According to Sandi Amorello, it all started -- oddly enough -- with some Rice Krispies treats.
In 1971, a pre-adolescent Amorello was hard at work alongside a merry band of fellow Girl Scouts, each of which was striving to earn a cooking badge, in her home state of New Jersey. Her troop leader's recipe du jour: the iconic, if simply-made, desserts -- a choice that left the young Amorello flabbergasted.
"I had this wonderful Martha Stewart-like mother who made all of these wonderful things," she told The Huffington Post from her home near Portland, Maine. "So I just thought, 'Is this the quality we're really striving for? Couldn't we do something better than this?'" That ill-fated culinary incident prompted Amorello to drop out of Girl Scouts shortly thereafter. "I felt like the level of expectation wasn't quite high enough ... plus I never looked good in green."
An artist, writer and mother of three, the 49-year-old Amorello would recall that early memory many times over the years as a reminder of how "life doesn't always go quite as we plan." Sadly, that admonition hit home once again in 2002, when her husband, Drew, died at age 42 of terminal cancer the morning after Christmas. Amorello said that multi-year grieving process after Drew's death is what partly inspired her to create Girl Scout Dropout, a web-based forum that "will allow women to join a club that celebrates their alternative views of the world, while also finding a resource of support during any variety of life's challenges."
Though still in its early stages (the site launched this week), Girl Scout Dropout will complement Amorello's earlier site, Irreverent Widow, which provides Web-based, peer-to-peer grief support for widowed women around the world. Like Widow, the new site is meant to be a social forum for like-minded women -- from working mothers to housewives to professionals -- to find a general camaraderie. Instead of aiding the grieving process, the emphasis is on female empowerment, and for the female audience to find a way to channel their inner rebel in a self-effacing, yet humorous, way.
"I'd just like it to grow into a quirky, fun community of women who are fearless and who embrace and celebrate their inner spirit," Amorello said. The site is structured much like the organization from which it takes its name, but with a twist: Instead of earning merit badges, members can accumulate "dropout badges of honor," all of which are iron-on (since, naturally, a Girl Scout dropout can't be expected to sew). There are badges for single parenting, divorce, death and even for "midlife dating."
"I wanted to give recognition for the things that we live through, the things we survive in life -- not just about housekeeping and building a campfire," Amorello said with a laugh.
Though Girl Scouts of America has yet to comment on the new female empowerment project, Amorello insisted her project "isn't meant to slam them. Obviously we embrace some of their core values and their visions, but it's mostly meant as a parody."
And if the motto of that organization is to find sisterhood, Amorello believes women from all walks of life will find it here. "This isn't a support group, but if people can connect to other people within a community ... to know that I helped one person do that, that's what's important to me."
For more information on "Girl Scout Dropout," click here.