More than a hundred people flocked to a New York City cafe on Thursday to attend the first Girl Scout cookie sale held by Troop 6000 – which is made up of young girls who live in homeless shelters in New York.
The girls, wearing their official uniforms, were applauded and cheered as they walked into the Kellogg’s cafe, near Union Square in Manhattan.
Rosanny, 10, was one of those selling cookies. She is a junior Girl Scout, she said, and was wearing a green uniform accordingly. Some of the younger girls were wearing brown uniforms because they were Brownies, Rosanny said.
“I’m excited to sell all these cookies,” Rosanny told the Guardian. She had a special plan for selling cookies to the customers: “I’m gonna be very kind to them.”
Rosanny couldn’t remember how long she and her family had been homeless. But she said she likes being in the Girl Scouts. The best thing about being a Girl Scout, Rosanny said, was getting “to do fun things with all of my sisters and other girls”.
“I really like doing all these projects that we do in Girl Scouts,” she said. “Sometimes we do a fruit salad or something like that.”
Victoria, who is eight and lives in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn, was wearing a Brownie vest with “Troop 6000” stitched on to the lapel. She said her favourite cookies were “the mint ones”.
“This is my first time selling cookies,” Victoria said. Like Rosanny, she said she loved being in the Girl Scouts. “I like that we’re all sisters and that we can all help each other every day,” she said. “And we can sell cookies!”
Asked how excited she was about selling cookies, Victoria said: “I’m 100% excited.”
Victoria said she had lived in a shelter for a long time. She joined the Girl Scouts last year, she said.
It’s the first time Troop 6000, which was set up last year and has Girl Scout leaders in about a dozen homeless shelters across New York City, has held its own cookie sale. Girls from the troop have been selling cookies in Kellogg’s since Monday, and are running through until Saturday.
Meridith Maskara, chief executive of Girl Scouts of Greater New York, said the troop enables girls who are forced to move to different homeless shelters to still be part of the same scouting troop.
“A lot of the times in the New York City shelter system children and families get moved frequently so they’re in a different neighborhood in a couple weeks,” Maskara said.
“The idea was to establish a troop that is based in the shelters and that is consistent programming from shelter to shelter so that when a girl moves that’s stable, that’s the stable thing in her life. She may go to a different school, she may have different friends on a weekly basis but scouting is the same for her.”
