Wherefore Art Thou, Journeys?
National Operations 11 Comments 
girls guides, gsle, gsusa, journeys, vtk
If you were around between 2008 and 2011 when the new national program called the Girl Scout Leadership Experience (GSLE) rolled out, you’ll know that a new type of content called Journeys was considered the new backbone of it. Badges, the staple of Girl Scouting throughout its history, took a back seat. Some might even say that Journeys were shoved down everybody’s throat. It took a while, but I think GSUSA reluctantly realized that you can lead a volunteer to a Journey, but you can’t make them do it. So through the years, some changes were quietly made.
All this time, I was under the impression that our national programming was still Journey-driven, but after writing my Tough Cookies Revisited paper, I realized this wasn’t the case. I think it’s OFFICIAL that we’ve moved back to a badge-centric national program. It seems obvious now, but I guess it just didn’t click with me until recently because Journeys were so heavily pushed when I began as a volunteer, and it stuck with me. They’re still required for the higher awards, but there’s not an emphasis on them like there used to be. The following is a rundown of the Journeys’ journey through the years and how they’ve faded into the background.
I started my volunteer career in the fall of 2010 with K5 Daisies which was right about the time when Journeys were in the midst of being rolled out. As a new leader, I was handed a retired Daisy handbook plus told that we should also use these new “Journeys” which were revolutionizing Girl Scouting! But nobody could really tell me what they were all about or how they worked other than following dry scripts in the leader guide, and I found them very confusing, awkward, and unlike anything I remembered about Girl Scouts from my youth. We stuck to the Daisy petals the first year, and then we attempted the 3 Cheers for Animals Journey using its original material (kinda sorta) our second year. Meh.
Ignoring the outcry from volunteers and girls who railed again the lengthy and clunky Journeys, GSUSA doubled down. So in response, our Movement’s creative volunteer base took it upon themselves to make them palatable. “Journey in a Weekend” and “Journey in a Day” plans began to pop up in Facebook groups from leaders who rewrote them to “get them out of the way,” much to the chagrin of GSUSA and council staff. Websites offered “Journeys in a Box” kits that leaders could order that streamlined a lot of the work that comes with running a Journey. GSUSA was not happy. We were told that Journeys were not meant to be done in a short period of time but instead, led over a number of meetings – or even an entire year. Volunteers replied, “That’s a big nope.” I knew that GSUSA finally gave up that fight when I saw a council publicize its own Journey in a Day event.
Each Journey was originally released as a set of books consisting of a spiral-bound adult guide and a smaller girl book. The adult guide wasn’t very helpful to a lot of folks, and the girl books went unused. We now have two large boxes of them sitting in our service unit’s scout closet taking up space and gathering dust.
There was a huge shift in national programming in 2017 when a whole slew of STEM-based and outdoor badges was released, and ever since then, GSUSA has published a set of new corporate-sponsored badges every summer. Three STEM-based “Think Like a….” Journeys were launched in 2017 and 2018 for each level as well, but the format changed to a set of six activity plans versus the lengthy eight to ten sessions of the original Journeys. The original Journeys were also eventually “modularized” (yes, that is a real word) down to six sessions as well and published in Volunteer Toolkit (VTK). At this point in time, all Journeys in every level can be found in VTK with Think Like a Citizen Scientist additionally offered as a digital download from the GSUSA online store.
As a response to the Outdoor Initiative push at the 2014 National Council Session (see pg. 23 of Tough Cookies Revisited), GSUSA released an Outdoor Journey in 2017 for all levels. Some could argue that it was basically lip service in that all it comprised was three outdoor related badges pulled together with a Take Action project slapped on the end. But personally, I didn’t have an issue with it, and when I had Cadettes (the first time around), that’s the Journey we completed so that the girls could fulfill that part of the Silver Award requirement. I like the idea of a badge pathway. It’s similar to what was done with the Signs of the Sun/Rainbow/Satellite awards in national programming from the past.
No new Journeys have been released since 2018. Will there be any more? I think they’ve been replaced by what I call the “Series of 3” badges. I always felt like they were Journeys in disguise when they first came out. They’re wrapped up in a badge costume since volunteers and girls are always clamoring for more badges and less Journeys. The Series of 3 badges involve the Robotics, Automotive, Coding, Cybersecurity, Math in Nature, and Mechanical Engineering fields.
Another example of how Journeys have faded into the background has to do with the somewhat newly released handbooks. They’re made up of the handbook from the original Girls Guide to Girl Scouting binder notebooks, but entire pages that referenced Journeys have been removed or replaced.
Out with the old:
And in with the new:
The map is the same, but the words “Brownie Journey” were removed:
Some other references to the original Journeys were removed – which makes sense considering four more have been added since the original handbook’s publication. But overall, the focus on Journeys lessened in the new handbooks compared to the original versions.
I actually do believe Journeys have a place and can be a good experience depending on the topic (and if you add a little bit of variety to the plans). Admittedly I haven’t done many of them, but of the ones we completed over the course of a weekend, Brownie Quest and Mission: Sisterhood are two that stand out to me. If you’re taking your troop on an encampment weekend or just want to get away, a Journey is an option if you have to come up with your own programming. You can find Journey in a Day/Weekend plans online and via Pinterest if you’re doing one of the original Journeys and find that the VTK plans are too plodding and skimpy. I ran a Junior Think Like a Citizen Scientist Journey at Camp WaBak one year, but I had to heavily modify parts of it since we had no internet service (plus I’m not a fan of girls crowding around a phone to watch an adult enter in data).
By the way, if you’re interested in getting original Journey adult guides and girl books at a heavy discount, check with me at amy@dawgtoons.com to see what our service unit has in stock. All of them were donated to us from our leaders, and we have a variety of new and used books. The girl books are $1 each and adult guides are $2 plus shipping regardless of condition. The money our SU makes from sales is used to purchase items from our camps’ Amazon wish lists and/or donated to the Juliette Low Friendship Fund. If you order a bunch, I can send them Media Mail to cut down on shipping costs; otherwise, they’ll be sent Priority Mail or with stamps if there’s only a few.
Addendum 4/11/23: The printed (original) Journey books are going out of print, so the only place to find them eventually will be in Facebook selling groups. I was surprised that they were still printing them, to be honest. I had a vision of a large warehouse of Journey books with dust on them. Plans will still be available via the VTK.
I’m really glad to see this, because I struggled with Journeys as a leader, like you I found it confusing and bulky. And I had an impossible time with the scripts and couldn’t bear the girl “workbooks” because it felt too much like school.
It helped me tremendously when I was at a training in about 2012 and the Journey experience was boiled down to this: Step 1 — you have to learn something about a subject before you can do anything, Step 2 — you have to internalize the the topic in your own life by taking some small effort, and Step 3 — you have to do a bigger project on the theme. Once I had that mindset it was a lot easier. To make it work, I had to depart from the script and follow the essence.
For me writing my own script and tapping into my own resources worked out and I thought the girls I led got a lot out of it, but I also was a “go big or go home” kind of leader and encouraged even my Brownies to get super involved in their projects — projects that older girls could have done. The problem I saw in my overseas committee is that other leaders were not doing anything like I was. Somehow girls were doing journeys in a couple of meetings and moving on. I’m sure those girls weren’t getting anything out of it, it wouldn’t have been possible. So my take: if the program is too difficult for leaders to manage, it’s not reasonable to ask them to do that. This is an *activity for kids* and all the icing in the world will not dress it up to be any more than that, no matter what.
FWIW, I never worked the badges that “went with” the Journeys as part of the effort, we did the badges that the girls themselves were interested in doing. I missed badges because that was the fun part when I was a GS but I had a very limited selection. And the Journeys and to some extent badges were not written with kids who live outside the US in mind, so I always looked to what the point was rather than the task.
What you describe is the Three Keys to Leadership (Discover, Connect, Take Action) which I think Brownie Quest actually does a good job at explaining. I tell Brownie leaders to do that one if they are thinking about doing a Journey and that it will help them understand the GSLE.
The thing was — I found that perspective, peeling back to the essence, was just as applicable to the other journeys, esp the environmental ones like the Juniors’ Energy one. We took it to different levels in Brownie World of Girls, Junior Change your World, and Cadette Media. (With two troops at different levels, I’ve lost track of how many journeys I led, guessing 1 Daisy, 2 Brownie, 3 Junior, 1 Cadette — and my older daughter did 2 others I did not lead!)
I became a leader in 2011 and found them very confusing, and often boring. The girls book didn’t seem to correlate with the leader book. And the problem with doing a whole themed year (which I tried with MEdia with Cadettes), is that by the end of the year they’ve forgotten what they learned at the beginning. You lose the momentum. What I didn’t realize until later is that the key to the journeys is the take action project. If the girls don’t learn how to identify issues they care about and come up with ways to address them, doing a higher award is going to be very difficult.
Well done explanation.
My troop was Cadettes when Journeys came out full swing. They were “optional” about a year before, and I liked the idea of a theme for the year. They became required, which didn’t sit well with my girls, all of whom had been homeschooled at some point and wanted to drive their own path.
Our biggest obstacle… my own kid was greatly afraid of spiders and all three Journey books were hosted by a cartoon spider named Dez. No way were we going to be using the books.
We did sign up for a Journey Overnight once, Friday – Saturday. But on Thursday morning, I had an email that low enrollment caused the event to be cancelled (big pet peeve of mine – no heads-up at the beginning that I should be recruiting friends to help reach a minimum enrollment). So instead, we spent that Saturday learning about Our Own Lou Henry Hoover – great lady and very involved with GSUSA.
I’ve lead several journeys for daisy’s and brownies and agree with many of your comments about them. If I didn’t have good facilitation training I think they would have been a disaster with the girls. As it was, it required a ton of planning on my part to understand the main goals of each journey and come up with creative ways to get the points across. I like to think I succeeded. The “Think like a…” journeys, however, we’re not my favorite and I never bothered to attempt them. Getting the badge work done and the regular journeys (only to earn the summit pin) was enough with out the added work and minimal guidance of the newer journeys.
I’ve been a g.s. Leader since 1995. When the journey books were rolled, none of my girls were excited about them. Most of them agreed as well, that it felt like they were doing homework at troop meetings. One of my cadettes had no desire to earn her silver award because she had to complete a journey book. I, myself never liked them but did encourage the girls to finish what we started. They all got bored with them and thought the examples of the take action didn’t fit every state or city. Because of them getting bored, we would take a break and work on service projects or crafts or other activities/field trips. Happy to know they no longer in use.
Wow!! I have been out of scouting for several years and did not know this. The what-seemed-to-be the nearly universal unpopularity of the journeys took a long time for the organization to admit. Well after that almost 20 year failure I’m glad they did. I went off book with my troops and distilled Journeys to the theme and the essence. That’s the only way we made it through. But we did excellent projects… just was on my shoulders to think of them.
Your way is exactly the same as how we are doing the Journeys. Take the essence and adapt it to our girls, location and abilities of the leaders to put together something that is a real learning experience for the girls.
As of August of 2024, Journeys are still required to earn the higher awards. But I expect to see them phased out entirely at some point soon.