Setting the stage
When Christina Williams-Debrew signed on to facilitate a new series of one-day workshops for young women, she went in with plenty of entrepreneurial mindset knowledge thanks to her certification as an Entrepreneurial Mindset Program facilitator. She was familiar with one of the organizers, NC IDEA, a private foundation committed to supporting North Carolinians in achieving their entrepreneurial ambitions to start and grow high-potential companies, but she had less background with the other, the Girl Scouts—North Carolina Coastal Pines.
“I had never been a Girl Scout, and I have a 19-year-old daughter who wasn’t a Girl Scout,” Christina said. But with 18 years as an educator and three years as an Ice House facilitator under her belt, she jumped in with enthusiasm.
The primary benefit she expected from facilitating the NextGen workshops was to have a model for how to condense the Ice House materials into a single session for girls in fourth through 12th grade—something she and her sister, Tasha Williams, could use within their company, the Innovative Networking Group, which educates, engages, and empowers diverse communities from its home base in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. But she came away with much more than that.
Meanwhile, across the state in Charlotte, Katrina Wiggins was excited about the opportunity to facilitate for completely different reasons. “I was a Girl Scout for many, many, many years, so when the opportunity presented itself to talk to the Girl Scouts about entrepreneurship, I was like, ‘Hey, that’s what I want to do!’”
Katrina had become an Ice House facilitator at the suggestion of NC IDEA staff in the spring of 2023, just over six months before the series of NextGen workshops was scheduled to start in September. She had plenty of experience leading groups of young people thanks to her nonprofit, Launched for Life, which equips youth ages 14 to 24 to launch into adulthood successfully. And she knew the Girl Scouts inside and out.
The innovative partnership behind the workshops
The collaboration between NC IDEA and the Girl Scouts came about through Kate Wiggins, the former program support manager at NC IDEA—herself a longtime Girl Scout—who was interested in bringing Ice House content to groups that already have an established membership. She approached Laura Lee Davis, Vice President of Girl Experience at Girl Scouts – North Carolina Coastal Pines, who agreed to co-produce the NextGen workshops as a way for girls to amplify their business skills and explore pathways to innovative leadership, all while earning entrepreneurship badges.
Rather than offering NextGen workshops within individual troops, Kate and Laura Lee decided to emphasize the importance of long-term connections by partnering with small business centers at local community colleges. “It’s important for the girls to know that entrepreneurship isn’t something you do alone,” Kate explained. “Successful entrepreneurs have support.”
As described in this case study, the workshops followed a standard format and used a curriculum Kate had designed that aligned the Girl Scout badge levels with content from the Ice House model. In addition, Kate said, “Each facilitator brought their own spin to it.”
For Katrina, that included her perspective as a former troop member herself. “Girl Scouts has been around forever, and it has evolved. The entrepreneurship badge is among many other things they do now that we didn’t do back then,” she said. “It was fun to see their eyes widen when I told them cookies used to cost $1.25 a box when I sold them.”
She also talked about other changes over time. For example, she spent countless hours in her room working to earn badges. “Now the girls have experiences in earning their badges as opposed to a lot of paperwork,” Katrina said.
Outcomes from the NextGen facilitation experience
The workshops reinforced Katrina’s belief that the principles within the eight life lessons are universal. “The Ice House program is so flexible and so rich that it can be tailored to any organization,” she said. “The concepts are solid gold, and I am grateful to be a part of it.”
In this video recapping her experience facilitating one of the workshops, Katrina shared how she explained entrepreneurship as the self-directed pursuit of opportunities to create value for others to the young NextGen audience. “Basically, what you do in everyday life is solve problems. That’s entrepreneurship,” she said.
One of the concepts she focused on the most was the choices we make to respond to circumstances in our lives versus simply reacting to them—which happens to be her favorite of the eight life lessons. For example, she included a worst-case scenario where someone walked up to a sales booth and knocked all the cookies off the table. “If you ask questions and prompt, young minds come up with the neatest things,” she marveled.
The novel approach combined with her endless enthusiasm worked well. “Some of the participants took a while to warm up,” Katrina acknowledged. “You had to coax responses out of them. But at the end, I got hugs.”
For Christina, not having a background with the Girl Scouts meant she relied on the participants even more to bring forward their own entrepreneurial ideas—starting with the very first activity she led, which was to help them create a cookie sales pitch.
“The way the girls understood problems as opportunities—and how they are out there as entrepreneurs creating pitches and understanding what to do if someone says no—that inspired me,” Christina said. “I recognized the potential of what Girl Scouts can do for young ladies.”
Good vibes across the state
The positive impression from the NextGen workshops in Lumberton and Wilmington stuck with her after she returned home to Rocky Mount, two and a half hours away. “When I was facilitating the sessions, me becoming a Girl Scout leader was the furthest thing from my mind,” she said. But by coincidence, her church had launched Troop 177 just a month before, and she agreed to join as a co-leader to ensure that young ladies in her community had the same opportunities she had witnessed in other parts of North Carolina.
In the six months since its founding, the troop has grown to 29 girls in kindergarten through fifth grade who meet one Sunday per month. Their inaugural year of cookie sales went “fairly well,” Christina said. She was able to incorporate some of what she learned as a facilitator to address the inevitable bumps and bruises of nascent entrepreneurship, and she feels they now have a structure that will help them earn even more profit in future years.
The wonderfully positive—and completely unintended—consequences of Christina’s contract with NC IDEA continue to inspire her in the professional space as well; she and her sister are developing a summer leadership group for teens built on the eight life lessons in the Ice House model.
And she feels more strongly than ever about introducing an entrepreneurial mindset to young people as an investment in their futures. “If everybody thought about a problem as an opportunity,” she said, “the world would be a better place.”