Canceling camp? What about the staff?

May 7

By Sarah Kurtz McKinnon

Note: This is a brainstorming blog post. If you attempt to initiate any of the suggested ideas, please check with your insurers, lawyers and other medical advisors!

The Facebook video begins with the camp director sharing the difficult news to her camp community that they will be canceling their 2020 season due to Covid-19. She lists the heartbreaking ways that different groups will be affected—she talks about the disappointment that campers and families feel, and then says, “Our camp counselors are without jobs for the summer.”

But wait.

Can we think about that a little more? Can we put our energies here? Is it a “given” that our camp counselors will be without jobs for the summer if we have to cancel our camps? Can we still fulfill many of the promises made by “Project Real Job” even though we won’t have regular camp this summer? Could we think of a win-win “Option B”?

I’ve been up late many nights thinking about this.

I’m thinking about how crushed I would have been as a counselor to learn that I would not be able to go back to the place where I felt most myself; that I would not reunite in our version of paradise with my best friends...to be honest, I would have been more crushed as a counselor than I would have been as a camper.

I’m thinking about how precious few summers we have when we are the traditional camp counselor age and all of the other things many of our camp counselors have lost in 2020.

I’m thinking about many of our staff who were counting on their camp jobs not just for a salary but also for food and housing.

I’m thinking about these promises we made to our staff about how we are awesome employers, and how crappy it feels and it is to fire them before they even start.

I’m thinking about the Summer of 2021—and how there will be no returning staff.

So, I’m brainstorming. None of these ideas have been run by insurers, doctors or lawyers, but I want to get the conversation going.

If your traditional camp program has to be cancelled, can you run a different sort of operation this summer?

Can you utilize the talented staff that you had lined up in a different way?

If you can’t, what other resources do you have for your staff?

Let’s take care of them the way that they deserve. Here are my ideas:

Fight Food Insecurity

Several camps (including the Sherman Lake YMCA and Flint YMCA Camp Copneconic) have turned into food distribution sites. They’re cooking meals, putting together grocery packages, and delivering them out into the community. Many of our camps have the unique resources of a commercial kitchen and of people who know how to use it. Can we secure funding to fight food insecurity this summer? Can our staff members run this type of program?

Some local businesses in my town have also used their commercial kitchens and pantries as makeshift grocery stores. Customers place an order online and it is packaged for pickup. This would require a bit of capital to start up (website and buying inventory), but is a huge service to a community and provides a safer way to shop. Here’s an example of a family-owned hotel in Ann Arbor that has converted its typical restaurant/lodging operation into a curbside grocery.

Create a Socially-Distanced Family Camp

Depending on the layout of your camp site, could families come to camp and stay away from each other (in individual cabins), while still enjoying time outdoors and getting a break from being at home 24/7? Could you appoint a mini-fridge and a picnic table to each cabin, so families could eat separately and avoid communal spaces? Could you have a few staff members at camp to keep things going, to clean, cook and lifeguard? Each family could have their own assigned canoe, bow and arrow and lifejackets, and it would be much easier to enforce many of Covid safety protocols in such family groups. For inspiration, check out the plans from JCC Ranch Camp in Colorado.

Create a Family Recreation Area

Maybe a family camp is too much for your site, especially if they stay overnight. But what about opening up your site for daytime recreation? Families could make reservations for a particular day. For that day, they could be assigned a particular time to use parts of your facility or be assigned specific parts of your facility for their use that day only (a canoe and paddles, a particular bathroom area/sink, an adult and child-size bow + arrows, etc.). Staff could safely facilitate outdoor recreation from a safe distance, sanitize after the day is over, and give families a needed break from being cooped up in their houses. If camp activities are too much, maybe you could just open trails and picnic spaces to a limited number of families each day, charging for a daily use pass. This type of setup could definitely keep a handful of camp counselors busy.

Form Work Crews

If camp counselors can’t come to camp to be counselors, could a handful of them come to camp to work for the summer on facility projects? Sure, you’d need some money to feed, house and pay them, but it would not be a ton. The return on your investment would surely be strong and probably long overdue, as many camps have deferred maintenance projects that never seem to get done. Think of Summer 2020 as a re-set of your camp property, and bring on a crew of camp staff to get it done. They could even live and eat in separate cabins, and you could effectively abide by the social distancing guidelines.

Create an Au Pair Agency

Many of our campers’ parents are going back to work—but safe childcare is extremely hard to find and schools are closed now (and even into the fall). If your clientele has the cash, you could have parents who would be extremely interested in hiring an in-home nanny for the summer season. What better a nanny to bring in than a displaced camp counselor? Now, I realize there are liability concerns here—but there are ways to do this. Au Pair agencies place in-home nannies all of the time. A camp counselor (pre-screened by the camp) could interview with a prospective family, the camp could provide virtual training, and then the counselor (with testing or a quarantine period) could move into the family’s home for the summer. The family could pay the camp some sort of placement fee OR could pay the camp for the service, and the camp could pay the counselor.

Match Alumni and Parents with Interns

You’ve got parents and alumni in your camp community who are doing interesting things. You’ve got camp counselors with cool ambitions and lots of skills. Could there be a mutually beneficial way to pair up your counselors with professionals in your camp community to do summer projects? Could a camp counselors serve as a remote research assistant for a lawyer? Help a small business get their social media marketing going? Write content for a company’s blog? Even if not all of the intern-offerings are paid, this is a worthwhile venture. If you can do nothing else, email your parents and alumni and tell them that you have however many camp counselors who are all out of work for the summer, and ask the for help placing these camp counselors in summer experiences that are educational and career-related. This could be a win-win situation for both the professional adults in your community and for your staff.

Alternatively, you could ask your counselors if they would like their resume to be shared with your alumni and parent community. The very least we can do is help connect our displaced staff with other opportunities.

Those are my ideas—for now—but I want to keep thinking about this. Our staff members will remember how they were treated during this crisis more than anything else. Transparency, care, and a good-faith effort to make sure their summers aren’t a total loss will benefit them and can even benefit our camps. What other ideas do you have? Let’s hear them in the comments.