Page 243 - The Drucker Lectures

224 [ The Drucker Lectures

But this has enabled the Girl Scouts not only to weather the
demographic changes in this country but also to benefit from
them. Twenty-five years ago, both the Boy Scouts and Girl
Scouts were lily white, middle class, suburban. And then you had
a tremendous influx of immigrants—Hispanics and Asians—
and blacks into suburban areas. And the Boy Scouts have not
been able to handle this, and they are in severe trouble. The Girl
Scouts had five years of infighting, and then basically said, “Girls
are girls are girls.”
To this day, most chapters of the Boy Scouts are ethnically
separate. The Girl Scouts decided that they are only girls. The
main result—and this was very deliberate—was that the Girl
Scout troops offered, quite deliberately, a means for that His-
panic mother, that Vietnamese mother, the black mother, to be-
come a member of the community. And they saw that as their
first result.
The Boy Scouts have been going downhill in numbers, and
especially in volunteers. The Girl Scouts now have almost 50
percent more girl members and almost double the number of
volunteers because they defined the results. And the result was
the integration of the family. Sure, when you look at their mis-
sion statement, it doesn’t even mention the volunteer mothers.
It’s all about the girls. But when you look at the actual policy, it
is the volunteer organization in the local chapter that is the basic
focus. It is the creation of community.
To “do good” is not a result. To “do good” means giving away
money. To make a difference is a result, and that is not so easy.
It is also very risky, as the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts show
you. You have to make decisions, and they can’t be the wrong
decisions or decisions that don’t have results.
Now, we need to recognize that different people have differ-
ent ideas about what the results should be. Let me say there’s no
quicker way to provoke a civil war within a nonprofit organiza-