What Do Girl Scout Leaders Think About Journeys and Take Action Projects

Last year I wrote a post basically saying that I thought TAPs were not developmentally appropriate for Brownies and Daisies and that, from what I could see, few troops did them as GSUSA envisioned.  A few months later I put a survey up on Survey Monkey and asked leaders who were members of several Facebook groups what they thought about TAPs.  This article is a summary of those survey results.

First, my Survey Monkey account is a free account, so while I got over 100 responses, I only get to see the first 100.  I did keep an eye on the survey as results were coming in and the percentage never moved that much. Therefore, among the universe of people who chose to respond to my survey, I believe the numbers are reasonably accurate.

Who Responded?

I got responses from 153 people.  11% identified themselves as Daisy leaders, 14% as Brownie leaders, 14% as Junior leaders, 16% as Cadette leaders, 6% as Senior leaders and 6% as Ambassador leaders.  Also, 9% said they were multi-level leaders with mostly Daisies, Brownies and Juniors, 10% were multi-level, mostly older girls and 5% had all levels.  10% listed themselves as "other", mostly leaders of troops with other configurations than those listed earlier.

5% of respondents had been leaders for less than a year, 25% were in their second to fourth year, 32% had been leaders for four to eight years, 18% were in years eight to twelve and 18% had served as leaders for more than twelve years.  

In short, compared to what I've seen around my council and service unit, the leaders who responded to the survey tended to be more experienced than the average leader, and older girl leaders responded out of proportion to their membership numbers.  

What Do These Leaders Think About Journeys?

In response to the question:  "What do you think about Journeys", respondents could pick "Love them", "Believe they are important, but they aren't my favorite", "Neither love them nor hate them" or "Hate them".  6% of respondents loved them, 25% believed they were important, 19% neither loved them or hated them and 50% hated them.  

I'll admit I'm in the hating camp, and I suspect that a greater percentage of people who hate them bothered with my survey than of those who love them or don't care, but I have to say that I've found few people in my GS experience who do like doing Journeys.

How and When Do Troops Do Journeys?

When Journeys first came out they were touted as a new way to do Girl Scouts.  Badges, camping and cookies were "side trips", the Journey was the path for the year, and the leader's guides reflected this.  Each Journey was broken down into at least six and as many as eleven different meetings.  To say that  GSUSA's vision has not been realized is an understatement.  So, how are troops using Journeys?

8% of the surveyed leaders never do Journeys.  34% do one per level for Juniors and up (the minimum to qualify to work on the Bronze, Silver or Gold Award).  33% do one per year and 25% do more than one per year.

I listed each Journey at each level, Daisy through Junior, and asked whether they pretty much followed VTK/leader's manual, made up their own plans, did a Journey in a Day, used a plan they found online or chose not to do it.  Based on the "chose not to do it" answer, I learned that the most popular Daisy Journey is Welcome to the Daisy Flower Garden.  Brownies most frequently did WOW, and Juniors picked Amuse. 

Because I was not expecting a lot of older girl leaders to respond, I just lumped the Journeys at those levels together, so I cannot say which is the most (or least) popular. 

This survey was done near the end of the school year, about two years after the "Think Like A..." Journeys were introduced for Daisy through Junior.  Of those Journeys, "Think Like An Engineer" was the most popular, and "Think Like a Programmer", the least.  Interestingly, more leaders who did those Journeys chose to create their own plans than who choose to use the VTK plans. 

Cadettes seemed to be the group mostly likely to do a Journey as only 16.67% selected "chose not to do it" in response to "Any Cadette Journey.  40% chose not to do an Ambassador Journey, 25.71% chose not to do a Senior Journey.  At the Cadette and Senior levels, about 14% did Journeys in a Day.  The older the girls get, the more likely the leader is to have used a plan she found online.

The Journeys for which the leaders were most likely to use the official plans were Daisy Flower Garden, Brownie Quest and Think Like an Engineer.

What About the Take Action Project?

I asked two questions about Take Action projects. The questions and the percent of people with each response are listed below:

• Which best describes your troop's latest TAP?
• I told the girls what we were going do do   14%
• I presented an idea and gave the girls a chance to vote for or against it   13%
• I gave the girls a choice between several projects  45%
• The girls came up with the project without (or with very little) prompting from me  28%

• Based on my reading of GSUSA's TAP guide, I believe GSUSA wants the girls to identify a problem they want to solve, identify the causes of the problem, and to then design a solution to the root cause of the problem.  What do you think?
• I agree, and do!  20.20%
• I agree, that's what GSUSA wants, and good luck with that  79.80%
• Definitely not what I believe GSUSA wants. 

In short, less than 1/3 of the leaders who responded stated that the girls came up with the TAP.

My Conclusions

GSUSA has been pushing Journeys now for almost ten years, and they are not becoming more popular.  It seems that most people see them as hoops through which you have to jump for the higher awards, and not much more.