When eight-year-old Olivia Goodwin makes a decision, she makes it happen. At birth, she chose to live. At age 5, she chose to survive. Today, she’s aiming to become the number one Girl Scout cookie seller in the Girl Scouts Virginia Skyline region, which is comprised of 37 counties.
When Marisa Goodwin, Olivia’s mom, was pregnant, the doctors told her that her baby’s heartbeat was too slow. In fact, Olivia had complete heart block and had to be delivered immediately.
“They told me, don’t have lunch, you’re having this baby today,” Goodwin said.
So Olivia was born at the University’s Medical Center under emergency conditions, with complete heart block. At three days old, she received her first pacemaker. At age five, her pacemaker had to be replaced and the wiring had to be fixed. Olivia underwent open heart surgery which included a sternotomy. In fact, she will require surgeries for the rest of her life, approximately every five to six years.
“I can’t even begin to describe the pain and her fear,” Goodwin said. “You know as her mother I wanted to switch places with her, but there was nothing I could do but be there with her.”
Olivia can’t play lacrosse, soccer or participate in other contact sports, but she swims, dances and, most importantly, is a Girl Scout. Girl Scouts is her thing. And, luckily enough, she excels at selling Girl Scout cookies.
Last year, Olivia came in first for her age group and third overall for the region.
“There’s this drive within her, she wants to be number one,” Goodwin said. “Last year, she met the girl who was number one, who was 12. Olivia was seven, and Olivia looked at her and was like you’re going down.”
According to her mom, Olivia has a knack for cookie-selling.
“The pizza man came to our house, and he walked out with two boxes of cookies,” she said.
Olivia asked her mom to drive her to the doctor’s office, the fire station and other places around their community to drop off order forms. The University’s chapter of Beta Theta Pi held a philanthropy cookout to support Olivia. During the cookout, anyone who attended was encouraged by Olivia and the brothers to buy Girl Scout cookies. At one point, Olivia’s mom remembers looking over and seeing Olivia running the table all by herself — taking orders and keeping track of the sales.
Attendees at the cookout also had the option to donate boxes to troops overseas.
Many groups on Grounds have helped Olivia reach her goal. The Inter-Fraternity Council , Latinx Student Alliance, Inter-Sorority Council and the University chapter of the American Society for Civil Engineers helped Olivia sell boxes.
ASCE bought 95 boxes of cookies, 10 of them for the soldiers.
Robert Larmore, community service chair for the IFC, worked with Goodwin to set up Google spreadsheets that were distributed to each of the 31 fraternities at the University. Members of each of the fraternities could order directly, and Olivia would come home from school and look at the Google sheets, at times seeing people ordering as she watched.
Larmore and Wilkerson Anthony, public relations chair for the IFC, noted they’ve enjoyed seeing the direct impact the IFC’s help has had.
“It’s cool to see something pick up this much support,” Anthony said. “We have 31 chapters, so it’s hard to get everyone behind something, but this is easy to support.”
“The IFC acted as a means to get a lot of individuals to help out this girl,” Larmore said. “It wasn’t about the fraternities, it was a system to get a bunch of people to help this girl reach her goal.”
In total, the IFC contributed over 800 boxes of cookies towards Olivia’s goal — 151 of which came from Beta’s philanthropy cookout and 129 of the 813 were donated to soldiers overseas.
Soon, Olivia and her mom will go to the American Legion at Pantops and package the cookies as care packages. Donating to the troops is part of the Girl Scout program, but Olivia latched onto the idea specifically because she has friends with deployed parents.
Olivia and her family are Hispanic, and they met members of the Latinx Student Alliance at Baileton!, a Zumbathon event organized by LSA and the Latinx Health Initiative. Baileton! was held in the amphitheater to bridge the gap between the University and greater Charlottesville Latino communities.
Goodwin reached out to Kayla Dunn, the incoming LSA president to ask for their help.
“We would help them table, promote them on GroupMe's and also help Ms. Goodwin, her mother, watch Olivia's sisters,” Dunn said in an email. “Ms. Goodwin is a single mother of three young girls so it was difficult for her at times to watch her daughters and help Olivia sell. LSA's Outreach community offered to help in anyway we could.”
Surprisingly, this is only Olivia’s second year as a Girl Scout.
“She went for the stars right out of the gate,” Goodwin said.
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