FUN Patches! The What, Why, and How
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Girl Scouts has certain values to uphold, but ask anyone what they associate with Girl Scouts, and I bet you’ll hear “cookies” and “patches” or “badges”.
So what are fun patches, and why should you, as a leader, care?
Official Badges
First, to understand fun patches, you need to understand the official badges. Official badges are part of the Girl Scouts “curriculum”, and you can keep track of earning those using my “Girl Scout Badge Trackers”. These badges are consistent across all of GSUSA. They are the lesson plans found in your volunteer toolkit, and they cover the front of your Girl Scout vests as they are earned.
For Daisies, they look like petals, pins, or circular patches with a scalloped border. They have unique and consistent shapes for other scouts, like triangles for Brownies and circles for other levels.
Fun Patches
Fun patches, on the other hand, go on the back of the vest. They can be any shape, color, or design that you can dream up. Your council may not offer a badge for things like “first asleep on the camping trip” or “fun day at the community pool” but you can bet that you can find a fun patch to commemorate such an event.
That’s the point of fun patches– they are a scrapbook of sorts, collecting memories that may be in addition to a fun troop trip or other milestone but are not an officially licensed or sanctioned badge from the GS organization.
They are still a fun and important piece of the Girl Scout experience!
Expense
If you look for fun patches versus official badges, you will quickly find that there is a vast difference in cost. At the time of this writing, official badges for our troop are in the $4-9 range, while fun patches typically run 50 cents to $2, regular price. If you are a Daisy troop of 12 that earns a badge per week and meets weekly, that’s a minimum of about $192 per month for the official badges. A fun patch each meeting is about $24. You will probably end up with a mix of earned badges (fun and official) and commemorating the “fun” along with the official will fill up those vests and save the memories that you, as a volunteer, put so much effort into for your troop.
I’ll add some of my favorite fun patch sites to the end of this post, and those are shared voluntarily without sponsorship or commission.
Unique
If every troop had the same badges and the same experiences, then there wouldn’t be a need for so many in every town. Your troop is unique, and you plan activities with your whole heart. Badges are made to celebrate those unique experiences for your troop.
For example, every scout earns the same cookie patches within a certain council. Our specific troop had the unique luck this past season to have snow EVERY WEEKEND that we had a cookie booth. Therefore, we purchased special patches to commemorate “freezing our cookies off”-- official? No. Worth it anyway? Yes.
In conclusion, the important thing to remember is that while official badges are important to scouts, you are not limited to only those badges in any way. There are no badge police (respect authority!), so feel free to savor your troop memories with supplementary fun patches along the way.
After all– the back of the vest won’t fill itself!
