One week. Six hundred new girls’ troops.

[Cburkhardt 382]

Promoted the adult community meetings with small display ads in neighborhood paper.  Theme was “Your girl can be an Eagle Scout”.  These were small gatherings of about 10 adults each.  We had a 20 month program to share and asked what they thought their families wanted.  The open house welcome parties were promoted in the same paper with a girl-appealing theme and on blogs — but particularly via word of mouth among the girls.  The events were on consecutive Saturday mornings and consisted of a “fair” of tables with scoutcraft topics and summer camp information.  We signed up a lot on the spot.

[Eagle1993 2160]

@Cburkhardt Did you have any support from your council or was this all unit driven?  How many all girl Troops exist in DC?  Are you advertising 20 months to earn the Eagle Scout rank?

From what I have seen locally, there has been limited support from Council and there are a limited number of adult leaders out there (so far) that are not already District or Unit volunteers. 

[Cburkhardt 382]

All unit driven.  I know what I am doing, having formed units before.  The tendency will be for harried professionals to encourage their better boy troops to form linked units.  Once committed, those girl units will probably start as single patrols reliant on the boy troop, with some growing into troops capable of functioning more independently.  The better model is to form at least a few non-linked girl troops in each district, but that is infinitely harder.

We are not trying to bring in numbers of girls to get Eagle on the fast track and have not advertised to do so. We might have one, and will certainly accommodate her.  We have almost all 11 and 12 year-olds that we will bring through in the normal manner.  Our 20 month program is just our normal program plan of events and activities.

The District of Columbia is its own district in our Council.  We have about 10 boy troops and we are the only girl troop.  The tack being taken here is to scale up a large best-practice girl troop (us) that serves the entire city, rather than multiple weak groups.  We hope to eventually spin-off additional units when that makes sense.

[T2Eagle 902]

I just saw the Bryan on Scouting posting with 50 troops from 50 states.

They also had a troop from Germany.  Sorry Cburkhart, just like with voting, you guys didn't make the cut.🙂  Though I did see several other troops' pictures in the comments if you want to send yours in.

There is a picture from Maine, and IIRC one of our posters talked about trying to establish a troop there.  If so does he want to fess up to being the long haired hippy in the photo?

[scotteg83 89]

17 hours ago, T2Eagle said:

I just saw the Bryan on Scouting posting with 50 troops from 50 states.

They also had a troop from Germany.  Sorry Cburkhart, just like with voting, you guys didn't make the cut.🙂  Though I did see several other troops' pictures in the comments if you want to send yours in.

There is a picture from Maine, and IIRC one of our posters talked about trying to establish a troop there.  If so does he want to fess up to being the long haired hippy in the photo?

Nope, but that is my Wife, Daughter, fellow Scout and my District Executive with the hippie hair.

[Cburkhardt 382]

Being the only Scouts BSA Troop for Girls in the District of Columbia, we received plenty of local and even some national coverage of our opening.  I'm frankly happy to simply move out of organizing and into operations at this point.  On Saturday we have our second meeting, form into three patrols, elect leaders and get to the program!  

[Mom2Scout 10]

We had some of our female BSA Scouts at a community event that involved a fundraiser for our troop.  Don't forget the advertisement of being out and doing things in the community.  Good turns = good publicity.