“Would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies?”

It’s that time of the year again when hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of girls run up to doors and bombard people at grocery markets, trying to get people to fling their money at them for overpriced cookies. It’s not as if I hate Girl Scouts – I’m currently one, and it’s my tenth year. You could call me an avid cookie seller, which is apparently all that Girl Scouts are good at doing.

I decided not to sell this year, which is surprisingly an option.

Why? Was it laziness, the weight of AP classes, or simply apathy? I’ll admit – it’s a mix of all three. Yet, there’s another aspect that has bothered me since I started begging people to buy Girl Scout Cookies – the fact that Girl Scouts seems to solely focus on selling cookies.

They highly encourage selling and have created initiatives geared towards both young and old girls, through prizes. There are prizes that you can earn if you sell a certain number of cookies – a trip to Disneyland, a stuffed animal, a bike, a laptop – the more you sell, the more you earn. Individual Girl Scouts do get a small cut, although it’s under a dollar per box, and it goes to their troop’s balance. The Girl Scout organization encourages cookie selling by promoting the idea of going on trips with your troop that incorporate valuable skills girls need to succeed. While that may seem like a good reason to fundraise, all of those trips are extremely expensive, and I never raised enough money to go on one – even after selling hundreds of boxes of cookies. What this shows is that many girls, especially those with less money, will not be able to attend the trips that are supposedly the main purpose of selling cookies.

If you ask anyone what Girl Scouts do, they’ll probably say that they sell cookies – and do nothing else. Yes, the cookies are the most widely advertised part of Girl Scouts, yet Girl Scouts have accomplished far more. For example, Gold Award projects. The Gold Award is the gold pin displayed on the back of all of the boxes, and it is the highest award that a Girl Scout can earn. It’s the equivalent of the Eagle project that Boy Scouts partake in. Sounds impressive, right?

It is. However, there’s a lot less initiative behind finishing such a project, and no one seems to know it exists. Simply putting it on the back of boxes isn’t doing it justice, because their one sentence description does not show the true significance of the services projects that many girls, including myself, have accomplished.

Instead of focusing on selling Girl Scout cookies, Girl Scouts should, at the very least, place equal emphasis on service projects in order to truly encourage girls too, because isn’t that the whole point of the organization? No one signs up to be a Girl Scout simply because they want to be a walking advertisement. They become a Girl Scout because they want to help their community, and better themselves. Perhaps it is time for a change – the administrators of Girl Scouts need to be reminded of what the goal of the organization really is.