When a crisis hits — a missing camper, a flash flood, a wildfire, or an intruder on site — will your staff know what to do? Not just in the first five minutes but in the hours that follow? Most camps run safety drills throughout the summer, and these are important. However, drills alone are not enough. A true crisis response requires a comprehensive, practiced plan — one that’s adaptable, coordinated, and understood across every department of your organization.
A crisis plan is far more than a binder that checks a compliance box. It is your camp’s strategic roadmap for navigating uncertainty. It provides structure when stress and emotions are high; guidance when decisions must be made quickly; and reassurance for families, staff, and campers when everything feels uncertain.
We will highlight how you can build a plan that’s both meaningful and actionable, and how to ensure it works when it’s actually needed.
Why a Crisis Plan Is Essential
An effective crisis plan helps camps minimize disruption, protect people, and return to normal operations as quickly and safely as possible. At its core, it is designed to reduce harm — both physical and reputational — while ensuring that a camp can continue to function, even under the most challenging circumstances.
Crisis plans support clear, strategic decision-making by outlining procedures for communication, evacuation, medical care, and coordination with emergency responders. They detail who does what, how key stakeholders will be notified, and what steps to take across a wide variety of situations. By assigning roles and responsibilities in advance, plans prevent confusion and support fast, confident action.
Equally important, a comprehensive crisis plan also includes support systems for staff, campers, and parents. Mental health resources, communication protocols, and recovery strategies ensure that everyone involved feels safe, informed, and cared for. A well-crafted plan allows your organization to be proactive rather than reactive — and that distinction can make all the difference.
Drills vs. Crisis Plans: Understanding the Difference
It’s important to distinguish between routine safety drills and a full-scale crisis simulation. Drills typically focus on isolated events — like a lost swimmer or fire alarm — and tend to emphasize immediate reaction over long-term response. A crisis plan, by contrast, is an overarching framework that addresses a wide range of possible emergencies, including natural disasters, intruders, major medical events, or infrastructure failures.
While drills often end after 15 or 30 minutes, a crisis simulation — based on a real plan — should continue well beyond the initial phase, lasting perhaps a half day or a full day. It must test your team’s ability to coordinate across departments, sustain communication, manage resources, and recover from disruption. In short, your plan must go beyond a drill.
Sample Table of Contents — Crisis Manual
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How Do You Make Your Plan Robust?
To be effective, a crisis plan must begin with a thorough assessment of the risks most likely to affect your camp. These may include, among other hazards:
- Natural threats like lightning, tornadoes, floods, or wildfires
- Animal encounters with snakes, bats, or bears
- Human-related risks like intruders, vehicle accidents, or facility hazards
Once identified, these risks should be paired with mitigation strategies sourced from trusted authorities, including local law enforcement, emergency management, and public health departments. Key internal stakeholders should review and update your chart annually. For example, the Risk Exposure Chart we worked on together grew to 24 pages over the past decade.
The plan must also include accurate and up-to-date contact information for key stakeholders. This includes not only internal leadership, but also local hospitals, law enforcement agencies, your insurance provider, board members, and any relevant emergency operations officials. Knowing whom to call and having that information readily available saves critical time in an emergency.
Equally important is role clarity. A designated crisis team should include leadership roles such as the CEO, owner, or camp director, as well as heads of operations, programming, facilities, and medical care. Determine who should be on your crisis team. Each person on the team must understand their role and responsibility, including who leads the overall response and who handles communication, logistics, staff and camper communications, and family coordination.
Your plan should outline how and when to communicate with parents, staff, the board (if applicable), insurance, and partner organizations. And it should include protocols for documenting incidents through clear, easy-to-complete forms that capture what happened, when, where, and who was involved, in real time.
An effective plan also identifies a crisis headquarters — a physical space equipped with basic creature comforts, phone and internet access, and emergency supplies. Backup spaces should be designated as well, in case your preferred space is in the center of the crisis and unusable.
A robust crisis plan also includes mental health and recovery support. Camps should consider establishing relationships with external counseling organizations or leveraging support from their insurance providers. After any crisis, the emotional well-being of staff and campers must be a top priority.
Finally, your communications strategy — both internal and external — needs to be proactive. Prepare sample statements; consider developing a pre-prepared, fill-in-the-blank template that allows you to issue a statement in as little time as possible, with suggested wording from authoritative sources, such as ACA, which reflect your camp’s values and mission. Assign a trained and authorized spokesperson as part of your plan. Your insurance company will often have materials to help in advance or when a situation warrants additional resources. Knowing how to speak with parents, the media, and partner organizations with clarity, compassion, and credibility is key to successful crisis communication.
Writing and Storing the Plan
Creating a crisis plan should be a collaborative effort, ideally involving your camp director, operations and facilities leaders, and members of your camp’s senior leadership team. Once written, it should be reviewed not only by your internal team, but also by outside stakeholders such as your insurance company, legal counsel, local emergency officials, and board members. Asking for external perspectives and being open to critical feedback can uncover blind spots and help strengthen the plan.
The plan should be easily accessible. Make sure you store it in a shared online drive, and place an up-to-date printed version in multiple key locations across your camp — such as the main office, dining hall, health center, and maintenance buildings. As a best practice, date the title page so staff can confirm they have the most current version.
Review the plan at least once a year, and more frequently if your staffing structure or policies change. Plans lose value if they become outdated or are forgotten.
Designing and Conducting Realistic Simulations
Once your crisis plan is written, you need to test it. This is when simulations come in.
Start by choosing a realistic emergency scenario — something like a prolonged power outage, a fast-moving wildfire, or a water system failure. The goal is not to create drama but to replicate the types of stress, complexity, and resource limitations you would face in a true crisis. Be intentional about the objectives you want to test, such as decision-making, communication breakdowns, and evacuation procedures.
Assign roles that reflect real responsibilities. Your incident commander should be the same person who would lead during a real crisis. The internal communication lead should use actual radios, phones, or PA systems. The external communications lead should handle mock press statements and mock website updates. Your staff should handle medical response using your own first-aid kits and supplies.
It’s important to keep the scenario grounded in reality. Only use the people, buildings, tools, and equipment you would actually have in the moment. If your simulation requires extra roles that you wouldn’t typically fill, scale it back. The goal is to reflect potentially true circumstances and avoid fantasy.
Equally important is emotional safety. Make it clear to staff that this is a test of systems, not individuals. Use existing support structures to check in after the simulation and see how people feel about the experience. Psychological safety is essential if you want people to learn and improve — and staff also likely have valuable insight that, if shared and implemented, can strengthen the plan and process.
Evaluation and Debrief
The most valuable part of a crisis simulation is the debrief. This is where actionable learning occurs.
After the exercise, bring your team together and ask:
- “What worked?”
- “Where did confusion or delay occur?”
- “Did people follow the procedures, or were the policies too complex?”
- “Did staff have access to needed resources?”
- “Were supervision and accountability adequately maintained?”
Also explore emotional and social impacts: How did staff and participants feel during the drill? Were there moments of panic or disconnection that might affect a real emergency response? What additional support(s) might be needed?
Gather feedback from all participants and encourage honest feedback. Often, the biggest takeaways come from parts of the simulation that didn’t play out effectively enough to succeed. Use this information to revise your plan, update procedures, and prepare for another simulation that targets the identified weak spots.
A Living Plan with a Culture of Preparedness
A crisis plan is not a one-time project. It’s a living document that grows with your camp. It should be regularly practiced, refined, and owned by your entire staff — not just your leadership team.
Encourage team buy-in by reminding staff that the purpose of this work is to support each other and protect your camp community rather than to catch people making mistakes. True preparedness is built on trust, shared responsibility, and an understanding that emergencies are no time for improvisation.
Use simulations to reveal limitations and design better systems. Turn reflection into action. And when possible, use tools like ChatGPT to get feedback on your plans or to help craft scripts or scenarios. But don’t outsource your expertise — AI does not, cannot, and will not know your camp like you do.
When the unexpected happens — and it eventually will — you’ll be grateful for the time you invested in building a thoughtful, practiced, and deeply human crisis-response plan.
Additional Resources
- “Crisis Response — Tips for Camps,” American Camp Association: ACAcamps.org/resources/crisis-response-tips-camps
- “Crisis — It Can Really Happen to You 2024” webinar, American Camp Association: ACAcamps.org/events-education/online-learning/recorded-webinar/crisis-it-can-really-happen-you-2024
- “The Crisis Communications Handbook: Templates and Sample Forms and Letters” book supplement, American Camp Association: ACAcamps.org/resources/crisis-communications-handbook-templates-sample-forms-letters
- “How to Run Effective Crisis Simulation Exercises for Reputational Resilience” video, Insignia: youtube.com/watch?v=yMEzkYzmVxE
- “Crisis Response Training: Coaching Non-Counseling Staff to Respond,” by Linda Ebner Erceg, RN, MS, PHN, Camping Magazine: ACAcamps.org/article/camping-magazine/crisis-response-training-coaching-non-counseling-staff-respond
- “Armed and Dangerous: Fugitive Situations Near Camp,” by Brent Clark, Zona Hutson, Brenda Pruett, Julie Tritz, and Autumn Starcher, Camping Magazine: ACAcamps.org/article/camping-magazine/armed-dangerous-fugitive-situations-near-camp
Pam Gregory, MA, CCD, has over 30 years of experience in camping and outdoor education. Her outdoor leadership journey includes roles with Girl Scouts, Trail Blazers, and Girls Quest. She most recently served for 11 years as President and CEO of the Princeton-Blairstown Center. She runs a coaching and consulting practice and can be reached at [email protected].
Maren Morsch, MPA, has 15 years of experience in outdoor education through her work with the National Park Service, NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, and currently is a co-director at the Princeton-Blairstown Center.
