Badge Booklets are Now in VTK!

As I’ve documented before, our national badge programming’s organizational system needs some work. I’m a mentor for new leaders in our service unit, and they usually come in very confused and often ask one simple question: “Isn’t there a badge book that I can buy somewhere?” Unfortunately, the answer is no. At one point, I put together a matrix pointing leaders as to where they could find requirements for certain badges. As much as I love spreadsheets, it’s never really a good thing when you have to create one just to help others find the building blocks of your organization.

After the Girl’s Guide to Girl Scouting binders were retired, each badge has to be purchased separately either via a $2.50 PDF download from the GSUSA store or a $3 hard copy from your council store or the online GSUSA shop. As you can imagine, that gets pretty pricey, especially if you are a new leader attempting to build your own badge book. Back in 2023, I estimated that it would cost a Junior leader $176 dollars to put together a badge book with all of the booklets, the handbook, and a large enough 3 ring binder to fit.

About five years ago due to the pandemic, the Farthest North council made the decision to scan in every badge booklet and made them available via password protected pages. The password was easy to find if you knew the right person to ask, and subsequently, the website grew in popularity. It closed about a year or so ago, so leaders were forced to find other black market ways to access badge requirements. Searches for badges on Google and Pinterest increased dramatically as leaders sought to save money. Or worse, leaders just took the simple summaries found on GSUSA’s Badge Explorer and used them to make up their own requirements.

Last February, GSUSA held a State of the Movement webinar for National Delegates, and on it, Bonnie B (our National CEO) shared that badge booklets would be available in VTK starting in May. I was surprised to hear this, and part of me hedged my enthusiasm because I’ve found that oftentimes my expectations always shoot over the mark when it comes to what GSUSA actually delivers.

But earlier this week, I saw a note on Facebook that the badge requirements were now showing up in VTK, so I logged in to check it out.

Here they are!

And it’s just like I envisioned! It’s a Festivus miracle!

To get to them, you have to add the badge to your Meeting Plan, and then open it. You’ll find it right under the badge summary. After doing a little bit of spot checking, it seems that some of the booklets are the actual full color PDFs and others are printer friendly PDFs featuring just the text of the booklets.

What if you don’t have access to VTK? For what it’s worth, the booklet PDF files can be accessed from a direct link without the need to log into VTK. I’m sure someone will soon create a directory featuring just that.

Hard copies of the booklets are still available to order online and in council shops, and as far as I know, they’ll continue to be printed. The PDFs are available for download on the online shop for a cost as well.

And with that, I actually wrote a positive piece about VTK! Will miracles never cease to exist?