Way Beyond Cookie Sales

Imagine a summer camp where horseback riding is replaced with business planning, and swimming is replaced with learning presentation skills.

Before you think this sounds like no fun, consider the scores of Girl Scouts who have participated in the Girl Scout Leadership Institute (GSLI), a sister program of “Entrepreneurs in Training” at Barnard College in New York City [the all-women’s institution founded in 1889 and long affiliated with Columbia University]. Over the past two summers, these emerging female entrepreneurs (ranging in grades 9-12) have developed and pitched almost fifty startups as part of the program, and some of these new business ideas have tackled social, community and business issues.

One of the more fun startups from 2014 was Futo, a mobile app that acts as a crowd-sourcing decision-making tool by sending pictures of an outfit to friends to get wardrobe advice. Another startup, Elevate, focused on a care-package subscription that sends customers a monthly box of products geared toward smoking cessation. The GSLI program gets girls excited about entrepreneurship by teaching valuable business skills and encouraging ethical-minded business development: other startups have incorporated a social conscience, often having proceeds go to support local and global issues.

Encouraging Young, Energetic Innovators

“We want them to catch the entrepreneurial bug,” said business strategist and entrepreneur Nathalie Molina-Niño, who helped develop the program with Kathryn Kolbert, director of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College. As Molina-Niño and Kolbert reviewed the areas of focus at the Athena Center, they saw an opportunity to focus on entrepreneurship readiness, especially for rising female scholars, since research shows entrepreneurial aspirations begin at an earlier age than is presumed. The GSLI partnered with the Athena Center to manage the four workshops during the summers of 2013 and 2014.

“I designed a summer camp that I wanted to go to as a kid,” Molina-Niño said. A young entrepreneur herself, she originated her first start-up at age 20, then spent fifteen years in the tech world advising leaders at global organizations, non-profits and early-stage startups, before leaving it to embark on a  sabbatical to study playwriting at Columbia University.

“The distance from the business world really required me to go back and think ‘how did that work?’ and ‘how do I do this and then teach them that?’” she says. “I was forced to go back and think ‘what worked well?’ and ‘how can I make it into a workshop?’”

The Basics of Teaching – and Re-Defining – Entrepreneurship

The GSLI is based on the Athena Core 10 methodology, which is a set of 10 core competencies developed for women to cultivate gender equity and give them the skills and qualities they need in order to lead.  Molina-Niño helped shape the GSLI/Core 10 curriculum by bringing in the best of the best teachers, artists and business mentors, as well as offering her own experience as an instructor.

The program is designed for students to go through the entire entrepreneurial cycle, so that when they decide to venture into projects of their own, they are prepared. Girl Scouts are chosen from among New York’s five boroughs through an application and interview process that includes a big question: “Why is entrepreneurship important to you?”

Aside from business aspects, the program teaches girls to identify as entrepreneurs and not just believe   “it’s a man’s world” – in fact, they are actually taught to re-think how they visualize entrepreneurs.  Entrepreneurship, they are told, doesn’t just mean the founder of Facebook – it’s also the nail girl or your grandmother who sells empanadas on the weekend. With this understanding, the GSLI hopes their students will be able to identify and connect to a legacy.

“We need to level the playing field for women entrepreneurs,” Molina-Niño said. “We [as women] haven’t really had that identity, and don’t identify as entrepreneurs. It’s male-dominated. As a girl, when you go online, entrepreneurs look like young men. We try to give them the message, again and again, that they bring to table all the creativity and grit they need, and there’s not just one way.”

During the workshops, students learn how to identify problems in an exercise asking them to share all the things they want to punch (i.e. things they or their peers don’t like). Next, they flesh out possible solutions, and then review business and revenue generation models to convert their solutions into a viable business.

“Students are far more creative and able to think outside of the box,” Molina-Niño said. Something else she is reminded of is “the level of creativity in the room is so astounding that the next time I start a startup, I want to suggest having a board of teenage advisors. They’re so savvy about e-commerce as consumers, and they can predict problems before they happen, because they think of everything that could go wrong.”

Using Storytelling for a Great Sales Pitch – and Skills for a Lifetime

After learning about what goes into building a business, students prepare their pitch to actual investors with help from actors, directors, and writers, as well as storytellers from The Moth, the famed imaginative hub founded in New York, all participating in the program as instructors and mentors. This creative team helps transform the text-heavy business plans into a compelling human-focused story, which becomes the students’ final performance: a five-minute pitch to investors on the last day of the workshop.

Molina-Niño tells the girls it doesn’t matter what they want to be in the end, they will be able to use these skills in myriad ways, since what they learned connects directly to leadership – in any field.  For these Girl Scouts who attend this summer workshop, they’ll get more than just summer camp memories. They will have gained the strength and know-how to prepare for their own business ventures for the rest of their lives.