Meet the volunteer advisory committee for the 5-year ACA research project.

On the job front, national employment reports are generally coming in positive, with some indication that salaries, wages, and benefits may be rising a little (see, for example, www.bls.gov). So how is this playing out in the camp industry? The American Camp Association’s 2016 Compensation, Benefits, and Professional Development Survey provides some insight.

The purpose of this evaluation was to understand the outcomes of appreciation, possibility, and friendship skills in a traditional camp program for youth with serious and life-threatening illnesses. A second purpose was to use the American Camp Association's (ACA) Friendship Skills outcome measures with a specific population of campers: youth with serious illness. A third purpose was to explore potential relations between campers' self-reports of appreciation, possibility, and friendship skills, and reports from parents/caregivers on these measures.

After reviewing the results of the 2015 Enrollment Survey, in general, camps had a good year as enrollment continued to rise. The majority of camps reported at least maintaining the same enrollment numbers compared to 2014, and, in many cases, they were higher. Generally, the camps in the sample were representative of overall ACA membership (231 camp directors responded). The following data, charts, and graphs are based on camp directors’ responses.

In one of her 2010 commentaries in Camping Magazine, former American Camp Association CEO Peg Smith reflected on her conversations with award-winning researcher Marge Scanlin nearly a decade earlier about establishing a strong research tradition in the ACA). She said, “We wanted to find a way to create a culture that could not only say, ‘Camp Gives Kids a World of Good,’ but demonstrate science-based evidence of such” (Smith, 2010). This contrasting desire for both anecdotes and evidence resonates with me.