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Hillary Maynard has a bulging social agenda over the next few weeks. The 15-year-old and her friends are getting together for a spa night to test out homemade facial recipes. Then there's the trip to a laser tag hot spot. She's hoping to squeeze in an evening of learning to tie a sari, too.

The life of a Girl Guide has changed.

Girls once practised their compass, sewing and laundry skills in exchange for the iconic badges that mark success. Today, they are more likely to be logging hours at weekly meetings where they discuss "career awareness" and self-defence - with a few make-your-own-facial nights thrown in for fun.

Their activities have also evolved to reflect technological advances. The photography badge is now called "picture this," and includes both still and video photography, along with learning to manipulate those images with illustration and PowerPoint programs.

"It's totally different," says Hillary, who has participated since she was a five-year-old Spark.

Like any brand concerned with staying current, the Girl Guides of Canada is trying to evolve in order to compete with TV, social networking and the lure of the mall. While the organization has broadened the range of activities for girls ages 5 to 17, it is still happy to cleave to the good-girl aura Girl Guides has promoted since its founding in 1910.

Now, as part of a push to reverse shrinking membership, the Guides are seeking to reinforce the old-fashioned ethos with a modern twist. The group is teaming up with HarperCollins, publishers of The Daring Book for Girls, released in November, to further overhaul its badge lineup.

The book, like its bestselling companion, The Dangerous Book for Boys, is a compendium of traditional and decidedly low-tech games and pursuits, such as tag and sari-tying, that evoke an era before video games and celebrity gossip magazines. The Guides, along with the publisher, chose 10 activities from the book to produce a booklet that will be distributed free of charge to 10,000 Guides across the country.

The new program comes on the heels of a national 2006 ad campaign that the group credits with stemming a steady, 20-year slide in membership, says Shauna Klein, a Guides spokeswoman. The all-time membership high was in 1983, with 275,620 members. Current membership is 112,000.

"We don't have the 2007 numbers yet, but as a result of the ad campaign we saw the decline from 2005 cut in half," Ms. Klein says. "We are optimistic that this year's numbers will show the same trend."

The marketing campaign featured cheeky magazine, newspaper, billboard and Web ads with an image of a faux magazine cover touting stories on diets and beauty. Superimposed on the fake cover were the words: "Why girls need Guides."

Guides also teamed up with beauty brand Dove to hammer home the message that the group offers an alternative to mainstream thinking for young women. Dove sponsored a Guides activity in which girls filmed mock TV commercials exploring the meaning of beauty in Canadian culture.

"Today children are being bombarded with noise," Ms. Klein says. "This is a peaceful, quiet type of pastime. They can get away from all the pressure they're feeling and focus on having fun."

Young women such as Hillary say that Girl Guides is as necessary now as it was back when it was born in Britain in 1909 as an outgrowth of the Boy Scout movement.

"I love the meetings," Hillary says. "We have two hours to do stuff, but we also get a chance to talk about our weeks and our lives. Sometimes there are things you don't want to tell your parents or your other friends."

And since the pressures to fit in are getting more intense, says Marion Brown, a professor of social work at Halifax's Dalhousie University who studies girlhood, activities such as Guides may mitigate some of the more troubling aspects of girlhood.

"What's going on with girls today is symbolic of the complexities of our times," says Dr. Brown, adding that a new field of study is emerging to address this, called critical girlhood studies.

For some, participating in Guides is way to hold all that complexity at bay, if only for a few years, especially among anti-Britney, anti-Lindsay pop-culture refusniks.

While she used to keep her extracurricular activities hush-hush for fear of being ridiculed, now, Hillary says, "It doesn't bother me at all. I've made so many new friends and had so many opportunities. I would tell anyone about my guiding experiences."

Toronto "junior leader" Brandy Spurrell says she isn't shy about telling friends about her activities, although she admits in the past "sometimes it was looked at by other classmates as being childish."

It's a risk she's willing to take, especially given some of the "childish" events she can brag about back at school.

Ms. Spurrell, 17, and her group recently hosted a giant outdoor twister game with several hundred girls. Sharing this kind of news with her classmates, the more common refrain Ms. Spurrell hears these days is, "Oh, that's cool," she says.

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Some of the new badges in the Girl Guides roster include: Career Awareness, Streetwise, Cultural Awareness, Inventing and Business Communications.

Old badges on the page include: Laundress, World Neighbour, Picture This, Business Communications, Poultry Farmer, Sewing/Seamstress, Neighbourhood, Stalker and Bee Keeper.