Heritage - Juliette Gordon Low
| Category: | Scouting Heritage |
|---|---|
| Notes: | For any troop, pack, or unit meeting, World Thinking Day (February 22), or Girl Scout Week around March 12. Tells the story of the founder of Girl Scouts of the USA. The "Daisy Low" song in the Songs section pairs well with it. Part of a series on Scouting heritage - see the other heritage minutes in this category. |
In 1911, an American woman named Juliette Gordon Low was living in England when she met Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting. She was fascinated by what he'd started for boys, and she went home with an idea.
Her friends and family called her Daisy. She was creative, funny, a little bit unpredictable, and she didn't let much stop her. She had lost much of her hearing over the years, and plenty of people might have let that hold them back. Not Daisy.
As the story is told, when she got back to her hometown of Savannah, Georgia, she telephoned a cousin and said she had something for the girls of Savannah, and all of America, and all the world, and they were going to start it that very night.
On March 12, 1912, she gathered eighteen girls for the first meeting of what would become the Girl Scouts. They hiked, camped, played basketball, and learned first aid. At a time when girls were often expected to sit still and stay indoors, that was a big deal.
Daisy spent the rest of her life building Girl Scouting, and she paid for a lot of it herself. In her last years she was seriously ill, and she kept it quiet so she could keep working.
Today, millions of girls have been Girl Scouts. It started because one person had an idea and refused to wait.
Is there something you've been waiting to start? Daisy probably wouldn't have waited.