It's Girl Scout Cookie season, and who do you have to thank? A Savannah socialite who in the early 1900s had been searching for something useful to do with her life. In 1911, Juliette Gordon Low met Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, in England and found her cause.

A year later, on March 12, 1912, she gathered 18 girls for a meeting of what would become the forerunners of today's Girl Scouts. The Girl Scouts of the USA has 3.2 million members, including girls and adult volunteers, and our local council, the Girl Scout Council of the Nation's Capital, has a combined membership of more than 90,000.

In the GSCNC, Girl Scout troops are organized under Service Units by geographical area, and Service Units in turn are organized under Associations. Troops in Herndon and Reston, as well as parts of Dranesville, belong to Association 51, Ashgrove West.

Along with our sister troops throughout the world, the Girl Scouts of Association 51 will be celebrating 100 years of Girl Scouting this year with events throughout the DC area. One of the biggest will take place on June 9, when 200,000 girls and adults from around the globe with gather on The National Mall for “Rock the Mall” – the world's largest singalong. For more information about this event, please visit http://100.gscnc.org/rtm_about.html.

To keep our communities up to date on local and regional Girl Scout activities and programs, Association 51 has launched this new blog on our local Patch sites. We welcome any community feedback, particularly from those who have been Girl Scouts in their youth! Please send questions, suggestions, comments and more to ashgrovewestassociation51@yahoo.com.