For junior Penny Saha, Girl Scouts is not just an extracurricular activity, it’s a family tradition.
“I got involved because of my mom,” Saha said. “She has been in girl-scouting her whole life, and she got it from her mom who was also in Girl Scouts. I’ve been involved since kindergarten, so this is going to be my twelfth year.”
Girl Scouts offers a plethora of opportunities for girls of all ages, including selling cookies and camping trips. However, as the girls get older and more responsible, more opportunities are offered to them. For example, Saha has the opportunity to go to Costa Rica over the summer through Girl Scouts.
“Now that we’re older, we have to take more of a lead with leading meetings and scheduling things and being responsible for our schedule and the events that we do like leading events for other girls,” Saha said. “As I’ve gotten older, more career-based opportunities have been opened to me and that’s been super helpful to meet professionals, ask them what they do, and see facilities. There are events at colleges. There are events at organizations. There are just lots of opportunities to see a bit of what the future could be like.”
Part of her job as a leader is running and managing programs for younger girls.
“More recently, I ran with my troop a ‘Think like an Engineer’ journey, which is basically we got a whole bunch of girls in a room, and we ran a whole bunch of stations where we made various inventions as solutions to problems,” Saha said.
Girl scouts get rewarded for the programs they run and projects they accomplish through a system of “patches” and “journeys.”
“There are patches for little fun things that are less strict on requirements and there are patches for journeys,” Saha said. “The difference with a journey is that after you do all the steps of the journey, then you also have to do a ‘take action’ project, which is just like a service project that will show that you learned things.”
Upon completion of a journey, girl scouts can receive a pin, known as the bronze, silver and gold awards, earned successively. Saha earned her bronze award in elementary school and her silver award in middle school.
“For my bronze award, we made a pig pen for an animal shelter and for my silver award, we started hosting STEM nights for the elementary school because we noticed there was a lack of science in the curriculum after covid,” Saha said.
Currently, Saha is working on her gold award.
“That one is different from the other two because the other two, you get to work with your whole troop or just a group of girls,” Saha said. “The gold award is a solo mission. It’s not entirely solo but you lead the project instead of it being a team that leads it. I’m doing my project on my own but I’m also going to have a team of professionals who are experienced in the project help me.”
The most well-known (and tastiest) part of Girl Scouts are the famous Girl Scout cookies, often sold outside of grocery stores by girl scouts at booths.
“Some people stand there, like my little sister, because she doesn’t like talking to people,” Saha said. “I also get nervous talking to people, but I’ve grown used to it over the years of selling cookies because I realized that if you just stand there, it doesn’t really work. Only the people who want cookies will buy from you.”
Through years of experience and practice of selling cookies, Saha has learned to improve her social skills as well as sales skills.
“As I’ve been doing more booths and learning that you really do need to talk in order to sell and reach out to your friends and family in order to get really good sales, I’ve definitely been able to come out of my bubble,” Saha said. “Through going to lots of Girl Scout events, meeting new people, I’ve definitely been able to improve socially.”
Saha has also been able to make friends with her fellow girl scouts.
“Those are some of my closest friends because we’ve been in the same troop since elementary school,” Saha said. “The troop around us changed, but the core members are still there.”
