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Yes! I SO get where you are coming from. I have been looking for the last few years trying to find some sort of Adult Merit Badge program community I could be a part of.

I was in Girl Guides for a few years and loved dreaming of earning badges, planning how to earn them, working on the tasks and challenges, and then receiving the reward – an actual physical, recognizable (many people know about Guides/Boy Scouts etc.), and respected bit of proof that I had achieved the requirements for that badge.

The closest thing I’ve found so far is Mary Jane’s Farm Sisterhood merit badges that I just learned about while reading a “Mary Jane’s Farm” magazine this weekend. I am beyond thrilled to have finally found something, and it looks like it has a pretty good little online community with it.

I also participate in reading challenges and have been trying to come up with a way to create a “Book Badge” community – but like you, I would want actual (nice!) badges and then how to pay for them? I can see why digital badges are an attractive alternative, being free to distribute, but how then how do people save them beyond their computer screen? In five years will people still be able to access them? Share them with others? Will anyone other than the immediate members of the “Book Badge” community even care? *sigh* Like you, I keep getting stuck trying to come up with a good solution (that wouldn’t be too costly for me).

I also looked online as there are a couple of Merit Badge-ish books on the market and I noticed there was someone in the reviews thinking the same – they would like actual physical badges instead of just the stickers from the book.

There was also a program I found a while back (Quest/Frontier Girls) that had badges but they were more geared to kids/homeschooling from what I could tell (but they do have an adult level). My Girl Guides co-leader said she also wished they had Guides for adults so we could still earn badges too. There certainly would be a market for it, if we could only find a way to do it!

Please feel free to email me if you’d like to chat about this more. I’d also love to hear if you’ve found any other Merit Badge options that I haven’t found yet. So far the Mary Jane’s Farm Sisterhood ones seem the best option for me. There is at least someone that signs off on item completion, there are in-person chapters in some places, but the badges are emailed to you to print on fabric to embroider yourself or display how you’d like. I’d still love to find something with standardized requirements and badges.

Take care,
Stacey

So I’ve kept on searching since I left the other comment and I’ve found a possibility! It’s called the Rebel Badge Club (https://www.rebelbadgestore.com/) and includes a book, actual badges, and a Facebook community that seems to be growing pretty quickly. I believe the book was just published in October 2021 and it already has ~ 2800 members. I’m definitely going to look into this one more. You may find it interesting too. 🙂