Each spring and fall, members of the Girl Guides groups in Estevan and other communities across Canada go out and sell cookies. It’s been a familiar site for generations.
But the COVID-19 pandemic has prevented members from going door-to-door this spring, so the local Girl Guides group has found another way to offer cookies to residents.
“We reached out to businesses, and Canadian Tire in Estevan has come forward and agreed to sell 75 cases of our delicious, chocolatey mint cookies for us, with all of the proceeds going directly back to our local guiding unit in Estevan,” said Christa Morhart, the provincial commissioner for the Saskatchewan Council of Girl Guides of Canada.
There are 12 boxes of Girl Guide cookies in a case, so that works out to 900 boxes that will be available at Canadian Tire. Each box is $5 each.
Girl Guides in Estevan typically sell 300 boxes of cookies in the fall and the spring. They were committed to more than 150 cases in the spring sale.
When Morhart put the call out locally for businesses to sell cookies, other companies besides Canadian Tire voiced an interest, but since Canadian Tire contacted her first to make the deal, they have the cookie sales.
“We’re just asking our community to show their support of Girl Guides and buy our cookies from Canadian Tire locally,” said Morhart.
It’s expected the cookies will go on sale April 3 or 4. They were successfully delivered earlier this week, with social distancing factored in, and she hopes the people of the Estevan area will support them like they have in the past.
Across the province, more than 10,000 cases of cookies need to be sold, and businesses have started to step forward to support the sales.
Girl Guide activities were suspended earlier in the month to respect recommendations for social distancing and to keep members safe, Morhart said.
“Our biggest concern and our top priority remains the health and safety of our members. We know these are unprecedented times, and we have never before, as a guiding organization, locally or provincially, taken this stance where we’ve had to distribute cookies to businesses and asked businesses to help sell them for us.”
