Goalsetting with Girls

Every year it surprises me how much "anti-cookie" sentiment there exists in our community. We have brownie girl scouts out in front of grocery stores selling cookies. They have dreams of going camping, having a horse back riding adventure, painting pottery at a studio, and simply having fun. Every year my parents come back from selling cookies with stories of people berating the adults about childhood obesity, too much sugar in children's diets, & the negative message selling cookies has for our girls.

And yet we keep doing it. I don't need to re-argue the why. The Girl Scouts Organization does that far more eloquently than I can. Every year I have a cookie selling story that makes all those negative comments fade away like morning fog. Here is this year's one.

Before we launch into the cookie selling, the girls and their leaders discuss goals. For the past 2 years, my girls have been focused on going to the Great Wolf Lodge. What 8-9 year old child wouldn't want to go there? While we were setting our goals, we did some quick math finding out that we needed to sell 1444 boxes to reach that goal. This would be the year that we could raise enough money to go there overnight. Then we discussed a service project that the girls could get behind. We would participate in the usual Operation Cookie Drop which sends cookies to our troops overseas. However, we wanted something that was just our group's focus. Unfortunately, we ran out of time and the girls were charged with trying to come up with a service project by the next meeting.

The week before our next meeting, the earthquake in Haiti happened.

When we met, I thought I would ask the girls if they had heard about the Haitian earthquake. They had. The girls all had their hands up talking about their schools collecting money to send to Haiti. Each girl talked about pictures they had seen on television, or their parents had shared with them in the paper. They spoke about their ministers or priests urge for generous donations for Haitian relief over weekend. I credit our parents, schools and churches with talking to these girls and giving them their boundless capacity for compassion.

I mentioned to them that Girl Scouts and Girl Guides are everywhere in the world, including Haiti. In that moment, you could see in their eyes that they could identify with their sister girl scouts. They were so moved that one of our girls suggested we just give all our money in our bank account to Haiti. However, there was some protest at that idea, and the girls had worked so hard to save up towards their goal, we came up with a compromise. We would donate the first $1000 of our cookie proceeds towards the Haitian relief effort. I told them that we'd essentially double our cookie selling goal to almost 3000 boxes. If we didn't make our goal, we might have to postpone our trip to Great Wolf Lodge one more year. They understood.

One of my girls put it very succinctly, "they need it more."

In the intervening time, we participated in the Cascade Bicycle Club Chilly Hilly bake sale and raised $310 towards our goal. Also during the Chilly Hilly, our girls helped out at the Squeaky Wheels Bicycle Club's chili feed. That event raised $1400 for the American Red Cross. Because of our participation in that event, the organizers have given us the honor of presenting that check to the ARC. Along with our $1000, our girls have helped raise $2400 for earthquake relief efforts.

So go ahead and complain about GS selling cookies. This is what building girls of courage, confidence and character looks like.