Abstract
Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) is a national organization that has hundreds of councils throughout the United States. Diversity and inclusion is an important value to GSUSA and encourages their Girl Scout councils to provide training on diversity to staff and volunteers; however, it is not a mandatory requirement for councils to ensure volunteers and employees are trained in diversity. Many organizations promote diversity and work with diverse populations. Unfortunately, in many cases organizations do not provide resources to support working with diverse communities (Armour, Bain, & Rubio, 2004). From the researcher’s experience in participating in diversity training, gender was not a topic that was not generally covered. The researcher found the lack of gender training in diversity training an issue and wanted to address it by including gender in her diversity workshop. The researcher found rationale to include gender for two reasons. One, within diverse populations, race and gender are likely to intersect (Hill-Collins, 2000). It is difficult to talk about race and isolate gender from discussion and it is difficult to talk about gender and isolate race from the discussion. Interweaving the topics of race and gender allowed for the workshop to be well rounded and to include discourse on multiple identities. Secondly, gender was included throughout the workshop in order to examine the role of gender and the impact of gender surrounding issues of diversity. Giving the Northern Central Valley (NCV) Girl Scout employees the possibility to explore issues surrounding diversity gave them the opportunity to connect with the communities they are serving. The participants of the training were pre-surveyed and post-surveyed to determine if the training had an effect on their attitudes towards diversity (Appendix A). The participants were also given an evaluation of the training (Appendix B). Additionally, the researcher observed the participants included in the study and used the notes as part of the data. Overall the impact of the workshop did not significantly change the participants’ attitudes towards race and gender. The full time staff had more of a shift on their pre and post survey, than the part time seasonal staff. The results provided interesting insights into the participants and although the surveys were designed to measure the participants’ attitudes towards race and gender it was interesting to see how the participants felt regarding diversity training. The researcher was pleased that the participants understood the term intersectionality and understood how multiple identities can intersect and the effect of multiple intersections on the life of a person.