My daughter Megan is a Girl Scout leader, along with two co-leaders, and she is also the cookie mom for her troop. I think this is her fourth year in that role. This year, however, cookie season looks very different.
Door to door sales will be somewhat limited in her town and even more difficult for troops in Minneapolis because of the ICE presence. Booth sales usually generate a large portion of orders, and those booths are typically set up in grocery stores or Walmart parking lots. Unfortunately, ICE has been known to go into parking lots to detain or deport people, which has created understandable fear. As a result, quite a few troops are opting out of selling altogether or are limiting themselves to online sales only. Online sales, however, do not include a rewards program for the girls.
Each year, cookie sales feature an animal mascot. This year’s mascot is a ferret. Girls earn prizes based on the number of boxes they sell, and it is likely that one of those prizes will be a stuffed ferret.
Megan came up with a creative solution. Using the family’s 3D printer, she designed a hard plastic ferret and began offering them for sale to troop leaders. For every ferret a troop leader purchases, Megan donates one to a girl who is unable to participate in sales because of the ICE presence. It is a simple and thoughtful idea. She already has far more orders than she anticipated, and most of the donated ferrets are already claimed. This is not a money making venture. It is an act of love.
Watching my daughter conceive this idea and then reach out to me for help with the recordkeeping side while she focuses on manufacturing has been a real gift. I love watching her learn about sales tax, Venmo business accounts, and how to think about costs. It has been fun for me to help where I can. We set up her recordkeeping in Google Drive, and opening a spreadsheet to find her questions waiting for me is a trip. I had forgotten how much of my work life centered on teaching people new skills. That is the part of working that I miss.
None of this fixes what is broken, and it is not meant to. It is simply one family, one troop, and one idea responding with care instead of fear. Watching Megan turn concern into action, and finding myself alongside her doing the kind of teaching I once loved, has been grounding. In a season made harder by forces far beyond cookie booths and prize charts, it feels meaningful to witness kindness taking a tangible shape. Sometimes that shape is a spreadsheet. Sometimes it is a small plastic ferret. And sometimes, that is enough for today.
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