Taking the "Fun" Out of "Fundraiser"
What if instead of selling cookies, we did mutual aid? And other fantasies
“Girl Scouts can take your girl anywhere she wants to go. And if you think that sounds good, wait till you see her grow into the leader she was born to be,” the email read. “I'm leading Girl Scout troop Troop 60110, and I know she'll do all that and more—with a supportive squad cheering her all the way. Register your girl today and watch her shine her brightest!”
When I saw the email in my in-box this summer, I was excited. After a mostly-remote school year, it was a welcome message. I had done Girl Scouts for a year or two as a kid, and it had been … kind of fun? I remembered doing some crafts and stuff, and going to Camp Whispering Winds (mascot: a skunk) and having a good time. A couple of my daughter’s friends were in this troop, so I figured, why not?
I’m going to pause here for a minute and say that I have no reason to be critical of Girl Scouts. A lot of people have reached out to me to highlight the good things Girl Scouts are doing, both as an organization and on an individual or community level.
All of this sounds awesome, and it’s made me more excited about what lies ahead for us with Scouting. We are just entering the world of Girl Scouts, and I have a lot to learn. So what I’m about to say is not about Girl Scouts; it’s about me, and how my first few weeks as a Girl Scout mom have left me feeling kinda depressed.
And it’s not because of the troop leader, or the troop, or the really long thing we have to say at each meeting that absolutely does have God in it even though supposedly that part is optional now. No, I can manage all of these things. But starting off my Girl Scouts experience with Nut and Cookie sales has been a tough pill for me to swallow.
I am, at best, highly skeptical of fundraisers in general, soured after only a few years of exposure to the types of fundraisers common in public schools (coupon books, cookie dough and flower bulbs come to mind). My general impression of the fundraisers has been that, at best, they are an exercise in selling overpriced goods that are often of a poor quality to adults who don’t particularly want or need what they’re buying. I know that a lot of fundraisers net only pennies on the dollar on the local level, and that lots goes back to private companies that profit off these things, which I don’t love.
All that is bad enough, but fundraisers also exacerbate existing equity issues, and can make life harder for kids with less privilege, and that really bothers me. If your parents work in an office, there’s a pretty good chance they can bring your order form to work with them and sell whatever it is you’re selling to people for whom $20 is not a big deal. That’s not available for everyone, so kids who already have less end up working even harder for whatever measly prize they’re offered — or they don’t participate at all and might feel mad or sad or uncomfortable about it.
But really, what was on my mind when we started knocking on my neighbors’ doors was the question of what my 9-year-old was going to learn from this experience.
“When girls participate in the Girl Scout Cookie Program, they get more than life-changing experiences and adventure,” the Girl Scouts of San Diego tells me. “They also develop essential life skills — goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills, and business ethics — all while soaring in confidence and practicing leadership the Girl Scout way to lift one another up and change the world, together.”
“Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that ‘the market’ delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.”
— George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems,”
The Guardian, April 2016
Is it cynical of me to wonder how selling cookies (or nuts, or candy, or magazine subscriptions) “lift(s) one another up and change(s) the world”? I don’t know. But I do wonder. I see fundraisers as the perfect encapsulation of neoliberalism: an environment in which all interactions are transactional, where the only way we can enrich ourselves is by extracting capital from our neighbors.
My 9-year-old and I climbed in the car and drove down the road. We tried to sell peanut brittle to a man with no teeth and an obese beagle who barked, lovingly but insistently, at us as we hawked our wares. We offered chocolate-covered pretzels to a retiree whose vacation home is, inexplicably, down the road from my house (isn’t it always weird to think of your neighborhood as someone else’s vacation destination), who pried seven dollars out of her house dress with such kindness that it made me want to cry. We watched as the picture-perfect kids who were getting ready for family portraits on their picture-perfect farm got to pick out whatever they wanted, because there was egg money to pay for it, and no one really cared about the peanut brittle or the chocolate-covered pretzels or the dark chocolate mint penguins or the caramel bears.
In fact, no one cared when they would get the candy they had just paid us for. “Don’t worry about it,” they said. “Keep the change,” they said. It’s not really about the money. But also, it is about the money, because we were sent out here to sell stuff. To engage our neighbors — many of whom we had never met before, who we may never see again except to deliver their chocolate-covered pretzels, which is entirely on me, but it’s also true — in a purely capitalistic exchange.
It’s possible that my 9-year-old was learning “goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills, and business ethics” as we waited for our neighbors to peel off $12 in small bills to buy a tin of white chocolate peppermint bark that they neither wanted nor needed. It’s possible. But I don’t know. I really don’t know. I think she might also have learned some other lessons. I think she might have learned that people want to do things that make them feel like a good person, and buying $12 of candy from a Girl Scout makes people feel good. I think she might have learned that you can ask someone for something and they can say “yes” and you can still walk away feeling like you cheated them. I think she might have learned that there are other things we could have been doing at our neighbors’ doors that might have felt better — that might have been better.
Today is the last day of the fall Nut and Candy sale. Yesterday I got a passive aggressive auto generated email, supposedly from my 9-year-old, except it wasn’t really from her. It was from the automated program that I had plugged my email address into so that she could set up her online “store” to sell her stuff.
“The program has been a great learning experience and if my troop reaches our goal, we will be able to do all of the fun activities we have planned,” my 9-year-old supposedly said, according to this email. Neither she nor I knows what those fun activities are.
In November, the dark chocolate mint penguins and peanut butter bears will arrive. We will bag or box them up and drive up and down my road, delivering the goods to our neighbors. Some of them will have forgotten what they ordered until it arrives (relatable, as I contemplate a delivery notification for something I have no memory of buying). Some of them will not remember us. It will feel good, for a short time, to play Santa Claus, to hand out goodies up and down our road. But for me, it will also be bittersweet. I will wonder about what else we could deliver to our neighbors, what we could have done to build a relationship that’s more than transactional.
During the pandemic, I tried, and failed, to start a mutual aid group for my community. I was really discouraged by my failure and spent some time just feeling ashamed and embarrassed and not doing anything about it. But this experience has galvanized me to try again — or to try something. I’d love to hear about things you have done to build bridges in the neighborhood where you live, because it’s something that I don’t seem to be very good at. And if you’ve had experiences with the Girl Scouts — awesome or less-than-awesome — that you want to share, I’d love to hear about that, too.
This has been a pretty grouchy installment of Think of the Children, a twice-monthly newsletter about the intersection of parenting and education, and also apparently Girl Scouts. If you enjoyed this newsletter, why not forward it to a friend? You can also find me on Instagram and Twitter.