Sylvia Acevedo
CEO | Girl Scouts of the USA
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
When Sylvia Acevedo was in fourth grade, her teacher showed her a photo of Stanford’s campus. She was awestruck by the university’s historic sandstone quad: Romanesque buildings with red-tiled rooves set against a backdrop of green, northern California foothills. At that moment, she decided she would go to Stanford. And she did. After earning a bachelor’s from New Mexico State University, she went on to earn a master’s from Stanford. But none of this would have been possible without the Girl Scouts of the USA. Acevedo credits her time as a young Girl Scout to changing her life; her troop provided her with the tools and experiences that gave her the confidence and drive to be a leader and pursue her goals. And it was that same foundation of leadership skills that propelled her from Stanford to achieving another one of her dreams: becoming a rocket scientist. “Working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was a huge achievement,” Acevedo says. “I had grown up with NASA and was fascinated by it since I was a young Girl Scout. Working at JPL when the Voyager 2 was sending back images of Jupiter and its moons, Io and Europa, still thrills me to think about to this day.” After leaving NASA, Acevedo was fortunate enough to be in the Bay Area during the tech boom, and she held prominent positions at IBM, Autodesk, and Dell. Fittingly, she is now the CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA after sitting on its board of directors from 2009 to 2016. As a lifelong Girl Scout, she says it’s her responsibility for having an idea, vision, mission, and strategy for the organization and for making sure Girl Scouts gets the resources it needs to achieve that vision.
STEM’s Importance
Promoting education has been central to Sylvia Acevedo’s career. In fact, she has been a member of the Stanford Alumni Association’s Board of Directors and the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, chairing its Early Education Subcommittee. Now, as CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA, one of her missions is to promote science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in young girls.
“In today’s world, for the United States to remain competitive, we need a workforce that doesn’t just use technology but also knows how to program, code, create, and design technology,” she says. “With millions of jobs that are unfilled because of a mix and match in skill sets, US girls are an untapped resource. Girl Scouts is committed to developing a STEM talent pipeline of millions of Girl Scouts who can provide the skills and expertise that our
country needs.”
Acevedo is so passionate about STEM that she has even designed her own Girl Scout patch, which includes images of Jupiter, pi, stars, a rocket, and the symbol for sigma, symbolizing the summation of numbers.
