When most people think of the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts, they think of cookies and camping, merit badges and pledging oaths of honor. But now you can add “throwing shade” to that list, because the last few months in the corporate world of scouting have been ugly.
It all started earlier this year, when rumors began circulating that the Boy Scouts were considering changing their policies to include girls in their programming.
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In response, Kathy Hopinkah Hannan, a managing partner at KPMG and president of the Girl Scouts board, wrote a damning letter to Randall Stephenson, the head of AT&T, who is also the president of the Boy Scouts. The treatise accused the Boy Scouts leadership of a lack of transparency in “surreptitiously testing the appeal of a girls offering to millennial parents.”
In October, the Boy Scouts formally announced they’d start allowing girls into the fold. Starting in 2018, girls will be allowed in Cub Scouts, and from then on they’ll be allowed in the main Boy Scouts programs — eventually being able to earn their Eagle Scout badges.
VICE News Tonight delved into the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts to find out what these century-old, single-gender youth organizations are going to look like in the future — and whether they’ll both be able to survive.
This segment originally aired November 3, 2017, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.
