Tomasa Pacheco watched her two daughters paint maracas and occasionally helped Kelley keep the girls on task. Pacheco, an undocumented immigrant from central Mexico, had never heard of Girl Scouts until about a month earlier. She had been going to Casa Monarca for English classes when someone suggested her 8-year-old and 5-year-old daughters might enjoy scouting. It was only their third meeting, she said, but the girls now get so excited that they run to Casa Monarca on Wednesday nights.

“It’s been really great for them to learn new things that I can’t teach them,” said Pacheco, who cleans houses in the Philadelphia area. The troop has visited a local animal shelter and an aquarium. Kelley hopes to take them camping this summer, something most of the girls have never done. “It’s fun,” Pacheco’s 8-year-old daughter told me.

Finding members and volunteers in urban neighborhoods is a big challenge, said Krysta O’Connor, a full-time recruiting manager for the Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania. “It’s super hard,” she said. “We are trying really hard to get into the city to tell them about us, but it’s not something they grew up with in their families. They’re a little unsure.” She visits South Philadelphia and West Philadelphia often, trying to spread the word about who Girl Scouts are and what they do.

Another challenge is the structure of the organization. In some ways, it still seems designed for the average suburban family of the 1950s, with one working parent and stay-at-home moms who could volunteer as troop leaders. Nowadays, especially in urban neighborhoods, children live in homes with working parents or single mothers who don’t have time to volunteer or take them to extracurricular activities, O’Connor said. They are also turned off by the annual fee and cost of things like uniforms and summer camp, she said, even though scholarships are available.

Seventeen-year-old Francheska Lopez, who has been a scout since she was 8 years old, had never heard of the Girl Scouts growing up in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. When she moved to Reading, Pennsylvania, she happened to see a group of girls laughing and playing around after class at her elementary school. She asked what was going on, and the teacher invited her to join. “I signed up the next week,” she said.

If it weren’t her own initiative, she wouldn’t have known about it. Lopez said handing out brochures in Spanish is not cutting it. “They need to just try something else,” she said. It would help to have more bilingual troop leaders, she said. Two new girls in her troop barely speak English, so they have trouble following the activities. While Spanish-speaking troops have been popping up across the country, the national organization doesn’t track the numbers.

Girls Scouts alumnae surveyed by the organization say confidence was the biggest benefit they got from scouting. Lopez agreed: “I wouldn’t be speaking to you if I wasn’t [a Girl Scout]. I wouldn’t have been comfortable,” she said. And that’s why this recruitment failure matters: Many of these girls, who already face so many obstacles, are missing out on a program that has given millions of others the confidence and some of tools they need to succeed.

* This article originally stated that Sandra Day O’Connor is a former Girl Scout due to incorrect information provided by a Girl Scouts council. We regret the error.

This article is part of our Next America: Communities project, which is supported by a grant from Emerson Collective.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.