Girlguiding, the UK’s largest youth organisation dedicated completely to girls, has today launched 72 new badges offering even more amazing opportunities for girls aged 4-18 to grow in confidence, learn new skills, have fun and adventure, and to know they can do anything.
Among the new badges, Rainbows (age 4-7) can giggle their way towards completing the Laughter badge; Brownies (age 7-10) might share the love for the Kindness badge; Guides (age 10-14) can creepy crawl their way closer to the Entomology badge; and Rangers (age 14-18) will be waxing lyrical about their favourite things with the Fandoms badge.
The 72 new badges were co-designed by more than 20,000 people including over 15,000 girls. Over 4,000 badge design ideas were submitted by girls and volunteers, and 11,000 girls from 753 Girlguiding units across the UK helped to test out the badge activities. The badge activities were developed with Girlguiding’s youth panel Amplify, which is made up of 30 girls aged 12-18, and seven expert partners: The Royal Horticultural Society (Rangers – Gardening); Children’s Book Project (Guides – Bookworm); University of Reading (Rainbows – Laughter and Courage; Guides – Journalling); Wildwood Trust (Guides – Biodiversity); Bletchley Park (Codebreaking – Guides); the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (Rangers – Guiding world); and Wellbeing of Women (Rangers – My health).
The development of new, and the evolution of existing badges was a response to girls’ requests to add even more choice to the Girlguiding programme given the popularity of the first wave of overhauled badges released in 2018, with a phenomenal 1,551,087 completed across all four Girlguiding sections since then.