Dear Distinguished Board Members,

There are few organizations we still expect to be guided by principle, but the Girl Scouts is one of them, and the mandate is both simple and profound: To empower girls to make the world a better place. I am writing today to ask you to do this, even when it costs you. Yep, I'm talking about Girl Scout cookies.

The meaning of Girl Scouting

I spent several years in Girl Scouts as a child, back when Girl Scouts started out as Brownies, spent more time outdoors than in, and sang campfire songs I wouldn't dare teach my troop today. That's right -- I'm now the leader of Troop #9045, a first-year group of twelve Daisies and Brownies who meet in a first-grade classroom from 5:30 to 6:30 every other Tuesday night. Next year we'll have Daisies, Brownies, and Juniors, ages five to ten, and will cap our troop size at around twenty girls.

The Girl Scouts-produced curriculum, It's Your World--Change It! is a great launchpad for our troop activities, though I follow it loosely, in part because we're blending Brownies and Daisies and find ways to design activities that engage all of the girls together. As far as I can see -- and the materials seem pretty straightforward -- the goal of this curriculum is to help our young girls use their natural curiosity and empathy to find opportunities to have a positive impact in the world. I've been looking ahead to the materials you offer for Juniors and Cadets as well, and I'm excited -- they take on environmental and social issues that our children will inherit soon enough, unflinchingly but with sensitivity as well. Overall, it's the modern Girl Scouts' emphasis on service, outreach, and engagement with issues that matter to kids -- approached from a child's perspective but harnessing the wisdom of elders -- that makes me a passionate advocate for the role of Girl Scouts in a world now full of sports-oriented, special-interest, and keep-em-off-the-streets after-school programs that simply didn't exist when the Girl Scouts were founded a century ago this year. Girls believe in Girl Scouting, and through Girl Scouting they learn to believe in themselves and in their voices.

A failure of leadership... in a leadership organization

But the way the Girl Scouts USA leadership - you, the board - have handled our girls' concerns about the environmental impact of Girl Scout Cookies under the tenure of board president Connie Lindsey and CEO Kathy Cloninger - is starting to make me feel like a hypocrite. And given the choice between my girls and the organization that purports to support them, I'll choose the girls every time.

In case the details of this case have faded from memory, in 2008 Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen started working on a project to earn their Girl Scout Bronze Award. They researched endangered orangutans in Indonesia and discovered that palm oil production is destroying the world's last remnants of orangutan habitat. To be more specific, palm oil producers pay laborers to burn the forests and slaughter every orangutan found along the way, paying a bounty on each one. Any infants that survive this purging are sold as pets, the land is converted to palm oil production, and the orangutan populations continue their nosedive toward extinction.

Noting that palm oil is an ingredient in Girl Scout cookies, Madison and Rhiannon did what any good Girl Scout would do -- they sought the nearest and most effective target for their change-making activities. They started an education campaign, circulated petitions and even met Jane Goodall and got her to sign their petition. Unfortunately, the Girl Scouts administration (you) told the girls that while the bakers that supply cookies to Girl Scouts are a part of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, which "researches" and "develops" sustainable sources of palm oil, these bakers are unable to remove the palm oil from their cookies.

We'll set aside, for this discussion, what exactly the RSPO is and whether there will be any suitable forest left for orangutans to live in by the time they achieve their goals. Specifically, it's unclear how the activities of the RSPO will do anything to stop or even slow the destruction of the forests on which the orangutan depend; based on their certification criteria, it seems entirely possible that a new plantation established through the burning of forests and the slaughter of orangutans could then apply for a "sustainable producer" certification without a blemish to their name. Add to that the fact that Girl Scouts (you) won't even demand that cookie bakers buy palm oil from producers currently certified under this scheme, and, well, the cookies are tasting a little less sweet.

What's worse -- what's unconscionable, in fact -- is that an organization whose stated mission is to make girls believe they can make a difference would fail to respond to the call to leadership of the very girls in whom it helped foster the confidence to speak up for what's right. And why? Because it was not in the organization's immediate, secure, financial, and public relations interest. Meanwhile, other groups are taking the lead you've abandoned. The UK's Girl Guides [Readers: Girl Scouts, throughout most of the world, are called Girl Guides] have now eliminated palm oil from the cookies they sell, substituted with olive and rapeseed oil, but all we hear in the U.S. is that, as the forests and their inhabitants are being wiped (are almost wiped) from this earth, the issue is complicated and the solution lies somewhere in the fog of the future.

(We refuse to) get the message

To me, Girl Scouts of the USA's stance sends a frightening message to girls, and that message is the one they already receive on every corporate-sponsored kids' cartoon and in free teaching materials provided by fast food chains: That "making a difference" is all about thinking small, and keeping it that way, and making the easy choices while putting off the hard ones until it's too late. Picking up litter and encouraging recycling but never asking where all this waste is coming from and what can be done about it. Getting fresh air and exercise but never examining the food we eat or where it comes from. Running "Save the Rainforests" educational campaigns while selling cookies that contribute to their destruction. You -- we -- were supposed to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

This year -- our first year as a troop -- we took a "soft sell" approach to getting our girls on board with cookie sales. Our six-year-old daughter, who took a keen interest in the issue of orangutans being killed by the scores in the jungles of Indonesia, and the fact that they might not even exist outside of zoos by the time she is old enough to vote, chose to sell homemade cookies instead of the official Girl Scout cookies. She also split the cost with her parents to "adopt" an orangutan through Orangutan Outreach ( Luna, pictured at left), which cost her $40 of her own savings. She also made a homemade "I don't eat palm oil" T-shirt.

That six-year-old girl then sold 48 dozen cookies at $5 a dozen, studiously working within the rules established by Girl Scouts for off-script fundraising (your policies on that front are another story entirely), and although we haven't done the math yet, we think the net will be around $3 per dozen cookies sold. We'll split that profit down the middle, donating about $70 to Orangutan Outreach and $70 to our troop for next year's supply fund.

The rest of our troop sold about a thousand boxes of Girl Scout cookies. (I believe the troop nets about forty cents a box on those, or $400 in total, for an average of about $40 per participating Girl Scout.) See, as their troop leader, it didn't feel fair to bring five-year-olds into the world of tough choices that your board is forcing the rest of us -- parents, consumers, troop leaders -- to make. I couldn't see a way to help them recognize and confront this issue without deflating their interest, or their parents', in the organization I believe in so passionately.

But I won't do it again. Next year's curriculum is It's Your Planet -- Love It! and I'm not making excuses for you any longer. Those voices you heard over the past few months telling people not to buy Girl Scout cookies are going to be louder next year, and you're going to have fewer allies ready to argue against them. Those who took the bait this year and let themselves believe that your RSPO membership represented a meaningful change in direction will experience nagging doubts. And as for my girls -- Troop 9045 -- we are going to hold ourselves responsible for what we say and do, and we are going to practice what you preach. We're going to discuss, evaluate, and decide as a troop how to address the issue of Girl Scout cookies' role in the deforestation of Indonesia and the likely extinction of one of the most amazing species on our planet. And we're going to do it whether you're on board or not.

Sincerely,
Jennifer McNichols
Leader, Girl Scout Troop #9045
Girl Scouts of Central Texas