Is it just me, or does the CBS Sunday Morning logo look like the Girl Scout Gold Award?
CBS Sunday Morning Logo
Gold Award patch
CBS Sunday Morning first aired in 1979, one year before the Girl Scout Gold Award was introduced.
However, the Girl Scout sunburst design traces to a Senior membership pin introduced in 1938. At the time, high school girls often did not want classmates to know they were Girl Scouts (hard to believe, right?). This special pin was designed to look like a sorority pin, which presumably was more acceptable.
The Senior interest program introduced in 1953 continued starburst design as a unifying background for the assorted interest-specific programs.
I’ve written about the history of the Gold Award before and the deliberate choice to incorporate history into its design.
Senior Membership PIn, 1938-1955Five Point Star pinSenior Panorama Troop
I’ve nothing else to add.
No conspiracies, intellectual property wars, or broadcast ambitious. Just, hmmm. They DO look similar.
The Girl Scouts of the USA turns 110 years old on March 12, 2022.
In the 1930s, individual Girl Scout troops began to group together as councils or associations.
Adults worried over how to keep older girls engaged, and GSUSA responded with innovative programming.
High school girls now had their very own membership pin, whose design inspired the Gold Award pin. The successful Mariner program would lead to other challenging programs for Senior Girl Scouts, including wing, horseback, and hospital aide.
The entire organization also began to incorporate civil-defense activities, which would come in handy in the 1940s.
This morning, as I was merrily searching online for the perfect shoe storage solution, an unexpected ad image popped up on my screen.
Instinctively I let out a primal scream that could be heard over the construction noise in my neighborhood. Like many older Girl Scouts, I suffer from Post-Traumatic Studio 2B Disorder (PTS2BD).
But then I looked more closely and saw there was no reason to head for the doomsday bunker. The apocalypse was not at hand.
A failed program concept for Cadette and Senior Girl Scouts.
Um, no. Nobody loved Studio 2B. That’s probably why I got this patch for a quarter.
STUDIO 2B debuted at the 2002 national convention, where the program was hailed as the solution to declining teen membership. The program addressed the problems with teen Girl Scouting that emerged from the landmark research study, “Ten Emerging Truths: New Directions for Girls 11–17.”
Researchers found that Girl Scouts wasn’t considered cool by girls 11 and older. Girls didn’t like the terms “Cadette” and “Senior” and they certainly did not want their friends in middle school to know they were Girl Scouts. (The Ambassador age level was introduced in 2008.)
Studio 2B’s Goals
STUDIO 2B would change all of this. It presented a “cool” and “hip” version of Girl Scouts that was to seem sophisticated and slightly mysterious. Meeting in small groups, online, or even working on their own, members of STUDIO 2B had four “B” program goals:
Studio 2B 4B list
Shouldn’t it be 4B?
Excellent question. The components of Studio 2B do not add up. That should have been a red flag. Bed, Bath, and Beyond apparently can count.
Too Many Choices
Instead of leaders, girls had advisors, preferably young women between the ages of 18 and 29 who would be “more relatable” than mom. Instead of troops, groups could call themselves anything they wanted or chose to meet online, work on their own, or other new “pathways.”
Instead of handbooks, girls could choose from a collection of single-issue booklets, such as self-esteem, writing skills, running, and saving parks. The books all had hip, slangy names like “Makin’ Waves” or “Cashin’ In” and used lots of apostrophes and exclamation points.
Instead of specific requirements, girls would set their own goals and decide when they had completed a focus book.
Two Studio 2B Focus Books.
Charm bracelet
But by far the biggest flaw was … wait for it … instead of earning badges to go on sashes, girls would earn charms to go on a charm bracelet. No uniforms needed.
We Don’t Understand!
Girls and their advisors were confused. Did STUDIO 2B replace badges or was it something completely new? Could you just flip through a focus book and declare yourself finished?
Was it required to earn the Silver and Gold Awards? An article, “Studio 2B Is Off and Running,” in the Summer 2003 Leader magazine was frustratingly vague:
Excerpt from Summer 2003 Leader magazine.
Many volunteers assumed STUDIO 2B would be optional; one year later the Gold and Silver Award requirements were revised to make STUDIO 2B mandatory. Many leaders/advisors/hip-people-other-than-mom were not happy with the change.
Girls did not rush to sign up for STUDIO 2B. GSUSA responded with multi-page advertising spreads in Leader magazine and supplemental books, sold in the catalog, instructing councils how to implement the program. The Winter 2004 issue of Leader, for example, had 32 pages including a two-page advertising spread and an eight-page pull out guide, “Studio 2B: It’s Easy. Here’s How.” That’s over 1/4 of the issue devoted to the program. Ten of the 2004 catalog’s 48 pages were devoted to S2B.
A major complaint was cost. Each focus booklet was initially $5.95, each charm $4.95, compared with $1.05 badges. The 2003 Leader article acknowledged the cost, suggesting girls “can request them as holiday or birthday gifts.” GSUSA took note, creating a “charm holder” in 2005 that could be pinned to a sash, slashing prices in 2006, and in 2007 creating “focus awards” — Interest Project-shaped patches with designs that resembled the charms and could be sewn onto a vest instead.
However, some charms, notably the ones required for the Silver and Gold Awards, were never offered in the cheaper patch format. One charm, On the Road, only appeared in the catalog for two years before it drove off into the sunset.
By 2009, only five charms and 12 focus patches were advertised in the catalog. None appeared in the 2010 catalog.
These charms, required for the Silver and Gold Awards, never came in more affordable patch versions.
What Went Wrong?
How did we get such a misguided program? I think the answer lies in research design. Of the 3,000 girls surveyed for “Ten Emerging Truths,” only 25 percent were actual Girl Scouts. The other 75 percent weren’t going to join just to get jewelry. And if the 25 percent who were already Girl Scouts wanted jewelry, they could make their own with the Jeweler Interest Project.
After years of neglect and decline, STUDIO 2B quietly passed away on April 13, 2012, when Girl Scouts of the USA cancelled the STUDIO_2B Trademark.
Still, I fully believe that reinstating Studio 2B or a similar program still could trigger an apocalypse.
Like most Americans, Ellie Alloway will pause tomorrow to mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
But tonight, September 10, Ellie will make an unprecedented contribution to the history of 9/11.
Girl Scout Ellie Alloway, via Fox5 tv
Tonight is the premiere of Ellie’s documentary, “Ripples: 9/11 Reflections from the North Fork, NY.” The film draws from more than 100 interviews that she conducted with survivors over the past two years.
The 9/11 documentary began as her Gold Award project, earning her the highest award available to Girl Scouts. Then it grew and grew. She hopes that one day schools might use her film when teaching about the events of 9/11.
Meet Ellie Alloway: one of the Girls the World Needs.
For more about Ellie and her project, follow these selected links:
