Stephen Gray Wallace, MS Ed

Growing up requires many important developmental stages and steps one must master. Camp can help.

When I was a young, first-year staff member at camp, two orientation speakers left me with distinct lessons that have carried me through forty more years in camping. The first was...

Some camps welcome teens, but others do not — perhaps because they find normative adolescent behaviors intolerable. Why should we care? Because the summer camp experience is...

Are boys in crisis? Popular literature (Raising Cain, Lost Boys, Boys and Sex) and theater (Dear Evan Hansen) seem to suggest so. Terms such as “boy code” and “toxic masculinity”...

This article discusses why it is important to challenge campers to take advantage of their opportunities so they invariably make new friends, try new activities, and become valued members of a camp community.

In her best-selling book Lean In, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg challenged women in the workforce to fight a lack of self-confidence in order to forge fulfilling and rewarding...

A well-known (believed to be an African) proverb advises us, “It takes a village to raise a child” (Goldberg, 2016). By way of explanation, the Exchange Family Center (EFC) offers...

So much of a camp director’s time is oriented toward risk reduction. From hiring lifeguards to teaching CPR, the number-one priority is “keeping kids safe,” followed by fun and...

Mike, Jim, Sarah, Eric, Jake, Marina, Michael, Hunter, Pierce . . . the names roll off my tongue too readily, capturing the enormity of loss too often. In the life paradigm that is...

Mentors come in all types, shapes, and sizes. There are loud ones, quiet ones; short ones, tall ones; young ones, old ones. The common denominator is “one” — as in “Be one!” While...