The first word that comes to mind when you think of "Girl Scouts" is cookies. That, and second graders. What the public doesn’t realize is that many girls continue to be a Girl Scout through high school. Girl Scouts is more than just a group of girls that go around helping people, it’s also a community.
Girl Scouts was founded in 1912 by Juliette Gordon Low and has grown from 18 girls to a total of 2,734,280 girls, in which only 100,414 are of the ages 16 and over.
I’ve watched my troop, Troop 784, go from a whopping 22 freshman girls to a mere three seniors. We’ve stuck to each other through think and thin, through Girl Scout meetings in which we buy food for the needy or watch our trade mark movie, A&E’s Pride & Prejudice and order pizza.
Not all of it is fun and games. We’ve had to bend over backwards to pull stubborn non-native plants out of the Palo Alto Baylands and sweat in a full-body polar bear suit greeting small children who refuse to let go of your leg at the San Francisco Zoo. Despite our back pain and the hair stuck across our sweaty faces, there’s always the little things that make it all worthwhile: the three huge trash bags full of dead plants or the little girl who kissed the costume’s nose.
As you can see, Girl Scouts is more than just "selling cookies;" in fact, the 95-year old organization has been changing drastically. Gone is the old and outdated notion of "technology-phobic" girls. The stereotypical housewife is disappearing and Girl Scouts has been changing their focus from cooking and camping to modern-day science, math, and the business world.
According to an article titled "How do you transform a 95-Year-Old Organization? Ask the Girls" in the 2006 Nov-Dec issue of "The Merrill Lynch Leadership Magazine" by Polly Labarre, Girl Scouts is "much more than cookies and crafts." There’s a "departure from?purveying Thin Mints, doling out merit badges and organizing quaint camping-and-crafts experiences."
"[At a program called "Lead the Way,] We learned about leadership skills and listened to a speaker from the Peace Corps," senior Rosie Schairer of Troop #955 said.
Some of the most prominent women in the US were Girl Scouts, including 70 percent of the women in Congress and Hilary Rodham Clinton, Sandra Day O’Conner, and Eileen Collins, the first woman space shuttle commander. Girl Scouts are creating the modern woman, the woman of the future. Most likely, our first woman president will be a Girl Scout in her teen years.
"Girl Scouts is one of the most recognized brands in the United States, but it’s probably the most misunderstood," CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA Katy Cloninger said.
This is exactly my point. I stopped selling cookies once I hit high school. For my troop’s Silver Award, we hand built an 11 by 8 foot playhouse, complete with electricity, a loft, and a slide. It was all painted, drafted, and wired up by us and us only. The only adult help we had was for instruction on the correct way to use the electric saw and draw the preliminary image. Onlookers were so skeptical that the San Jose Mercury stepped in and wrote an article about us. No one believed that a group of teenaged girls could have built something to that degree, but we did, and maybe we’ll do it again.