Girl Scout Cookie season is underway in Southwestern PA
Courtesy of Lainey White Duncan
Girl Scouts enjoy a friendly game of Cookie Twister Jan. 7 at the Greene County Fairgrounds, where troops from Greene and Fayette participated in games and activities, learned cookie history and picked up their sales information packets. The Cookie Rally was hosted by Lainey White Duncan, service unit manager and leader of Troop 80012.
Courtesy of Lainey White Duncan
Cheryl White; Peyton Duncan, Junior Girl Scout; Kaelyn Duncan, Daisy Scout, and Lainey White Duncan, leader, Troop 80012, pose in front of the the Cookie Time table during the Cookie Rally at Greene County Fairgrounds in early January. White Duncan hosted the first Cookie Rally, complete with learning, games and tasty samples, for Greene and Fayette Girl Scout troops to kick off the 2023 sales season.
Courtesy of Lainey White Duncan
Girl Scouts from Greene and Fayette counties were treated to cookie samples during the first Cookie Rally at the Greene County Fairgrounds Jan. 7. Among the samples were the original Girl Scout sugar cookie, front, Thin Mints and Samoas.
Courtesy of Lainey White Duncan
Girl Scouts from Greene and Fayette counties and their parents learn about the cookies for sale this season during the first Cookie Rally at the Greene County Fairgrounds Jan. 7. Samples, including the original Girl Scout sugar cookie recipe, were available for munching after Lainey White Duncan’s brief cookie speech.
Courtesy of Lainey White Duncan
The original Girl Scout Cookie recipe was available at the Cookie Rally earlier this month.
Courtesy of Shannon Thomas
North Allegheny Troop 54370 Daisy scouts deliver their cookie sales pitch to a neighbor. The first-year Girl Scouts are enjoying sales season, said troop leader Shannon Thomas.
Courtesy of Shannon Thomas
Emily Titus, 6, and Claire Thomas, 6, tout their Girl Scout Cookie sales sheets through a North Allegheny neighborhood. The first-year Daisy scouts were so eager to sell cookies that they determined to go door-to-door when sales started in early January.
Courtesy of Shannon Thomas
When Claire Thomas, a kindergartener and first-year Daisy scout, asked her mother and troop leader Shannon Thomas if she could sell cookies door-to-door, Shannon Thomas said, “Let’s go, girl!” Claire Thomas and her fellow Daisies have had fun pitching sales to neighbors and raising money for both community service and fun activity projects.
Be you Team Thin Mint, Team Samoa or Team All The Cookies, Girl Scout Cookie season arrives annually with the same buzz of excitement, and local troops are now taking orders for the organization’s most delicious fundraiser of the year.
“For volunteers, it’s a little stressful,” laughed Patricia Hawthorne, service unit manager for National Pike in Fayette County and leader of Troop 53024. “Cookie season is our biggest fundraiser of the year. The program and the sale helps to build the girls’ entrepreneurial skills, as well as help fund the activities that the girls will do throughout the year. Really, the majority of the money that we spend as a troop comes from our cookie sales.”
The cookie sale is a decades-old tradition dating to 1917, when Muskogee, Oklahoma’s Mistletoe Troop baked and sold cookies at the high school as part of a service project that helped fund troop activities. The first The American Girl magazine published by Girl Scouts of the USA in July 1922 featured a sugar cookie recipe, which recipe author Florence E. Neil suggested could be sold by troops at 25 to 30 cents per dozen.
“In 1922, the Girl Scouts sold the cookies and then they would actually go home and make them,” said Lainey White Duncan, a lifetime Girl Scout, Greene County service unit manager and leader of Troop 80012.
White Duncan paid homage to the cookie’s storied history Jan. 7, when troops from Greene and Fayette counties gathered at the Greene County Fairgrounds for the first area Cookie Rally. Scouts picked up their sale information packets and spent the afternoon celebrating all things cookies with friends old and new.
“We had the original Girl Scout Cookie recipe from 1922,” said White Duncan. “We had a sample of all the cookies that we are selling. We did cookie Bingo, cookie Twister. It was fun activities, games and prizes, learning about cookies, learning about cookie sales. We had a really fun time.”
White Duncan hopes the rally sparked in girls motivation to sell and solidified the importance of the annual fundraiser as a skill-building activity.
“It teaches, at all levels, starting from kindergarten all the way up to seniors in high school. It definitely teaches you money management, organization; communication skills is the biggest thing,” said White Duncan.
Through the cookie sale, Girl Scouts also learn phone etiquette, marketing and e-commerce skills, thanks to the organization’s digital system. The sale teaches girls to dream big, plan and save for the future.
“My particular troop, they are raising money to go on a zoo overnighter,” said Hawthorne. “They’re very excited about that.”
White Duncan’s troop is excited to earn enough money through cookie sales to cover the costs of a winter camping trip, with – fingers crossed – enough money leftover to complete a community service project.
Shannon Thomas’ Troop 54370 doesn’t know yet what cookie funds will be put toward. The first-year troop, comprised of 12 North Allegheny kindergarten and first-graders, is just excited for its inaugural Girl Scout Cookie sale.
“I’m so impressed,” said Thomas, a first-year troop leader whose daughter, Claire Thomas, volunteered to go door-to-door and sell boxes to neighbors. “It’s our first year doing Girl Scouts and cookie sales. I’m just surprised how much people truly love Girl Scout Cookies. Our troop’s almost at 600 boxes. We want to, through the cookie program, yes, we want to have fun, have the troop sustain itself. (We want girls) to learn how to be confident, learn how to talk to an adult in the right manner.”
Thomas said the girls will continue selling cookies through the end of the season, and it’s the girls, not the leaders, who will decide where to allocate sale funds.
“All of Girl Scouts is really supposed to be girl-led. We are going to allow the girls to all brainstorm. We’ll do a vote. A portion of (cookie funds) will be going to help the community, whether we want to give some to Animal Friends or donate some to the police department or the fire department,” Thomas said. “We’ll let them come up with a fun activity as well.”
Cookie sale proceeds stay within the community, according to the Girl Scouts website, but local troops cannot undertake service projects or earn badges without your help (as if you needed a call to action to purchase cookies!).
Local Girl Scout troops are taking orders for cookies delivered by hand to your front door through March 17.
Beginning Feb. 26, folks are invited to place orders online through Digital Cookie. While cookies arrive via shipping, not by hand, there is a sweet incentive for placing digital orders: Raspberry Rally, a crispy, raspberry-infused wafer dipped in chocolate, is new this year and available online only.
“It’s very polarizing: people either totally love it or totally hate it,” Thomas said, adding many of her Scouts are fans of the fruity cookie.
Since the pandemic began, booth sales have been hit or miss in communities, but this year, they’re back. Booth sales, which originated in the 1950s with the rise of shopping malls nationwide, begin the weekend of March 3, and Scouts are looking forward to setting up tables outside local businesses and interacting with the community.
“We are excited about getting back to that new normal cookie season. I think a lot of smaller communities, the customers are used to seeing the girls out around this time, so they begin looking for us,” Hawthorne said, adding the troop is grateful to generous local businesses for letting the girls set up shop outside their storefronts. “Customers can … take advantage of an app on their smart phone, The Cookie Finder App: It will tell them where local troops will be set up. We look forward to engaging with the community and having a successful sale.”