The wait to stock up on Girl Scout cookies will end soon, as the tradition that started over a century ago resumes this month.
More than 800 Girl Scouts from across Central Illinois converged in Bloomington on Saturday, learning all about how to safely and responsibly sell cookies, meet other Girl Scouts and to get to try some of those highly-coveted cookies.
WGLT correspondent Braden Fogerson has some of the best bites from Saturday's cookie rally.
Listen to this audio-rich story using the play button above or read the transcript below.
Sara Tate: I’m Sara Tate, director of programs and camps. This is the Cookie Rally, and it's our big kickoff for the cookie season. We have troops from the Champaign area, Decatur, Springfield, Quincy, Peoria and Bloomington, so really, all over Central Illinois.
I honestly don't know when we officially started, but we've had this large-scale event since 2019 before it was regional. So our bigger cities would have them, but then we decided to combine it to make it one big party, and everybody from the council is invited to it.
Event volunteer: On your mark, get set, go!
Tate: We also just have a lot of fun activities. We have games that they can play, and then they get to try that cookie. We have a DJ, we have pizza, we have our horses from our Girl Scout camp as well. So it's just really a big fun party for the girls to help them get excited about the cookie season.
Event volunteer, cheering on a scout shooting a bow and arrow: Good job!
Tate: Sometimes they don't even realize that they are learning these skills when they're doing their badge work. So it's kind of a way to sneak in that stuff without them even realizing that sometimes.
Amy O’Brien: I'm Amy O'Brien. I'm one of the troop leaders for Troop 1106 in Bloomington-Normal. And I think the biggest skill is, um, even my daughter and I were talking this morning about, you know, what do you learn from selling cookies?
And she said, “Well, Mom, I learn how to sell things, which is really important, because if I want to start a business someday, I have to know how to sell things.”
I see with the cookies too. Just learning those communication skills, they even talked about in one of the leader cookie meetings, you know, teaching the girls how to accept ‘no,’ you know, that's an important skill to learn in life. So lots of great values our girls will be learning with the program.
Brinley Jordan, a member of Troop 1106: My name is Brinley Jordan, so we're at the Cookie Rally for Girl Scouts, and it's pretty fun. So far, mostly, we've just been waiting in a line and for the past 20 minutes.
WGLT Reporter Braden Fogerson: What have you been able to do when you get to the end of those lines?
Jordan: We’re going to see the donkey over there, and I don’t know what else to do.
Abby Desatnick, another member of Troop 1106, who evidently does know what else they can do: We’re gonna do the dance party.
A group of Girl Scouts enjoying the karaoke and dancing area: She’s walking on fire.
Kaitlin Bostick: My name is Kaitlin Bostick. I'm our director of grants and strategic initiatives. So in the back part of the Cookie Rally, we've got different stations that are aimed at earning badges. So that's when the girls get their skill-building badges, and they're gonna set their goals for their cookie sales.
So they start with me, and they're figuring out what their goal is, what they wanna earn, what their troops are going to do with their troop profits. And then they go through the next couple steps of the badge so that they've completed all the badge work to earn the badge.
Fogerson: Were you a Girl Scout when you were little?
Bostick: I wasn't. That's usually one of the first things I rat myself out on. But if I knew then what I know now, I would have definitely wanted to.
It's just so much more than I think people give it credit for. Girls need a space that's just for them and lets them kind of try things without any social pressure and fail and try again and make mistakes and try new things, and not a lot of spaces like that exist for girls, so I think it's really important to let them have that early and often.
