Reply to Scoutmaster of Scouts BSA Troop 248 for Girls Answers your Questions

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Thank you for the dues answer. Here’s my GS experience for transparency and to help other PPs think about their situation, since you’ve been so helpful, OP:

Product sales eat up January-March for my GS troop and even though it funds a year of activities, the time spent prepping for cookie sale and recovering from that can eat up nearly half of the school year’s meetings. It also causes a lot of difficulty because girls who leave the troop work hard to earn money they don’t benefit from, while new girls reap the benefits of the previous year’s hard work. We end up self-funding for some activities to get around that, which creates a ton of tedious follow-up and parent communication. Imagining the possibilities of getting 3 months back and starting the year with a fully-funded budget is tempting.[/quote]

I don't want to derail this thread too much, but...  
I'm a GS leader in GSCM, and we currently do fall cookie sales, and what you talked about really concerns me!  Supposedly next year GSUSA is forcing us to move to winter/spring cookies like the rest of the country.
Right now, I spend one meeting in September talking about cookies, and we spend a few weekend days in October/November doing cookie booths.  That's it.  We start earning money in October, so we know what we have for the year's budget.  It also means we're doing cookies while we're also selecting badges, organizing leadership, etc., so that it's sort of part of the 'start up" activities.
I hate hate hate the idea of breaking up the middle of the year with cookies.  I also have no idea how we'll fund the first half of the year.  Do you just use the previous year's cookie sales for the following year?

Thanks![/quote]

Yes, we use previous years’ sales for the next year, not necessarily because we want to. And we are very light on activities until December. It’s why our troop is cookie/travel focused. I happen to live in a Council with very few council-sponsored activities. If we were in a more active council, it would be great to have the bulk of Council events during cookie season so the girls wouldn’t be entirely sales and booth focused.

I wish we could sell in October and energize the troop and move on to “real” activities, but we’ve tried to make the best of it by putting any talking/sitting badges into cookie season and make the rest of the year about getting out and about. We do a big camping trip in May after funds have been dispersed to the troop in April. And the girls usually go to a Service Unit day camp in July. We used to have a camping trip in September but it was too hard to get reservations this year and last. Even though it is very much against Girl Scout policy, our Troop Treasurer maintains careful accounting of troop bank account contribution by girl. Since we have a lot of girls who have stayed for many years but others who have cycled in and out, it helps track funding toward a big international troop trip. All parents have bought into this idea but I dread the day when someone undermines it or our treasurer steps away and someone less organized takes over.

Big thanks to the Scoutmaster who started this thread. You’ve got me thinking a lot about culture shifts in our troop, food drives, and the future (or not!) of cookie sales.[/quote]

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