summer to meet demand by adding staff.

Goldscher hopes to receive a Yedid Nafesh
grant from the Foundation for Jewish Camp
in support of mental, emotional, social and
spiritual health.

The ACA has put a greater focus on making
sure camps have the capacity of mental health
support staff to handle heightened needs
going into 2022.

Training is available at association
conferences, virtually and through external
programs such as the accredited “Mental
Health First Aid.” The association is also
working on developing grant-funded wellness
tools for camps.

Creating Space
To anticipate camper and staff needs, some
camps made adjustments to programming
in 2021, focusing on more outdoor activities,
slowing down the pace or creating intentional
spaces to breathe and adjust.

“We really believe that being outdoors is
great for kids’ mental health, their relational
health and their physical health,” says
Clendenin, noting that being pent up indoors
the last two years brought them challenges.

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Calleva Dolan says Focus Family was doing more
outdoor field trips and hikes instead of
museums and theaters, and the organization
changed how groups were rotating so they
didn’t overlap.

While some logistical changes came from
the need to social distance, Goldscher says,
having slower pacing and spending more time
in smaller peer groups took the pressure off
campers as well.

One notable change at Focus Family was
the use of relaxation spaces for campers to use
when things got too overwhelming. Although
it’s always something the camp has offered,
especially helpful for campers with autism, it was
used much more last summer. Campers even
had some group quiet times in those spaces.

“It was almost like normal life was too much
for them,” Dolan says.

Dolan also added meditation to weekly
sessions at camp at the recommendation of an
academy teacher. It had been done in karate
classes before, but never at camp.

Looking Ahead
Last summer was, in some ways, a guinea pig
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for 2022, as 82% of overnight camps and 40%
of day camps did not have the opportunity to
operate in 2020, Rosenberg says.

As winter recruitment for this summer’s
camp season starts, he says the focus will be
on camps communicating effectively with
parents and guardians on how to best meet
their children’s needs.

If staff don’t receive enough information,
Clendenin says, sometimes they are “discovering
challenges on Tuesday that maybe we could
have been better prepared for on Monday.”
Dolan says she found out what campers
enjoyed last summer so that she can keep
the things that worked, such as indoor
cooking classes.

Often, parents are more anxious about camp
than children are, she says, so she sends them
photos in real time so that they can see their
children are doing well.

“I think in a lot of ways parents may have
been through more than children,” Dolan adds.

“A lot of them (the kids) are young enough to
not really recognize what normal should be, so
they don’t always feel the loss of normal the
way that adults do.” n
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