A Letter From a First-Year Summer Camp Staff Member

This blog post in support of Project Real Job offers advice on how to help first-year staff members ease into camp life.

Caught Between Two Staff Seasons: Looking Back Before Moving Forward with Veteran Staff

Now is a great time to develop a plan for inviting staff back and securing their commitment, offering leadership roles and opportunities to advance, and keeping staff engaged in the time between now and next summer. 

Biting My Nails: Revisiting Staff Anxiety

It was three years ago when I first wrote about the increasing levels of anxiety that camp directors were seeing in their staff (Ditter, 2016). At the time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta had been reporting that anxiety in children ages 13–18 was at a 40-year high (CDC, 2011). In a survey conducted by the American Camp Association’s Healthy Camps Committee after the summer of 2015, camp directors indicated that anxiety was their number one concern when it came to staff (Gaston, 2015).

Three Different Roads That Led to Working at Camp

Working at summer camp helps young adults learn skills that will be valuable in their future careers, including leadership, communication, and more.

Outside Camp Customers and Inside Camp Customers

Camp owners always remember their outside customers (camp parents and campers), but inside customers (camp staff) are just as important.

Overcome Common Barriers to Making Your Camp Staff Feel Valued

Ah, the annual review at work. Or, in our camp settings, the end-of-session/summer evaluation. What a wonderful time for me, as a supervisor, to finally tell a staff member how I think they generally did for the entire time period prior to the evaluation (at least based on the few times I saw them in action and what I heard from others). Finally, a chance to tell this staff member that even though they were never Counselor of the Week or an All-Camp Event Team Captain, they did some things well.

Camp Staffing: We Can Avoid a Crisis!

Over the past few years, directors all over the country have reported struggling with the fact that good staff are harder to find. They also indicate that it is much more difficult to convince quality applicants to accept summer camp jobs and stay for the entire summer. In the late spring of 2018, with minimum wage issues, the shortage of male candidates, low unemployment rates, and the increased number of internships, we heard more urgency. In some circles, the staffing situation was being labeled as a “threat to our industry.”

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