Volunteer Essentials

Volunteer Toolkit (VTK)

The Volunteer Toolkit (VTK) is a comprehensive digital tool accessible on your computer, smartphone and/or tablet. The Volunteer Toolkit is the primary support resource for volunteers working with K-5 grade troops. For volunteers, this resource will replace the adult leaders guide for Journeys and provide all of the badge requirements found in The Girl’s Guide to Girl Scouting . Girls will still use the girl books to enhance their experience and serve as a memento of their great memories.

There are four tabs in the Volunteer Toolkit to help make meeting planning easy for volunteers to do with girls.

These include: • My Troop: Manage your troop contacts, renew membership and communicate with parents. • Year Plan: Broadly manage your troop year based on what girls want to do. When you log into Volunteer Toolkit for the first time, you will see year plan options for your girls to choose from including one Girl Scout Badge year and two Girl Scout Journey year plans. The first two meetings of each of these year plans will help you decide, in partnership with the girls, which of the year plans they would like to use based on their interests. This tab will also allow you to set your meeting calendar including meeting locations, date and time. • Meeting Plan: View meeting details including activity descriptions, meeting aids, materials lists and more. Here you can also customize activities, delete activities your girls wouldn’t enjoy and replace them with new activities. You can easily create your own activity or replace it with an activity from the toolkit. • Resources: Here you can find additional resources to support activities your girls choose to do. You will find the Safety Activity Checkpoints , all meeting aids and other helpful resources. You can easily add the meeting aids to a specific meeting in your year plan. Cadette, Senior and Ambassador troops have a customized view of the Volunteer Toolkit that allows the leader to use the My Troop Tab and the Resources tab. The year plan tab has no pre-populated content from the Girl Scout Journeys or badges from The Girl’s Guide to Girl Scouting ; however they can create their own meeting plans and year plans. Building a Troop Treasury In the first year, families can expect to incur out-of-pocket expenses for uniforms, books, supplies, badges, etc. Until the troop has participated in council-sponsored product programs, it will not have funds to pay for these items. To help cover these costs, troops may decide to collect troop dues from each family. • Troop dues are optional and are less likely needed at the higher grade levels as product program proceeds are earned to cover these expenses • The amount of troop dues is ultimately determined by the troop leader, based on planned troop activities and conversations with parents/guardians These dues are paid directly to the troop and are deposited into a troop bank account to fund the troop treasury. Each troop is required to have a bank account, which must have two registered, background checked cosigners who are unrelated by blood, marriage or partnership. Troop leaders should share troop bank account activity with parents/guardians periodically so there is full awareness about all financial activities of the troop.

Planning a Troop Meeting

Volunteer Essentials 34