The Badge Archive

Many are looking at doing a government themed badge in 2023 with the presidential election happening in November.

Pick your level and what government themed badge you might want to earn and go for it!

Daisy

• Democracy for Daisies
• Good Neighbor

Brownie

• Celebrating Community
• Democracy for Brownies

Junior

• Democracy for Juniors
• Inside Government
• _{(Not a pure government badge, but could be themed that way. When talking about powerful women, pick a powerful political female. The TAP could be about a political issue as well.)}
  Agent of Change 

Cadette

• Democracy for Cadettes
• _{(We don’t consider this one a pure government badge, but you can certainly theme it as such. It’s more about learning how to debate and compromise.)}
  Finding Common Ground

Senior

• Behind the Ballot
• Democracy for Seniors
• _{(Not a pure government badge, but could be themed that way. Just choose a political issue as this badge is about picking and issue, researching it, and figuring out how to make a change.)}
  Social Innovator

Ambassador

• Democracy for Ambassador
• Public Policy

Flashback! – Check out what it was like to earn the Citizen proficiency badge (from 1912-1980)

Democracy Badges

The Democracy badges are designed to have a field trip or a guest speaker in order to earn it. Multiple field trips and speakers to be true to the ideal they have. A local field trip, a state capitol field trip, talk to someone local in government or talk to a state representative, lawyer, or judge. There’s a large variety and options to earn if you can’t do a trip or invite a guest, but it’s harder to manage. We recommend using YouTube interviews to overcome the missing guest speaker.

Democracy badges have the same requirements for each level, but they differ slightly in what is required to fulfill that requirement. Check out the Scouts Honor Wiki for details on the 5 steps. Most multi-levels will pick the level that fits their troop for each requirement and call it earned for all levels when they have finished five. Afterall, they do still learn about the three branches, local, and state governments no matter which level you do.

Other Government Badges

Keep in mind that the GSUSA Citizen themed badges are not all compatible. Daisy and Ambassador don’t mesh well with the Brownie, Junior, Cadette, and Senior badges in the requirements. You can get creative, but be prepared to do multiple steps if you are doing them as a multi-level with Daisy or Ambassadors. The other four levels can overlap a bit more easily.

Pages

We are in the middle of updated all the The Badge Archive’s badge pages (deleting broken links, adding the top submenu, uploading archived copies of PDFs, etc.), starting on the Daisy level. However, we prioritized the government badges of all levels.

Each badge is now in the new format and we ensured that there is at least one link to a meeting plan, downloadable, or information page. Councils used to have the booklets up online, but they were all taken down during the GSUSA redesign of council websites in the past year.

Note that Scouts Honor Wiki is a free website that anyone can edit. Feel free to upload any new ideas you have for doing an activity on that site! We edited the government pages ourselves to make sure there is at least a basics information on the activities the booklet mentions. It won’t be the full word by word (they are copyright information and we don’t want the Scouts Honor website to get in trouble if we did so), but it does make sure anyone can tell what the options are on how to earn the badge.