WHY CAMP?

My great uncle started his camp career (and Scatico) in the 1920s. My daughters, in the 2000s.  In total, a century in camping, a century of working with children in an ever-evolving world. Often, we marvel at how both so much and so little has changed.

When we first launched our website around the millennium and I wrote the original Why Camp?, the American Camp Association was conducting research into the value of the summer camp experience and other non-classroom forms of teaching and inspiring children. 

Much of their findings still resonate powerfully today. They highlighted how campers learn new ways of thinking that develop their problem-solving and decision-making skills. How they learn new ways of working and effectively communicating and collaborating with others. How they learn skills for living in the world, like better citizenship, and how to take on personal and social responsibilities.   

I think back to something one of my daughter’s teachers once told me, while I was chaperoning a school trip: "I can usually tell which kids have gone to summer camp.” Her words echoed the ACA’s findings. Just think of the myriad interpersonal relationships, team-building projects, community bonding, and wonderment for nature that a child will experience at camp: cheering up a homesick bunkmate or welcoming someone new to the community; planning a divisional skit for a talent show or practicing for a sports competition; sitting around a campfire, stargazing, or marveling at a rainbow after a storm has passed.  

Yet despite all that has remained familiar, so much has changed in our world in the past decade. Politically. Socially. Technologically. A Pandemic.  Each year we, and the industry, evolve. We reflect the shifting realities of the world around us so campers can become the best versions of themselves, whatever that might look like. 

How our lives and the lives of our children will be shaped by the turmoil of the last few   years is unclear. What seems clearer to me more than ever is the value of a summer camp experience for all children: Living unplugged and connected closely to the outdoor world; forming meaningful in-person social relationships; and developing our core values and ethics both individually and as a community.

Overnight camp will continue to be about fun, friendships, and memories. About developing skills at activities on the athletic fields or in art studios. Maybe, most importantly, it will be about building character and teaching compassion; about forming a next generation that will take us all to slightly higher ground.