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-Many troops recite the Promise together at the beginning of every meeting – it’s a great way to get the girls settled down and ready for the business and fun of Girl Scouts! The Promise is said while each girl makes the Girl Scout sign with her right hand, like this. Just a note about the Promise. As a part of the inclusive nature of Girl Scouts, we allow individuals to choose to substitute whatever word they feel comfortable with for the word “God” in the Promise .

The Law is useful for troop management – you can reference it when the girls aren’t getting along and even build a Group Agreement by asking the girls to write down how they will act toward one another based on the Law.

-We also remember the tenants of the Girl Scout Law using a special ceremony – The Investiture and Rededication Ceremony. During this Ceremony, each girl is “invested” as a new Scout or she “rededicates” herself if she is returning, to the meaning of the Promise and Law. The ceremony is often done by candlelight about a month into the Girl Scout year – it’s a special time to give new girls their Girl Scout Membership pins! Don’t be afraid to try a ceremony with your girls to make Girl Scouts extra special! You can use google for lots of ideas, scripts, and designs AND use The Girls Guide to Girl Scouting to learn more. Ceremonies are what YOU make of them, and with a little bit of research you can be ready to lead one with your girls.

-The Girl Scout Law is also of particular importance to Daisy girls who are earning their petal awards. As the girls earn each petal, they are learning about a different part of the Girl Scout Law. For example, in the Girls Guide to Girl Scouting, the girls will meet Gloria the Morning Glory who will help them earn the purple petal, and learn how to “respect myself and others.”

And speaking of Daisies, let me introduce you to Juliette Gordon Low, the founder to Girl Scouts. She preferred to go by the name “Daisy!” She founded the Girl Scouts in 1912, which means you are joining a movement that is over 100 years strong! Juliette was born on October 31, and so in Scouting we celebrate that day as Founders Day. In a season full of harvest and ghouls, celebrating Founders Day with a birthday party, Friendship Fund penny drive or trip to the history museum is a fun way to make the girls troop experience stand out!

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This is what makes Girl Scouting unique, and why we can say we are the premier leadership development organization for girls – The Girl Scout Leadership Experience. It’s the research base that helps us know we are fulfilling our mission everyday! Byfocusing activities on the three keys: discover, connect and take action and the three processes: girl-led, learning by doing and cooperative learning, girls will see the benefitof their experience in Girl Scouting and will grow to be leaders with courage, confidence and character.

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Girl Scouts offers girls and leaders lots of tools to have fun, build new skills, and achieve that leadership mission. At each level there are three journeys and one Girls Guide to Girl Scouting. The Journeys are designed with the core Girl Scout Leadership Experience built right in – girls will be Discovering…Connecting and TAKING ACTION on their Journey! Here are the cover shots of each Journey, they look like this. Each Journey comes with an girls book and an important program handbook for the leaders –or for the older girls to use when they are ready to take the lead! The Girls Guide to Girl Scouting includes a handbook and badge section. Badges and other awards are included in here. You can shop online to get all the materials you need, or if you are lucky enough to be close enough to our Denver Shop, come browse the selection of books, awards, uniforms!

Girl Scouts also has a great new online tool called myGS which contains a Volunteer Toolkit to aide you in planning your troop meetings using online versions of this curriculum. Stay tuned… we will be diving deeper into myGS later in this course.

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A troop needs a village in order to thrive! As other adult volunteers join the team, these are some of the volunteer roles that they might fill. Here is a screenshot of the troop roster from the “My Troop(s)” tab within the member profile.

Troop leadership team members are frequently referred to as leaders or co-leaders but all are all members of a troop leadership team. Some may do more, some may do less. In order to qualify for a Troop Leadership position, you must become an approved volunteer and take the required training for the position.

Remember, as a troop leadership team member you have access to the troop’s member profile as well as edit access to the Volunteer Toolkit.

Troop Cookie and Fall Sale managers assist the troop in managing the fundraising and programmatic aspects of these activities. Once you have a leadership team in place, the next volunteer role to start recruiting for is your Troop Cookie manager. The sale takes place after the winter holiday break, and lasts into March.

Troop Support Volunteers join the troop to assist the leadership team. Your overnight chaperones, troop treasurers, outdoor experts, field trips coordinators…..they will all register to the troop and be listed on your “My Troops” roster like this.

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Lets revisit that idea of engaging families and getting the help you need to be successful. Asking for help is an art form, and its not a skill that everyone is comfortable with. I have so many leaders who would rather just do it all themselves….because it feels like that takes less time and effort, or because the are afraid of scaring away families with no time to give. We have found through years of experience that when families feel engaged and informed about the troop, they find a way to provide the needed support to the leadership team!

Getting the help you need is about understanding how people like to be asked. Some folks will respond best to a sign up sheet, a box they can check and put on their calendar. Check out the adult commitment form in the Resource Packet for another way to gather interest. Some folks will want to be a little more involved, and to feel like their volunteer role was designed by them and for them. You can balance the two by anticipating your needs and making specific asks, “Girls love field trips! Please sign up if I can call on you to help chaperone an afternoon field trip in October and April.” Another kind of volunteer might respond to this, “These are the badges that our Brownies can earn. Who is interested in flipping through this book and finding a badge activity or two that they would like to plan and lead with the girls?”

Sometimes the conversation about becoming an approved volunteer can be a sticky one. They have to pay to be a members of Girl Scouts if they want to attend the sleep over? What? Your best bet is to be honest about the financial commitment up front, and explain that Girl Scouts requires 100% compliance with the approval requirements in order to ensure 100% safety for our girls! You might also say, “Please sign up as a volunteer now so that when the time comes and you are ready to work with the girls, and we have this step already done and out of the way.”

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2. It is imperative that you not mix troop and personal finances. This is against the law. Troop funds must only be spent for the benefit of the troop. And

3. It is important for the leadership team, girls and families to understand that troop treasury belongs to the whole troop and not any individual girl. This includes proceeds from the cookie sale, and this is where this rule can get especially hairy. The cookie sale is a lot fun, a lot of learning, and a lot of effort on each family's part. That effort can sometimes translate into a sense of personal entitlement to the proceeds from the cookie sale. That money is meant to be spent for the troop, and the troop makes decisions together on how to allocate their profits. Individual girls can set goals for their cookie sale, and reap the benefits of those goals through our Incentive Program. So, if I girl sells 250 packages of cookies, she might earn a t-shirt or other awesome prize that’s just for her ON TOP of the money that her 250 packages added to the troop treasury.

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One thing you should plan on getting started on right away is to budget for the troop, and decide how much money each family will be asked to contribute in Troop Dues. We can provide some resources to help you make this determination, but you are offered a degree of flexibility to set a budget that works for your troop. In the Nuts and Bolts resource packet, there is a Start up costs worksheet. Girl Scouts usually costs the most when a troop first gets up and off the ground, and then the contribution from the families wanes as the girls participate in product sales and build their bank account. Here is a sample itemized troop dues budget that you might share with your families. Our best suggestion is to itemize one time purchase items, and then determine a cost per girl per month, somewhere between $3 and 5 dollars is common. The troop leadership team is empowered to set dues in partnership with the families in the troop. Be sure to think about making sure they are affordable for all families in the group. Troop dues totaling over $50 per year are not recommended. You can choose to collect this in one lump sum at the beginning of the year, or split it up into semester or quarterly payments.

In the beginning, you will decide what Girl Scout materials you want each girl to have, and what the costs will be for each family. Will your troop opt into the full uniform for the girls? Uniforms are optional, but a great way to communicate a sense of belonging and tradition to your troop! We do offer a Start up kit to make it easy. Also, decide if the troop start out with a Journey or the Girls Guide to Girl Scouting. We find it works best for each girl to own her own book, but some troops do choose to purchase a troop set of materials if finances are tight.

Once the troop has participated in product sales, the bank account will grow and the group will need to decide how they spendthose profits. Its best to make sure that the bulk of the money is spent before the end of the membership year so that the girls who participated this year reap the benefits of their troop dues and product sales profit. Remember, that the girls can be asked and can decide that a portion of the troop treasury can be allocated to expenses for next year – to offset the costs of troop dues. The girls will also be encouraged to set big goals for their product sales, like an overnight trip, Journey project, or amusement park. And they may also choose to allocate a portion of their proceeds toward a worthy cause of their choice.

You might have the chance to support a family in the troop who can not financially make the commitment you are asking. Girl Scouts of Colorado has a dedicated fund to support families and girls who need financial assistance. We already talked about howto access those grant funds for membership registration. If she needs assistance to purchase uniforms or books, or to attend a Girl Scouts of Colorado sponsored event (anything registered through our website), you can help her access that assistance using our Opportunity Grant Request form online. GSCO determines grant eligibility based on household income. You can fill this out for a family, or ask them to complete the form. The award will be communicated via email to the contact provided, and then that contact will need to work with our GSCO shop, located in Denver, to finalize the transaction and receive the granted items.

All shopping for GSCO is done in one of two ways. We have one physical location, located in Denver. You can visit, call or email that Shop to make a purchase. We offer a courier service for delivery to Service Centers in Fort Collins, Colorado Springs and Grand Junction for a small fee. The other option is to purchase your items online and have them shipped direct to you!

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ets take a quick tour of the site together.

Our homepage will always be laid out like this, with a central slideshow of featured news, and rows of links along the top which are static no matter where you navigate to on the site. Lets take a look at a few highlights:

- On the far right is your link to access myGS in yellow

- On the same line are helpful links to learn more about Girl Scouts of Colorado, Our Program, Events, Cookies, Camp and how to Support Us

- Below the central slideshow is a Join Now link which is where new girls and adults will enter the opportunity catalog to search for your troop.

- Just a couple more highlights here on the homepage – at the very top is a link to our Forms library where you will find all the resources and forms we have talked about today

- Next to the Forms link is a link to the training page – this is where you’ll fine descriptions and links to register for all our volunteer training classes, both those in person and online.

- On the other side of the Forms link is a link to our Blog –this is a great place to get the latest Girl Scout news and also inspiring stories of what other troops are doing.

- The last thing I want to point out on the homepage is GSHelp – this is your go to for Frequently Asked Questions

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I want to show you a few more highlights from inside a couple tabs on the website. Here is the Volunteers section, your go to for resources, support and information relevant to troop leaders. Right in the center of the page is some quick information about getting started – chances are you already have a few of these checked off.

I’ll direct your attention to this list of links on the left side, this is where you will find another way to access things like Training and all of our Forms including permission slips, the Troop Report and Bank Letter Request.

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Another great resource is the training page. If you remember, it was one of the links you can find always in the upper right corner of the website.

On this page you’ll find links to our e-learning site as well as the calendar listing for in person classes.

As you scroll down the page, there are descriptions of many of the classes we offer, organized into categories. By clicking on the arrow to the right of the class name, you can expand to view each description as well as if the class is offered online, in person or both!

While we are on the topic of training, lets take a quick detour to talk about our NEW e-learning site. This is what you’ll see when you access the site either by clicking on the link from the training page OR by simply visiting training.girlscoutsofcolorado.org. The first time you take a class online you’ll need to create an account by clicking on the create account button on the right. Unfortunately this system doesn’t talk with our other systems, so everyone will need to create an account – even if you just created one in myGS. However you are welcome to make your username/password the same for simplicity. After entering your basic info, you’ll get an email to complete your account creation.

After this first log-in, you’ll use the main log-in on the left. Once logged in you’ll simply click on a class name at the center of the page, enroll and start learning! As you complete classes you’ll earn digital badges within the system. Be sure to check back often as more classes will continually be added – both required ones such as Extended Trips and great enrichments on topics like troop finances to continue your Girl Scout education.

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One more highlight…the Events tab! When you click on this tab you will be taken to all our upcoming events and trainings in list format. I like to click this link on the left side to view these things in calendar format… like this.

This allows me to see everything coming up in a month quickly, I can then click on an item to get more details. Also the calendar is color coded – green for Girl Scout events, black for community events Girl Scouts are invited to, purple for adult training and so on.

Also, when you are in the Events tab, you will see links on the left side for special events such as our Training Events as well as something called Anytime Activities. This is a great place to go for activity and field trip ideas that aren’t tied to a specific date.

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As a new volunteer, you should have received an email that looked like this. If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend taking a close look at this email, it is jam packed with important information. Here are just a couple highlights:

It starts right off with direct links to complete all the new volunteer trainings – you’re well on your way to checking the first one on this list off, make sure you also complete your level 101 class and Girl Scouting 101.

In the second section are important details about your troop. The email populates meeting details and troop specifics such as grades and number of girls you plan to have in the troop. Its really important that anytime any of these details change you let us know using the troop update form. You can find this form on our website as well as linked directly in this email.

Also in this section are some details about your extended Girl Scout support team –Your Service Unit and the Volunteer Support Specialist your troop is assigned to. You’ll be hearing from this Volunteer Support Specialist about the same time as you receive this email and throughout your volunteering. They are here to help support you in this journey – so be sure to keep their contacts handy.

At the bottom of the email are a couple more checklists and resources to help get your troop going.

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You are certain to have questions, this was a lot of information to soak in all at once! As you get started with your troop, remember that you can rely on your fellow leaders for support, your Service Unit team is there to help you, and your Volunteer Support Specialist and other Council staff are happy to take your questions too!

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Thank you so much for taking the time to learn about the Nuts and Bolts of Girl Scout troops. We are so thankful for all those who contribute their time, energy and passion for girls. I hope you know that the Girl Scout world spins because of volunteers just like you who said “YES!” to helping us build girls of Courage Confidence and Character who make the world a better place.

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