What does it take to lead?

Some thoughts on what it takes to lead a Girl Scout troop, from one rather new leader....

I have been a co-leader for three years, for my daughter's troop.  Prior to that, I had been a Girl Scout as a kid, but not recently.  I hadn't been a CIT, nor do I have a background in early-elementary education.  (My current co-leader has much deeper experience with scouting, leading at camps, and education.  That's useful.)  With that background, here are some thoughts about what it would take to start your own troop.

1.  First things first - register yourself and your girl for Girl Scouts.  Its not too expensive, and you can express interest in a troop and potentially find other girls and leaders that way.  Sign up to volunteer, get your background check, and start watching the training videos.  You can do all this without committing to leading a troop, and it gets it out of the way.  The training videos are also a bit of an insight into what the GSUSA organization believes and promotes.

2.  Leading a scout troop requires two co-leaders.  In fact, all scout activities require two un-related adults.  This means you need to find another co-leader you can work with.  It also means you won't be alone.  That's good.

I can imagine other ways to implement this in practise - you need to register two primary leaders, but if you had a bunch of parents willing to contribute you could each take responsibility for some subset of the meetings.  (You could have one primary leader with a rotating second leader, or three people each taking 2/3 of the meetings, or....  )  Possibly the logistics make this harder than it is worth, but, GS is endlessly flexible, and what is really important is that the girls are supported.

I strongly recommend having additional adult help.  Even if you have two leaders doing most of the work, having an additional adult doing treasury, or cookie sales, or day-trip / outdoor specialist work can help distribute the work among all the parents in the troop.   Having an additional adult who can fill in for sickness or last minute trips is also nice.  I am fond of having a leadership team.

3.  A troop requires a place to meet.  That can mean your living room.  But it can also mean using a room in a church or community space.  Or, it can mean rotating around the houses of the other troop parents.  Or, a third parent could provide the space for the two leading parents to hold the meetings.... You get the idea - again, it is endlessly flexible.

4.  (Here you get more of my personal interjecting about how scouting should work, sorry.)  Girl Scouts is girl led.  This means you basically do what the girls want - they want to earn badges, you work on badges, or they want to sell cookies, they sell cookies, etc.  The way this makes sense to me is that you start simple, with simple goals, and build to more complicated things as the girls get more experienced and capable.

The premise works the best if you are lucky enough to start with Daisy's - start with just planning to earn your petals, and do the bare minimum on cookies.  Once you get a year under your belt, decide what you'd like to add to the agenda for the following year.  Decide whether you need more help, or can handle it.  Decide what was really hard, and look for assistance with that.  (What, you hate buying supplies?  Ask a parent who doesn't mind to be in charge of that - it can be done after hours.  etc.)

But it also works if you have older girls.  Arguably, its better for a girl to have a troop that doesn't do too much than no troop at all.

5.  One of the side effects of idea 4 is that you don't need to commit tons and tons of hours.  Many troops meet weekly (like ours), but many others meet bi-weekly or monthly.  Many troops do additional activities, many don't.  Some troops meet very infrequently, and leave a lot of the work up to the individual girls.

There are eleven badges to be earned for the Daisy petal set - plan eleven meetings and do one petal per meeting.  OR, something along those lines.  Or, you know, jump in with both feet and go big, if that's how you roll.

6.  You will want more time than just your meetings, though - there is a little paperwork, planning time for each meeting (sometimes very little, sometimes more), supply-buying, potentially more training for you, and potentially bigger activities with more time still.  You will also probably want to set aside time to see other leaders, get an idea of what is going on in Girl Scouts, and be involved.  In Seattle, we have once monthly service unit meetings for leaders that area really useful to attend - it turns out to be one Monday evening a month for a couple of hours, and can be shared between your leadership team.

I would say that, during the year, I put in an average of 8 hours per week, although it isn't distributed evenly.  This is a pure estimate, I don't have records.  On a normal week we have a couple hours for a meeting, plus an additional for planning or prep, so 3-4 hours (I have a good co-leader who really does a lot of the work).  Once a month add 2 hours for the SU meeting.  We don't expect our cookie parent to do 100% of the work, so February and March add a few hours a week to help with cookies.   Plus, we did a few extra events that required ~5 hours additional each, and camping which required a weekend and another ~5-10 hours.  I like advancing my leadership skills and donating additional effort to the council, so add another 5-10 hours per year for training and volunteer work.

7.  You do need to know some stuff - Girl Scouts has some internal goals and structures that are designed to make it reliably a good program for girls.  This means you need to do a little bit of training.  You also want to spend some time familiarizing yourself with the materials.  Since you're working with kids, having some experience leading a group of kids is beneficial.  Agreeing with parents on leadership techniques (discipline if necessary) is also beneficial.  If you do cookies, there is a lot (and training available).

8.  Where to you find help?  Well, there is training available through GSWW.  The service unit meetings are a good place to find things out.  There is a Facebook page for leaders that can be a great resource.  Searching on-line can give lots of lesson plans and project directions.  You can look for programs offered by other troops, or call in experts to lead sessions.

I hope that is helpful.  I'd love for people to add comments and criticism, and to ask questions and to flesh this out.