Once per week in a midtown Manhattan hotel, dozens of Girl Scouts gather in a spare room made homey by string lights and children’s drawings. They earn achievement badges in STEM education, architecture, and community service. They go on field trips to the Statue of Liberty and learn how to navigate the subway in a city most have just begun to call home.
They are the newest members of New York City’s largest Girl Scout troop. And they live in an emergency shelter where 170,000 asylum-seekers and migrants, including tens of thousands of children, have arrived from the southern border since the spring of 2022.
As government officials debate how to handle the influx of new arrivals, the Girl Scouts — whose Troop 6000 has served kids who live in the shelter system since 2017 — are quietly welcoming hundreds of the city’s youngest new residents with open arms. Most of the girls, who are kindergarten to high-school age, have fled dire conditions in South and Central America and endured an arduous journey to the United States.
Not everybody is happy about the evolution of Troop 6000. With anti-immigrant rhetoric on the rise and a contentious presidential election ahead, some donors see the Girl Scouts as wading too readily into politically controversial waters. That hasn’t fazed the Girl Scouts — whose stated mission is to "[build] girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place” — or their small army of philanthropic supporters. In fact, amid city budget cuts and a growing need for services, the Girl Scouts are just one of dozens of local charities that say their support for all New Yorkers, including newcomers, is more important than ever.
“If it has to do with young girls in New York City, then it’s not political,” said Meridith Maskara, CEO of the Girl Scouts of Greater New York. “It’s our job.”
Bolstered by $400,000 in emergency grants, Troop 6000 has tapped into its longstanding relationships to find grant makers sympathetic to their cause, but “there are some donors who would prefer their dollars go elsewhere,” says Maskara. “I am constantly being asked: Don’t you find this a little too political?”
‘Who’s Gonna Give Us a Chance?’
Last year, Troop 6000 opened its newest branch at a city government-funded hotel-turned-shelter called the Row NYC, one of the city’s first Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers, established in 2023 to supplement an already sprawling shelter system. Though hundreds of families sleep at the Row every night, the Girl Scouts is the only children’s program offered there.
Perhaps that’s what’s made the troop so popular.
Last January, the group held its first recruitment event at the Row and rolled out a newly designed bilingual curriculum meant to help scouts acclimate and learn more about New York City through its monuments, subway system, and political borders.
One year later, with nearly 200 members and five parents as troop leaders, the Row is the largest of Troop 6000’s nearly two dozen sites at shelters across the city and the only one focused exclusively on serving girls from asylum-seeking families.
With few other after-school opportunities available, the girls at the Row are “so hungry for more” and eager to get involved with other Girl Scout efforts, such as the group’s Leadership Institute or its awards program for older scouts, says Giselle Burgess, senior director of the Girl Scouts of New York’s Troop 6000. “They’re always ready to jump into the next activity.”
The success of the new site has been gratifying for the Girl Scouts, whose Troop 6000 was its first program in New York City to serve girls who live in shelters.
Seven years ago, Burgess, a single mother of six, built Troop 6000 from the ground up after losing her rental home to developers. While living in one of the city’s hotel-turned-shelters for families in Queens, she got the idea of creating a troop for girls like her three daughters. It was the height of “NIMBYism,” she says, referring to the not-in-my-backyard movement opposed to local homeless shelters and new housing construction.
At the time, she asked: “Who’s gonna give us a chance?”
As it turns out, “the donations started pouring in,” she says. A 2017 New York Times profile helped lead to a groundswell of philanthropy — as well as tens of thousands of dollars in cookie sales — that helped the group grow from serving seven girls at a shelter in Queens to more than 2,500 scouts and troop leaders at over 20 temporary housing sites across the city, which is home to around 25,000 scouts overall.
So when the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, a city-run nonprofit, asked Maskara to consider starting a troop at the Row in 2022, the Girl Scouts and Troop 6000 were ready.
“We already had a model that has really proven to work,” says Maskara, who quickly raised about $400,000 in an emergency campaign from the troop’s existing supporters, including Trinity Church Wall Street Philanthropies, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation.
Troop 6000 employs bilingual social workers and a transition specialist versed in supporting children who’ve experienced trauma. But otherwise, it operates much like other Girl Scout troops, which are typically formed independently with the leadership of a few parents and an agreement to uphold the Girl Scouts’ core beliefs.
Most importantly, say Maskara and Burgess, the troop offers a glimmer of consistency to children who often have to pack up, move homes, and switch schools in the middle of the academic year, sometimes more than once. Scouts are encouraged to continue participating even when their families relocate or leave the shelter system.
That hasn’t been easy at the Row. The average length of stay for a family in the city’s homeless shelter system is a year and a half; in an emergency shelter, it’s often mere months. In October, Mayor Eric Adams announced a 60-day limit for families residing in the city’s relief centers, and at least 40 families have been evicted from the Row since January.
“Keeping the girls connected is what matters the most for us right now,” says Burgess. “There’s a lot of emotion, frustration, and hurt.” Around 50 scouts whose families have since left the Row — often to other shelters or other cities — now participate in a weekly virtual troop with mail-in supply boxes filled with badges and art materials for participating in activities.
“We want to be able to encourage the girls and let them know it’s not over,” she says. “We’re still here.”
Philanthropy Steps In
In recent years, New York City has spent billions on services related to asylum-seekers while buckling under the pressure of an existing housing and affordability crisis. That’s left little time to court and coordinate the city’s major philanthropies to help local charities meet the needs of people seeking asylum.
“It’s very hard to take a step back when you’re drinking out of a fire hose,” says Beatriz de la Torre, chief philanthropy officer at the centuries-old Trinity Church Wall Street, which gave the Girl Scouts a $100,000 emergency grant — in addition to $150,000 in annual support — to help expand Troop 6000.
For decades, New York City has had a unique “right to shelter” law that requires the city to provide a place to sleep in a city shelter to anyone who wants one on a given night. That policy, plus a political ploy by Republican governors to bus tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to liberal cities, has led many to look for refuge in New York City even as the city’s Right to Shelter policy becomes increasingly tenuous under a strained system.
Trinity Church’s philanthropy arm has spent millions bolstering local charities and retrofitting houses of worship into temporary shelters. With or without government directives, says de la Torre, charities are feeling the crunch of increased demand from new arrivals: Food banks need more food. Legal clinics need more lawyers.
“Where philanthropy can step in is by taking a more proactive approach to fill in the gaps that government is leaving behind,” she says.
Over the past year, that gap has included bigger-picture planning over how best to support -those seeking asylum, some foundations say. Since asylum-seekers began arriving to the city, a network of around 30 local grant makers, including Trinity Church and Brooklyn Org, have met at least biweekly to coordinate their response to increased demands on their grantees.
Together, they’ve provided more than $25 million in funding earmarked for a wide swath of charities serving asylum-seekers and migrants through one-time direct cash payments for families in need, free legal assistance, and resources for navigating the city’s public school system.
“It’s hard for the government to be that nimble — that’s a great place for nonprofits and philanthropy,” says Eve Stotland, senior program officer at New York Community Trust, which convenes the Working Group for New York’s Newcomers and itself has distributed more than $2.7 million in grants since 2022 to local nonprofits serving recent immigrants.
“These are our neighbors,” says Stotland. “If a funder’s goal is to make New York City a better place for everyone, that includes newcomers.”
Political Backlash
In a typical year, funding for immigrants makes up a “very, very small” percentage of overall grant making, says Marissa Tirona, president of Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, a network of foundations. Funding for immigrants has actually shrunk 11 percent from 2012 to 2020, according to a report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
During an election year, she says, services for immigrants might be even more at risk of underfunding.
“Migrant families are often used as political pawns,” says Tirona, who noted that donors are not immune from the “fear-mongering and scapegoating” rhetoric perpetuated by anti-immigrant politicians.
Even a liberal enclave like New York City, where nearly 40 percent of residents are foreign-born, has found itself vulnerable to “us versus them” narratives around asylum-seekers as New Yorkers jostle over “systems that are already fragile,” says Grace Bonilla, CEO of United Way of New York City, which was entrusted by the city to distribute an emergency pot of money to small nonprofits responding to the influx.
Even the Girl Scouts have not been immune from backlash related to the asylum-seekers. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve shouldered criticism from conservative donors. In 2015, a Seattle branch of the group rejected a $100,000 gift from a donor opposed to the nonprofit welcoming trans and gender non-conforming children into their ranks, a policy that has also led to petitions, boycotts, and donor backlash. In that case, the Seattle branch recouped enough to make up for the gift from supporters impressed by their stance.
While Troop 6000 has not been deterred by critiques from internet trolls, or even some donors who’ve opted out of funding the expansion, Maskara says that many of her peers in the nonprofit world — and colleagues across the country, some of whom have been experimenting with their own troops for girls in shelters — have been reluctant to support newcomers.
“What holds them back is the appearance of being too progressive or too political,” she says. “My response to them is: You have no idea how many doors it will open.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
