Resource Library

Each camper and staff is different. It is one of the things camp professionals know best. We go to great lengths to make sure every camper and staff feels successful. And yet we do not always understand how to do it, or even why we should.

“To you much has been given, and from you much is required.” Beyond their Biblical roots, these are certainly words for everyone to live by. Whether part of the year-round or seasonal staff, everyone at camp has a vested interest and shares in its smooth function and safe operation. Unfortunately, people tend to get tunnel vision, approaching their assigned camp tasks with blinders, either unaware or unwilling to step outside their routine to help things work better.

Imagine taking a prospective family on a tour of your wholesome, backto- nature camp. You lead them down a dirt path, over a log bridge, and along the lake's edge on a route that also includes a visit to a pink- and red-striped candy shop, a purple pizza joint, an ice cream parlor shaped like an ice cream cone, and a spherical video store . . . all on your camp grounds. Wholesome? Back-to-nature? Is that an airstrip over there? Such is the tour route when an inventive and inexpensive program activity is a hit with campers, staff, and visitors.

Thirty-four years ago I came to camp for the first time as a member of the advisory/staff training team. I was a young mother, had finished graduate school a couple of years earlier, was a certified sex educator, and had been actively involved in sexuality education for about six years. The last time I had been in the camp setting, eight years previously, I had a very different perspective. I was single, had not yet finished my BSW, and had not yet developed my own clear conceptualizations of educational principles.