Starting a New Troop

So you want to start a Girl Scout troop, now what?

Starting a Troop
If you are looking to start or join a troop, please contact your local Girl Scout Council. You can find out which Council you are located in at:

www.girlscouts.org/councilfinder/

Parent Participation
What we did when we started our Daisy troop was to:


 * Create a meeting schedule
 * Mark meetings for discussing cookie sales, preparing for Thinking Day, preparing for bridging and the End of Year ceremony, and for the End of Year Ceremony itself
 * Send out the meeting schedule with the remaining dates and the list of Daisy petals to parents
 * Ask parents to sign up (individually or in pairs) to lead one of the petal programs and select a day to do it.

That got the parents involved (which the girls loved), and set the expectations of parent participation in the troop. It also took some of the pressure off the leaders to come up with all of the program activities, and brought in a lot more brainpower with unusual ideas.

Troop Membership
We started out with a mixed troop of kindergarteners and first graders, which added pressure to get all 10 petals done in one year for the first graders. As the girls have progressed, this also has meant that we have a mixed troop and multiple programs going on all at the same time. I would recommend, if you have the option, to have all of the girls in one grade.

Adding New Members
Every year or so, you may get asked to add new girls to your troop. If you decide to do this, you may want to find ways for the girls to get to know each other.

Here are some Team-Building/ Ice-breaker games for everyone to get to know each other: Team Build Spinner

Get to Know You Activities

 * Get to Know You Bingo
 * Get to Know You Spinner - asks the girls different questions about themselves. (Note: While this link says it is for team-building, it seems more useful as a get-to-know-you activity.)
 * Teampedia has a lot of team-building ideas, some of which might be better for older scouts.

Organizers

 * Attendance and Field Trip tracker. This Microsoft Excel file helps keep track of which scouts have attended which meetings, and also who is coming on the field trips (including parents).[[File:Attendance_Tracker.xlsx]]


 * Badge tracker. This Microsoft Excel file will help keep track of which requirements your scouts have earned.[[File:BadgeTracker.xlsx]]