Leap Before You Look

A typical day on the year round team right now is both thrilling and terrifying. We are preparing to build 4 more cabins and a bathhouse before this coming summer! Why? This is essential to the evolution of camp for two reasons. We want to grow to serve the kids on the waitlist, and build sustainability into our program for generations to come!

This growth will make us more sustainable and protect our mission. 

Maddy, our camp director, spends most of her time talking to families of campers that just found out about camp through a friend, neighbor or maybe through an internet search.  I love debriefing these calls with Maddy. It is motivating and invigorating to find like minded families and welcome them and their children to a community to connect with and belong to. 

MK is flooded with interviews for staff next summer. We are gathering an incredible crew of staff to be the magic makers, mentors, caretakers and “big kids” to dream big and partner with campers. I believe that this summer we will have the best staff yet. MK has made sure that we have the right mix of returners and new folks to hold fast to traditions and infuse new ideas into our camp community. 

George and Dylan are spending their time prepping. They are preparing to increase the capacity of camp by 40 kids a session, or 160 kids a summer.  Making new picnic tables for the dinning hall, ordering new bunks and mattresses, coordinating with the health department and the building department and the contractors and the engineers and the architects to line up all the dominoes so they neatly fall in place before June 1st. 

Quarius spends most of his time dreaming about how to tell the rest of the world what we are up to. He is storyboarding and building a narrative for a documentary that showcases the raw-ness of building, testing, iterating and reimagining a community with kids, by kids, for kids. 

And me? I spend my time pumping myself up to ask you for help. It is hard to ask for help. I think I have an incredible opportunity for you. Camp is poised and ready to leap. This team is incredible, the kids who are waiting are incredible. It is time to say yes, everything seems to be waiting on me to ask you for your help.

Will you help me? 

I know that we will head into the summer after an exhausting spring of building a new bathhouse and a new village. And hopefully in a few years we will be able to share a documentary film about camp with you and you will get to say I was a part of making that happen. I know that we will be able to raise pay for our summer staff and our year round team, and be able to support them with the kind of benefits and support they need to thrive. 

I know this because audacity and uncertainty make a powerful potion. I have experienced how uncertainty often forces us to question and dream with more curiosity. Audacity comes from that place of not knowing exactly but believing there is a way. Those two ingredients have gotten us to where we are now and I believe that they are baked into the very fabric of the organization. We have never NOT had a year where we made giant leaps into the future.

But more than anything else I know that camp really matters, it matters to the kids that come each summer. It matters to their families and their communities. It matters to the staff and their families and communities. It matters because the kids that are coming to camp now and building this thing from the ground up with us will be able to send their kids to this camp some day and to be able to say to them. “I was there the summer they built the second bathhouse. My family helped make that happen.” 

In order to make this project happen we need to lean on the army of support that camp has gathered over the past 9 years. Everyone working full time for camp right now is doing two jobs. We are both running camp and running a campaign.

The momentum and tenacity of our team is unstoppable. We have taught ourselves to do so much! However, most nonprofits trying to take on a half a million dollar campaign in the amount of time we have set out to do it would have an entire full time team dedicated to it. The team might include a development director, grant writers, major gift officers, stewardship coordinators, marketing and messaging professionals, graphic designers, website developers and content creators. We are going to try and do all those jobs and our current jobs. 

YOUR support changes this. You help make it possible for us to invest in staff, focus on our message, and inspire change.

By investing in camp now you are investing in the next generation's ability to dream. Together we’re giving kids power to reshape and reimagine the way we solve conflict and build community. Thanks for building this place for them to dream.

Camp is about to launch into another audacious growth phase. We are gearing up to build another bathhouse and a village. This is about sustaining camp and securing our future. I don’t have all the funding I need to make this happen .... yet. But the real risk would be not taking the risk. If we don't leap now we lose the opportunity to change the lives of the kids still on the waitlist this summer. 

Let's do this.