Justness and community are important to Cynthia H. Breunig, Chief Executive Officer and President of Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio. So much so that she has dedicated a large part of her life to helping fuel one of the nation’s most revered non-profit organizations.
“We’re all about female equity and female empowerment,” Breunig said of the Girl Scouts. “That’s our thing and has been for 113 years.”
A recent grant from Inland Empire Community Foundation has buoyed the organization’s efforts, helping with general operation expenses and its focus on several vital issues.
“We have different regions, they’re called councils, and each is a separate 501c3,” Breunig said. “We reflect the interests and challenges in each of our communities. The focus here—all over Riverside and most of San Bernardino—is about the wage inequity between males and females, especially in the Inland Empire.”
“Women in Vermont have probably the closest disparity at .89 cents for every dollar for a white male,” she added. “In the Inland Empire, it’s.75 cents for Black women, and for Hispanics, it’s.51 cents. About two-thirds of the low-paying California jobs are in our region.”
These issues are “top of mind” for Breunig and the San Gorgonio arm of Girl Scouts, and while she is quick to say that the organization can be “all hearts and rainbows and lots of little girls and cookies,” there’s something deeper running beneath the surface.
“The underpinnings of all those things have to do with financial literacy, which is a huge thing for us,” she said. “The cookie sale is one of the most successful in the country because so many people participate. But what you may or may not know is that all that money stays in the local economy and regrows this year. It was about $12 million in this local council.”
About 5 percent of that cookie sale is overhead. The rest goes into the girls.
“This would be girls’ programming and such,” Breunig said. “It goes back to their troops. They’re traveling the world—it goes back to the individual girls so that they can pay for camp and other things like college applications, driver’s education, Letterman jackets, and the whole senior package.
“It really helps the girls in our community,” she added. “That’s the pay and equity part. The whole cookie sale is set up so that the girls are learning how to run their own businesses.”
Breunig became President and CEO of the organization in 2011. She is a proud Gold Award Girl Scout and quickly credits Girl Scouts with shaping her leadership and business skills. Over the years, she’s been impressed with the impact the organization makes.
She also points out the many famous women who were Girl Scouts, such as American labor leader and feminist activist Dolores Huerta, now 95, who has been a big advocate for Girl Scouts.
“She said to us that she was a shy little girl and that she found her voice in Girl Scouts,” Breunig added. “And every [female] secretary of state was a Girl Scout. And 90 percent of [female] astronauts were Girl Scouts, and 80 percent of all of our tech leadership.”
Other “famous” Girl Scouts include: Lucille Ball, Katie Couric, Martha Stewart, Venus Williams, and Queen Elizabeth II.
When asked why the organization may be more relevant now than ever before, particularly in an era of extreme political shifts, Breunig is candid: “It has a lot to do with neighborhoods and communities and participation.”
This links together families and neighborhoods around projects that the girls are working on.
“Community service has been our thing for the full span of 113 years,” she added. “One example is during the Suffragette Movement and the Right to Vote endeavors—one of the reasons that you don’t see a lot of kids in those photographs of the ladies marching is because Girl Scouts organized nationally to babysit. So, we’re participating at all levels.”
Meanwhile, if there’s a credo that keeps these creative troops motivated, it comes from a reputable source.
“The Brookings Institute says, ‘If you want to change the world, invest in girls,’” Breunig said. “And that’s where we stand.”
Learn more about Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio at gssgc.org.
This story originally appeared in the Press Enterprise, July 2025.
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