Girl's Guide to Girl Scouting

The second component of the Girl Scout Leadership Experience, topic-specific to skill building, arrived in September 2011. The new valuable resources—Girl’s Guide to Girl Scouting and Skill-Building Badge Activity Sets—are available for purchase from River Valleys’ Shops.

The Girl’s Guide for each program grade level—Daisy through Ambassador—has three main sections:

•    Handbook
•    Badges (topic areas—Legacy, Financial Literacy, and Cookie Business)
•    My Girl Scouts

Plus, there’s an additional award section for designated program grade levels.

The three Skill-Building Badge Activity Sets for Brownies through Seniors are sold separately and correspond to one of the three Leadership Journeys. Badges are intended to work with the national Leadership Journey to add topical skill building to the leadership abilities girls develop through the three keys—discover, connect and take action.

Although described as a book for girls, this book is considered to be a sufficient leader resource as well.

How Journeys and Girl's Guide to Girl Scouting work together to build leaders

Journeys offer girls all the leadership benefits that we’ve promised them and the badges offer them the chance to build specific skills. When a girl goes on a journey, she gets to explore leadership from all different angles. How does a leader identify a problem that needs to be solved? How does she dig deeper to find the root causes of that issue? How does she research solutions that go beyond the surface level of the problem? And how does she team with others on all of the above, multiplying efforts to make the world a better place? That’s what the journeys are all about! The journeys aim at all three keys to leadership: Discover, Connect and Take Action.

Badges help girls develop specific skills in everything from photography to inventing to camping to geocaching—the list goes on and on! When girls build skills, they become more confident and develop a stronger sense of self, part of our Discover key. (And of course, a girl can use the skills she builds as she goes on her journey!) Journeys offer a wide, 360-degree view of leadership. Badges offer a focus on one topic. Journeys are the core of what Girl Scouting is about. Badges are complementary.