Flamingo and Girl Scouts have teamed up to spice up body confidence amongst young girls and teenagers.

Over the following two years, Flamingo will donate $1 million to Girl Scouts, aiming to support research and subsequent program development meant to combat body shame amongst Girl Scouts’ 1-million-plus members, with a deal with emphasizing body neutrality over body positivity.

“Body positivity is something great which you could opt into, however the concept and concept that you may all the time be body positive just doesn’t seem very realistic,” said Flamingo’s head of social impact Maggie Hureau, adding that young girls are more likely than their male counterparts to be taught to understand their bodies for the way they appear, reasonably than what they will accomplish. “To be more neutral — to take into consideration your body when it comes to the way it got you from point A to point Z, is a greater way of pondering than valuing it for what it looks like.”

To that end, the primary 12 months of the partnership can be focused on conducting research among the many Girl Scouts community to find out what meaningful support should seem like. Future programming could entail dedicated, routine conversations with Girl Scouts volunteers; with members’ own caregivers; inside troop meetings — or the entire above.

“We’re talking to Girl Scouts of all ages about what self-confidence means to them, and we’re very open to seeing where the research leads us,” said Sarah Keating, vice chairman of girl experience and program delivery at Girl Scouts.

Elementary schoolers — or those within the Daisy, Brownie and Junior membership levels — comprise the vast majority of Girl Scouts’ member base, with Keating reporting “an enormous drop-off between elementary and middle school” — which can also be a stage when girls’ confidence is prone to take a success.

“A lot of things change in a child’s life as they move from elementary school to middle school, but we do know that’s the time limit when Girl Scouts can have probably the most impact, particularly after we’re talking about body confidence,” said Keating, adding the organization introduced a Mental Wellness patch and corresponding programming a couple of years ago to raised meet the needs of early-teen and teenage girls, and body image programming “is the following stage of that.”

For Flamingo, too, the partnership marks an extension of existing efforts to support women in fostering healthy relationships with their bodies. Since launch, the body care brand has collaborated with trauma-informed yoga company Exhale to Inhale, and earlier this month, Flamingo unveiled a podcast, “Unruly,” which addresses the commodification and regulation of girls’s bodies.

“Certainly one of the cool things to occur along the best way of us partnering with organizations to debate body autonomy and trying to search out ways through which we will discuss with our customers about this work, is realizing it resonates with women of their 30s, 40s and 50s, a few of whom have never heard these terms before,” said Hureau. “We must always all be continually learning and understanding — and we will learn together.”

For Keating, too, maximizing impact is vital.

“My hope is that we are going to see [Girl Scouts] pay it forward, that what they learn on this program, they may find and invent ways to share it with the broader world, which is what I actually expect we are going to see.”