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Archery sheds and bulletin boards
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Visit and consult with enough camps, and you learn to pay attention to the small stuff. At Camp Turner in the Buffalo area, two small things told me almost everything about their culture. An archery shed. A bulletin board in every cabin. Walk into the archery shed and you’ll see the bows labeled and the arrows stored properly. If you were just passing it, I doubt it would stand out compared to so many other great facilities. But whoever set that shed up cared about it. Whoever uses it every day is still choosing to care about it. Which is the whole game. Then over to the bulletin board. Every cabin at Camp Turner had a token-based skill progression board on the wall. Kids knew exactly what level they were at in archery, in outdoor living, in whatever else the camp ran. And they were bragging about it. “I made it to marksman.” “I made it to woodsman.” That kind of talk. During the school year, kids are collecting badges, moving up belts, hitting the next level in sports. Everything they do is skills-based. Then they show up to camp, and half the time nothing has a ladder attached to it. The Camp Turner board gives them the ladder. Program progression is the thing camps take for granted the most. A pottery studio where kids build the same mug every day gets boring. The friendship bracelet is fun for an afternoon. A real woodworking program teaches a lifelong hobby. Stewardship of the space and progression of the skill. Both look small. Both actually tell you whether a camp respects its own program. Walk your camp when it is empty this fall. Look at the storage. Look at the bulletin boards. What do they say about how much you love the place, and how much you expect your campers to build on what they started last summer? The answer is already written on and inside the walls. Sincerely, Dan Weir Sincerely, Senior Consultant at Immersive1st Learn more about Immersive1st's Approach |
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