|
by David Lira Leveron
Camp-parent partnerships reach beyond customer satisfaction; they are
at the core of parent-camp loyalty. In most Hispanic communities, the
camp-parent partnership becomes a critical alliance that often originates
at the camp and is based on the mutual fulfillment of needs. This is
especially true for nonprofit camps serving underprivileged minority
clienteles where partnerships are crucial for the mere existence of the
camp.
In our quest for customer satisfaction, we fulfill campers' needs
by providing a fun, secure, and nurturing environment. We also fulfill
parents' needs by reassuring them about safety concerns, providing
growth opportunities and skills development for their children, and making
sure that our parents know that we are constantly making efforts to understand
their culture and adjusting our approaches and philosophy to meet their
needs. Parents and campers fulfill our camps' needs by providing
important feedback, return business, word-of-mouth advertising, and by
providing the camp with a prominent position in their communities which
can translate into greater funding potential for us.
Loyalty is more. It is the direct result of strong relationships that
go beyond partnerships — and although it is mutual, it usually
originates with the camper and subsequently includes the parent. Loyalty
is the parent's conviction that our camp has made the commitment
to go the step beyond fulfilling needs to embrace his or her child and
the family's culture as part of our camp's community. More
often than not, the camp director is at the forefront of this delicate
and important task. He or she acts as moderator between campers, parents,
higher echelons of the organization, and finally the board of trustees.
An Eighty-Year History
The Union League Boys and Girls Clubs (ULBGC) Camp is a nonprofit agency
camp. Located in southeastern Wisconsin, it serves campers from three
different ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago: Pilsen, West Town, and Humboldt
Park. For over eighty years, the camp, which is owned and operated by
the Union League Boys and Girls Clubs, has been providing services to
underprivileged children. As a beacon of outdoor programs in our communities,
the camp has created many important partnerships — especially with
the parents in the communities that it serves.
Of the 512 campers that attend camp each summer, about 97 percent are
children who belong to ethnic minorities (63 percent Hispanic and around
34 percent African American). The priorities, in the past, for these
populations have not included sending their kids to camp during the summer.
However, the camp's success in forming strong partnerships has
helped parents in these communities re-examine their priorities — now
they are putting summer camp as a top item on their list of summer activities.
Without a doubt this is the result of an overall camp strategy that has
involved the untiring efforts of a committed board of trustees (through
an active camp committee and various subcommittees), a visionary executive
director, and the tireless work of a team of summer camp staff that strongly
believe in the importance of the camp experience, the value of loyalty,
and the significance of strong community partnerships.
A Worthy Challenge
Creating strong camp-parent partnerships in our communities has not
been an easy task. It requires a constant exchange of information that
moves upward from the campers to the board and downward from the board
to the campers. While passing through the different points in between,
(camp director, executive director, and different subcommittees) the
information is received, interpreted, discussed, and shaped into the
strategies that have helped create not only great camp-parent partnerships
but also legendary loyalty that has campers and former campers coming
back to camp year after year.
Communication
In 1995, we asked parents to share one of their greatest concerns about
sending their children to camp. Their reply was that they could not communicate
with their children while at camp. Because our boys and girls clubs operate
in heavily Hispanic populated neighborhoods, we understood that concern
and created a policy to address it. Even though we rarely allow campers
to call home, we allow parents to call their children during mealtime.
It is a welcomed courtesy that parents of first-time campers appreciate
and use extensively.
The most interesting outcome of this unique communication policy is
that by the second season, parents call fewer times than the first and
by the third they stop calling entirely. As the first strategy that demonstrated
the camp's commitment to serve parents and campers beyond customer
service and satisfaction, it has helped cement a sense of trust for the
next eleven years that has translated into more Hispanic parents sending
their children to camp.
Visits
The next time we asked for feedback from parents, their concerns focused
in one of our original policies that restricted parents from visiting
their children at camp. Our challenge was to convince parents from inner-city
Chicago — mainly first generation Hispanics — that the camp
was a fun, safe, and positive place for their children. We realized that
by not allowing them to visit the camp, the level of trust was not there.
If they were not allowed to visit their children at camp, they were not
going to send them.
In a drastic change of policy in 1996, we decided to implement an open-door
policy for all parents who wished to visit their children at camp. With
the implementation of this policy, we have seen an increase in satisfied
parents who feel part of our camp community and in control of what's
going on in the lives of their children.
Every weekend at the middle of each session, parents are welcomed to
visit their children at camp. Many of them take their kids out of campgrounds
for the afternoon and when they bring them back, campers seem to be more
relaxed and ready for the following week. Parents leave camp convinced
that everything is OK.
Each Sunday afternoon in the middle of the session, we have a giant
cookout. Many parents drive more than sixty miles to come to camp to
help at the grills and to serve the food. It becomes a family event,
a community event. The open-door policy also provides parents the opportunity
to bring clean clothes for their children, bring boxes full of goodies,
and most importantly, meet personally with the cabin counselors, the
unit leaders, and the camp director. It is partnership building at its
best.
When some parents indicate that they cannot make the decision to send
their children to summer camp because they have not seen the camp, the
camp and the clubs make it possible for the parents who lack transportation
to visit the camp. In some limited instances, when mothers show concern
about their children attending summer camp, we provide transportation
and invite them to visit the camp with their children. The Boys and Girls
Clubs have gone as far as taking groups of parents during the months
preceding the summer camp season to visit the camp and have offered summer
camp programs like campfires, songfests, etc., at the clubs during the
off season to familiarize parents and club members with the camp and
all it offers. These efforts have had a tremendous effect in the way
parents in our communities view our program and have strengthened the
relationships between parents and staff.
Parent Volunteers
Some parents, although they recognized the value of the camp experience
for their children, had never been away from their children for such
an extended period of time. They asked if they could work as a volunteer
at the camp when their child was there. Again, we were confronted with
a situation that needed special attention. How many parents should we
allow to volunteer? What should be the extent of their involvement?
Increased Community Outreach
As more parents discover the positive impact of the camp experience,
we realize an increase in both public education and public relations
on the benefits of summer camp. For example, for the last two years the
Department of Multilingual and Multicultural Programs of the Chicago
Public Schools has invited the Union League Boys and Girls Clubs Camp
to make presentations about our summer camp programs to more than two
hundred parents representing all the Chicago Public Schools. This is
a definite product of the partnerships that the camp has created over
the years with satisfied and loyal parents. Additionally, for five years,
the ULBGC Camp in partnership with ACA, Illinois has held camp informational
fairs in five Chicago Public Schools during report-card-pick-up day.
This year, we increased the number to ten grammar schools.
As we move forward in our quest to serve the disadvantaged children
living in our Hispanic and African American communities, it is clear
that we will experience more parent concerns. We are already preparing
for these concerns. For example, in November 2005, our Camp Program Subcommittee
invited a group of campers of different ages and genders — and
from different neighborhoods — to come to meet with our board and
evaluate the last summer's program together. The outcome was outstanding.
Not only did the campers feel that they had a say in the development
of the program, but parents thought that inviting their children to be
part of the process was an important step. Additionally, the subcommittee
had the opportunity to make sound recommendations that will impact the
delivery of camp programs for years to come.
The next step is to hold parent forums designed to encourage direct
response and to learn more about their concerns, ideas, and expectations.
We are continuously looking for new strategies that will increase our
parents' sense of comfort with our approaches. Our camp team is committed
to developing partnerships with other organizations that offer outstanding
programs designed to improve the quality of life in underprivileged communities.
We have partnered with FirstPic Inc., the Office of Justice Programs,
and Immersion Presents to implement a crime prevention program while
teaching campers about science and technology.
Our camp brochures are bilingual — written in both English and
Spanish — and some summer staff are recruited from the same neighborhoods
from which our clientele come. Parents are offered the opportunity to
volunteer and visit the camp and are constantly reminded of the importance
of camp-parent partnerships. The camp director makes sure that the camp
maintains a strong presence in the schools where most of our campers
attend.
The Future Looks Bright
The future looks bright for the Union League Boys and Girls Clubs Camp,
yet we remain vigilant to the many challenges that might arise in our
pursuit for excellent service. Our commitment is to serve our campers
beyond just customer satisfaction and to create strong partnerships with
their parents and the communities in which they live. Olga Gonzalez-Granat,
an educator at the Valparaiso, Indiana, school district summarized our
core camp philosophy — one that we've been practicing for
years: "The Golden Rule is out. No longer are you expected to treat
people the way you wish to be treated. The new rule is: Treat people
as they wish to be treated."
Originally published in the 2006 July/August
issue of Camping Magazine. |
