Next time you buy a box of cookies from your neighbourhood Girl Guide or Brownie troop, be assured that you’ve done more than contribute a few pennies to the cause. You’ve helped a young girl become a leader in her community.

“We’re a lot more than just cookies,” says Pat Guillemaud, public relations director for Girl Guides in Alberta and the mother of a grown daughter who went through the program.

“However, even selling our cookies door to door helps our girls develop awareness of their community. They get to know their neighbours. They even learn about acceptance and rejection,” she explains.

Today’s Girl Guides, which includes five and six-year-olds in Sparks, seven and eight-year-olds in Brownies, nine to 11-year-olds in Guides, 12 to 14-year-olds in Pathfinders and Rangers for older girls, are a far cry from the girls of yesteryear. Girls once earned badges by doing laundry, cooking, plucking chickens and milking cows.

Today, young women are learning about business, communications, the environment, cultural awareness, social issues affecting women and leadership development, plus they’re earning scholarships for post-secondary education.

Guillemaud, who was a Brownie and a Girl Guide as a youngster in her native Australia, says the girls also develop friendships, respect for the environment and learn how to get along with each other.

“It gets kids participating in an activity and learning skills, not roaming around the community and doing something they shouldn’t be doing,” she says.

Despite having no children of her own, Janis Fenwick has been involved since the early 1960s and is one of Calgary’s longest serving leaders. She initially volunteered to be a treasurer but ended up becoming a commissioner and eventually a leader for her unit at St. Stephen’s Anglican Church. One of her conditions as a volunteer, at the beginning, was that she would not go camping.

“When I became a leader, the girls couldn’t earn their Gold Cord if they didn’t go camping, so I went,” Fenwick says with some chagrin. “Through guiding, I learned back packing, hiking, downhill skiing and cross country skiing and plenty of camping. I did none of these things as a child.”

Fenwick has remained friends with other women throughout the 40 years she’s been involved with Girl Guides. She also agrees that girls in the program learn about leadership, self confidence and how to be responsible citizens.

“My goal as a leader is to say, ‘You can do anything you want to do.’”

Girl Guides was founded in England in 1909 when a large number of girls showed up at an all-boys rally, to the surprise of Scout founder Lord Baden-Powell. The girls said they’d been practicing scouting and demanded entry into the rally.

Baden-Powell was impressed and he asked his sister, Agnes, to create a program just for girls. The movement spread to Canada and by 1912, groups of forward-thinking women in every province had formed units. By 1917, the Canadian Girl Guides Association was considered of such value that an Act of Parliament approved its constitution.

Guillemaud applauds the community associations and churches that provide space for Girl Guide programs in Calgary.

“They support ours and other programs by allowing the use of their facilities,” she says.