r/girlscouts

My troop has its own camp song book because I invariably develop camp song amnesia as soon as I’m put on the spot to remember a song.

It’s time to put out a second edition because we’ve learned a bunch of new songs and I got the bright idea to make a guitar version with chord notations. It turns out that formatting the tab notations so that they match up to the lyrics is a more labor intensive project than I had initially anticipated.

I have access to google products, most Microsoft products, and canva. Ideas?

I am the troop leader for my daughter’s Daisy troop with 8 girls and two more joining for the second year. Their first cookie season was very low pressure and we managed to get a decent amount of cookie money at the end. We haven’t had a chance to discuss how to spend that money yet but I want to bring it up at our family meeting when we meet in September. Any ideas on what would be fun for a bunch of incoming 1st graders? So far I’ve thought of indoor playground, the children’s museum, chuck e cheese maybe, build a bear, and pottery painting session or art studio session(not keen on this coz I’m not sure how much the kids will find that entertaining). I intend to buy the patches for this year with the cookie money and then use the rest for the experience. The parents are okay to chip in a portion of the expense if needed. Any suggestions would be helpful. Also , how do I charge the incoming new girls as they didn’t participate in the cookie season but will join the experience.

My service unit has a booth at our local community festival in the fall. Our primary goal is to build up good community relationships, but we also want to raise a bit of money. We can sell a food item, run a game, or sell crafts. Help me brainstorm what we should do. The not-boy scouts sell hotdogs, the trail life troop has a nerf shooting range and the 4H does pony rides. I was thinking snowballs?

I’ve got a bit of a “one bad apple spoils the bunch” issue happening. All the girls in my troop get along so well and are so kind and friendly to each other…except for my co-leader’s daughter. She isn’t exactly a bully, but she’s not often a nice kid either. She is rude to me, troop members and even her own mother, never willing to help, often won’t participate, and spends a lot of our precious meeting time pulling focus to herself with her terrible behavior. It’s gotten bad enough that I have a girl who wants to quit the troop over one mean girl.

Mom is aware of the behavior issues but doesn’t do a whole lot to discourage or correct her. I’m sure is a stress point for her, but I’ve hit a point where I can’t keep letting this negatively impact the troop members.

If I try to deal with her behavior the way I would any other girl, she just goes whining to mom who doesn’t make her follow through with what I’ve asked. Obviously we can’t really punish girls but I typically ask girls to sit out until they’re ready to participate with appropriate behavior or apologize if they have wronged someone, nothing wild.

I talked with my council rep and she suggested a meeting to address behavior concerns and gave me some resources, but I’m also curious what has worked for your troop when you’ve had issues with a single girl. Our next meeting I plan on asking the girls to make something like a kindness contract where they make rules about how to treat each other, and do the activity where you crumple paper and talk about how you can’t always undo bad actions. I see a million ideas about what to do online, but what has actually worked for your troop? Other behavior management strategies that might work besides separating her from mom?

We’re a troop of about 25 with girls ranging from K to 6th grade this fall. TIA!!

My daughter and I are attending in 3 weeks. We registered months ago, I am a leader and life member and my kiddo is an ambassador. We are sooo confused. We have received exactly 2 emails, no details, the website is hard to navigate, there is no app. The schedule is multiple layers down in the site. We did get one email telling us to accept terms and conditions on the registration- which we already had done. I sent an email to support and crickets. Are we getting cancelled today (the deadline)? No way to know. Anyone have any insight?

Pretty good if you ask me!!!!!!!

Hi! I'm a Polish Scout from ZHP. If your patrol is coming to the World Scout Jamboree 2027, I'd love to get in touch!

If you're planning to arrive a few days early or stay a little longer after the Jamboree, my troop would be really happy to host any of you, show you our region, and spend some time scouting together. Feel free to message me💞

We are from Wrocław, in Poland. Especially if you're from another continent and has never been in Poland before. We would be the happiest to show you our culture. We are sailor scouts, so we can even take you to the boat and swim together, make dumplings, sing by the fire and laugh. I am pretty sure it's gonna be one of the best expiriences in our lifes! Please, if you're looking for amazing memories, comment this post🫶🫶🫶

I have a troop of Juniors and we are working towards being more girl-led. One thing I love about the BSA program that my son participates in, is that the handbook contains actual information and there are extremely well-written merit badge booklets that contain actual information. This access to information gives BSA Scouts so much more independence.

Sure Juniors can choose which badge they want to earn, they can choose from among 3 options for each requirement. But, without background information or how to complete badge requirements, my Girl Scouts are largely dependent on me to provide all of that.

I could find books on their level and buy them to use at meetings, but they won’t be tailored for the badges and will be burdensome for the girls to pick through. I’m not putting them on laptops at Girl Scouts. I’m not printing the VTK and telling them to read it.

I’ve been a public school teacher for 15 years. We have the troop culture, great behavior, enthusiastic girls, but I struggle so much with the lack of learning resources provided by Girl Scouts. It always comes down to me working on Girl Scouts like it’s my second job and them remaining reliant on me at a point when they are capable of being more independent.

Then I go to a BSA meeting and the boys are so autonomous and working in youth-led patrols toward their goals. They have the information they need packaged in the BSA program materials. They have to work for it somewhat, but it doesn’t involves filtering massive amounts of information to get what they need to make progress toward a goal. These are middle school boys with middle school-age patrol leaders.

My juniors could start doing something similar. I’m debating using the BSA handbook and merit badge booklets with them next year as informational resources. I don’t want to use a different organization’s program, so if you can point me toward any great resources for Girl Scouts who are systematically building skills, that won’t require dozens of hours of sifting, hunting down handbooks from every decade (I have 5 already), and piecing little bits together - I’d be so appreciative!

My daughter joined girls scout. But she isnt in a troop because there isnt one in our area right now. Now she participated in a virtual event and they said all the girls earned a badge. How do I go about obtaining the badge for her since she isn't in a troop? Do I just buy it online? Or am I going to get a link emailed to me to purchase the badge? Sorry I'm all new to this and she is so excited she got a badge.

Okay, this is a bit of a crazy one to try and explain, so unfortunately I'm going to be hyper specific to try and get as much detail as possible as I don't remember much.

I've been trying to find this through my own independent research and have come up with nothing.

There are a few things that I'm certain about with this promotional character:

1. She has brunette hair to about her shoulders

2. She was a cartoon

3. She had a green girl scout sash

Beyond that, I don't remember much about the actual character or any media or promotional material she would have appeared in.

I recall seeing this character at a Girl scout "cookie kickoff" at a Chicago Wolves hockey game. Likely between the years of 2012 - 2016 as that is when I was most active in Girl Scouts.

I'm pretty sure this character was supposed to elicit a "girl power" motif to resonate with the girls to get them into selling cookies.

One thing I do recall but I might be misremembering in some way:

I recall there being an almost short film type thing with this character. As well as a physical button (And possibly other merchandise) with this character. I also recall the character being 3D animated in an almost Pixar- like style.

I genuinely can find very little photos of this actual event. And none of the ones I do find have any image of this character.

All in all, I guess I'm just wondering if anyone can find any pictures or videos revolving around this character or even just more information I can lean on. This has genuinely driven me insane for the past 2 hours and would love any help!

I recently started **The Foodie Society**, a free teen cookbook club in Las Vegas. The idea is to bring teens together through cooking, baking, and themed food events while making new friends. I honestly didn’t expect the response we’ve gotten—we already have around **50 interested teens**, which is super exciting… but now I’m realizing logistics are *hard*. 😅

Our biggest challenge right now is finding a place to meet. I reached out to several community centers that have teaching kitchens, but they’re either fully booked until September or cost several hundred dollars per event. Since my goal is to keep the club completely free (or at least very affordable), that really isn’t sustainable.

One event I’ve been dying to do as our first id a **Cookies & Cream Social**, where everyone makes homemade cookies together and then builds custom ice cream sandwiches with different ice cream flavors and toppings. I think it’d be such a fun icebreaker, but we don’t have a kitchen or event space. I haven’t asked members if anyone would be willing to host in their own home yet because I know that’s a big ask, but maybe that’s something I should consider?

So I have a few questions:
Where would you look for a free or low-cost kitchen/event space?
Are there organizations, businesses, churches, libraries, apartment clubhouses, or other places I should be reaching out to?
If you’ve started a club, do you have any advice on keeping things organized as it grows?
And lastly… does anyone have any favorite **cookie or baking cookbooks** that work well for groups?
I’d love to hear any ideas or lessons you’ve learned. Thanks!

There aren’t many council events where I live so my troop hardly ever participates in them. We’ve only done 2 in 4 years. We drove 1.5 hours to a council event last weekend and it was a disaster due to the behavior of the majority of participants.

Council booked a field trip program at a museum that was 1/2 outdoors, well organized, engaging, and skillfully led. I’m a public school teacher and this was a good program. There were about 20 girls and 14 adults.

At least 10 of the girls were poorly behaved. Things like climbing on museum exhibits, constantly asking the tour guide what time she was stopping for lunch, refusing to walk (we walked maybe 1/4 mile the entire morning) and demanding to be carried, shoving other girls like they were trying to start a mosh pit, cutting in line, interrupting speakers, ripping props out of the tour guide’s hands, screaming while playing during breaks, constantly complaining loudly.

Their chaperones were entirely tolerant of this. They carried 8 year olds around on their backs who refused to walk. They didn’t intervene when girls toed the line or crossed the line, they only stepped in when a girl had gone way to far over the line. For example, hanging on the arms of the tour guide was not corrected, so the girl escalates to slamming into the tour guide causing her to drop the prop she is holding. Then the parent of said girl, from 15 feet away, quietly asks the girl about 4 times to stop doing that. Adults held conversations with each other and girls at normal speaking volumes inside the cluster of people, making it impossible to hear the tour guide, so the tour guide is straining to project her voice and be hard by the small number of people who cared to hear her.

Next is lunch, then a bunch of science experiments in a classroom. At lunch time, nearly every troop ate lunch inside the classroom. The weather at lunch was 75 degrees, partly cloudy. The museum is in a gorgeous park. There are a dozen empty picnic tables. They did not leave the windowless classroom. I’m not sure what they did for an hour in there. Maybe they had phones to entertain themselves with?

When it was time to go inside for the science experiments, my troop begged to not go back. I am a science teacher and the science experiments were all set up and were worth doing, but I didn’t want to spend any more time with the group either. We found a trail map for the park and went on a lovely hike to a swinging bridge, got rained on, sang songs, and turned the day around for ourselves in spite of getting wet. We encountered another troop of 4 girls and their leaders who had also abandon the program.

At the museum, there was a flyer advertising the field trip for $12 and we paid something like $21/girl. There was no council staff there. I’m inclined to never go to a council event again if I can help it.

Looking to make a list of multi day training/workshop options across the US for adults/leaders. I just heard about North East Ohio’s ALE 4 day training and I’m unfortunately already booked that weekend. Any other options out there? Especially ones that occur every year, we can make a list for people to refer to in the future

We’re first year Girl Scouts, so we’re pretty new and not sure what the norm is. I’ve seen patches like the “Girl Scouts Love the Outdoors” and the set of America 250 patches that come with a list of activities to complete to earn them. I was under the impression that we could do these activities on our own, and earn the patches individually. Our troop leader disagrees, and doesn’t want some of the girls to have them and some not.

I understand the desire for fairness, but our council also hosts a variety of events that can earn fun patches. (Sporting events, day at the zoo, etc.) So I feel like she’s asking us to avoid those events as well unless we plan to attend as a whole troop. She has also stated that she is just too busy to be planning extra things right now. Which I understand, but also, the “extra” is what drew us to Girl Scouts. I don’t want my daughter to miss these experiences because our troop leader doesn’t want to plan or attend them.

Thoughts? Are there official “rules” for earning fun patche?

hey guys! reaching out to ask what a general day is like as a new unit counselor? i’ve never worked for the girl scouts before and my first day of pre-camp is this coming monday, june 29th. i’m wondering about things like… should i pack my own lunch/water? what time should i show up (ik when it’s time to meet the kiddos i should be there roughly half an hour before the kids arrive)? should i wear something a little nicer? what are good things to bring on the first day/everyday? if you have any other important info please feel free to lmk. thanks so much for your help fellas!! OH YEAH, FEEL FREE TO DROP CAMP NAME SUGGESTIONS! my top one rn is silkie, cause i love chickens

We have plans to attend our first family camp this weekend. The region has a fire watch from the National Weather Service. My husband had to take my place last year at the same camp, and he said he was worried because cell phones do not work in the area at all, and fairly young employees staff the weekend camps. (Not trying to be ageist, but I remember so many horror stories for those young camp counselors in Texas when they faced the floods. It's not just about trust, but doing what I can so I am one less person to worry about.)

What precautions should I take to be prepared? Being a Girl Scout mom is my reintroduction to camping and the great outdoors. It's been years.