15 tips for doing the Eco award in your unit
Ideas for getting stuck into the Eco award with your unit
Is your unit passionate about helping the planet and doing something good for the environment?
Here’s how you can deliver the Eco award for them.
We know that girls care strongly about helping the planet. We developed the Eco award in 2025 to celebrate Earth Day, an annual event on 22 April when everyone around the world comes together to take action to help the environment.
Our Eco award helps girls to think about how they can look after the environment. Whether it’s saving energy at home or protecting local wildlife, the award encourages girls to take the lead. It involves doing 3 actions to help the planet. And with over 300,000 members, all our small actions can make a big difference to our planet.
15 top tips to help you deliver the Eco award
- Learn about the environment first: give your unit plenty of time to learn about sustainability and the environment before starting the award to spark inspiration. You could do this through watching documentaries, exploring UMAs, or using carbon footprint calculators.
- Bring in local speakers: connect with local experts, such as a local beekeeper, a recycling centre or a community gardener, for a visit or talk. This takes the pressure off you to be the ‘expert’ and may inspire some different ideas for girls when picking their actions.
- Use the great outdoors: whenever possible, hold your meetings outside! It’s much easier to develop a love for the environment when the girls are actually standing in it.
- Link up with your local council: many local councils or authorities provide free resources, talk to units, or even provide litter-picking equipment for free. It’s a great way to get extra support without any extra cost to the unit.
- Let the girls lead: ask your unit what environmental issues they care about most, whether it's ocean plastic or local wildlife. They’ll be much more engaged if they’ve picked the project themselves.
- Have ideas to inspire actions: share success stories of what other people have done and have a list of actions that girls could choose from or be inspired by.
- Encourage specific goals: help girls set measurable targets, like trying 10 vegetarian recipes or picking up 20 bags of litter. Setting a specific target makes their success feel much more measurable and rewarding!
- Be a facilitator, not a fixer: provide the space and the tools needed, but let the girls take the lead. For example, you could organise a unit or district swap shop night, but let the girls plan and run it.
- Connect it to interest badges: you could encourage girls choose actions that link to interest badges, UMAs or skills builders, meaning they can tick off multiple badges at once. Read our activities to help girls learn about the environment. You might want to get the I’ve helped the planet badge for camp blankets too.
- Tell parents and carers what you’re doing: send a message explaining about the Eco award and the 3 actions. This means families can join in and cheer the girls on, helping make any eco habits stick long after the unit meeting ends.
- Involve the community: reach out to different places in the community and let them know what you’re doing. Someone may be able to run a bat-box building session or a local supermarket could run talks about seasonal vegetables.
- Document the journey: make a display board to show what you’re doing and track your progress. Encourage girls to take ‘before and after’ photos of their projects, like a messy patch of ground turned into a bee-friendly garden, or draw what they’re doing.
- Have an Eco award event day: run an Eco award event on a weekend or over school holidays and set up different stations to tick off actions in one go, such as a bug-hotel building station or upcycling station. You could even go one step further and run an Eco award themed camp!
- Be a role model: lead by example, so the girls can see eco habits in action. You could carry a reusable water bottle, avoid laminating so paper can be recycled after use, or make signs to switch off lights and taps at your meeting place.
- Celebrate with an awards evening: roll out the green carpet! Invite families to a special party to see the girls' work and celebrate their hard-earned success. You could let girls have the chance to speak about what they’ve done if they want to. Why not invite other units or local leaders? Remember to tell us about what you’ve done too!
Learn more about the Eco award
Who can do the Eco award?
Every young member can do the Eco award. It’s our first youth award that can be completed across every section, from Rainbows to Rangers. Girls can also complete their Eco award each time they move up through their sections, as long as they do different actions each time.
Each section has its own unique Eco award badge featuring a different endangered animal. Read our Eco award pages for more information.
How do girls achieve the Eco award?
To earn the Eco award, girls need to choose 3 actions to help the environment. Girls must do 1 of their actions consistently over a set period. Consistently means at least once per a week.
What actions could we do?
There’s lots of things you can do for the Eco award. For example, you could plant wildflowers, research local environmental campaigns to get involved in, help out at a community garden, or upcycle old items. Here are some ideas for environmental actions you may want to do:
You may want to do environmental activities that also count towards UMAs, interest badges and skills builders.
How can we do the Eco award? And do girls need to do the same thing?
One of the great things about the Eco award is that it’s flexible. It can be completed individually, as a unit, or in groups within their unit.
The actions can be flexible too, so girls can pick 3 actions that suit their interests and passions. This means everyone in the unit could choose to do different actions. You may wish to have a list of ideas to pick from or as inspiration.
If you’re encouraging girls to do the award at home, it’s best to ask girls to chose individual actions to suit the time and resources they have available. They could decide on their actions with their families, then let you know what they’re doing too.
Even if you’re asking girls to do this award at home, if they’re siblings, friends, or go to the same school or college, girls may wish to work together and do the same actions as a small group outside of the unit and any meetings.
You may wish to encourage girls to do the award at home over any school holidays as an optional activity. If you decide to do this, make sure to tell girls and their parents and carers about the award and what they’ll need to do to earn it.
There’s lots of ways to do the award in unit meetings. You could let girls work:
- Individually. They’ll choose their own 3 actions to do.
- In pairs or small groups. They can work in pairs, sixes, patrols or friendship groups. They’ll need to choose the same 3 actions to do (such as by voting for their favourite ideas) and then carry them out together.
- As a whole unit. Everyone will work together. The unit could vote on their favourite 3 actions or they could be decided by the leaders, then the unit does the actions together.
You can be flexible with group sizes and how you work it. Some girls may want to work in small groups or pairs, while others could still do it individually.
It’s best to plan the award over a few weeks. Make sure to give plenty of time in unit meetings to decide, plan and do the actions. For example, you could have a couple of meetings for learning, research and planning, then a few weeks to complete the actions and a final celebration week to give out the award.
Remember to set any boundaries for time and resources available before girls decide what to do.
The one consistent activity for a set period of time can still be done at weekly meetings. Some examples could be:
- Walking or cycling to the unit.
- Doing a quick 10 minute litter pick.
- Having a weekly book swap at your meetings.
- Having plastic-packaging free snacks.
- Setting up a collection point at your meeting place for hard-to-recycle items, like crisp packets or toothpaste tubes.
Some groups decide to do 2 actions in unit meetings, then ask girls to do the longer consistent activity at home for the number of months needed.
You could run an ‘Eco award day’ event for a few hours on a weekend or in the school holidays. Members from your unit or local area could come and do 2 actions of the award. You could have different options for them to choose from, such as building a bug house or plant wildflowers in a pot. They’d then do the 1 longer consistent activity at home.
You could run an Eco award camp. You’d do the 2 actions at camp and then ask girls to do the 1 longer consistent activity at home.
Explore interest badges
Head to our badge finder to explore 72 new interest badges for Rainbows, Brownies, Guides and Rangers