Retirement speech

I just finished my fifth year as the service unit manager for our local Girl Scout organization. I voluntarily oversaw about 30 GS troops in our city. Basically, that means I told the leaders when their treasury reports were due, nagged them to get training and follow standard safety precautions, spread the word about fun GS events, and so on.

Sounds pretty straight forward, right? Not so much.

I'd originally planned to share the job with another woman. We agreed in the spring that we'd take over the job come fall. This woman was a cancer survivor and during the summer, her illness came out of remission with a vengeance. She lasted a handful of weeks, and died the week before our first meeting. She'd been determined up until the end that she WAS going to do this job, and the value she placed on this organization was what got me through the first year.

I had to field other situations when leaders called, wondering what to do when a girl's parent or sibling died. I had one leader call with an "incident" after a meeting between a girl and a school janitor. Another leader (who I still stand by as being innocent) was accused of molesting a neighbor. Even though all charges were dropped, he will never again have full custody of his daughter and can never again be a Girl Scout volunteer.

What did I find out as a volunteer Service Unit Manager? Life isn't always fair.

I often laughed at the irony that I was a volunteer. I had no training in counseling, and wasn't paid to deal with these heartaches. In retrospect, I would have gone nuts trying to "fix" these situations if I'd been a paid counselor. After five years I know now that some family issues can't be fixed. It doesn't stop me from worrying about if I could have done more, but at least I did okay.

Here's one final irony... I'm going to miss this job. The service unit benefitted from my technical prowess and communication skills. I got to help people, meet some terrific people -- both adults AND girls, and watch them grow. I'm definitely ready to move on to other things, but I'll always look back on what I did as a Service Unit Manager with pride.

That's enough for me.