Focus on Catholic identity, accessibility and facilities improvement is helping re-establish camping as ‘important element of the archdiocese,’ director says
By Kevin Birnbaum
After a decade of declining enrollments, things are looking up for the archdiocese’s Catholic Youth Organization summer camps.
“It was a huge change, and a lot of that stemmed from focusing back on what makes us unique, and that’s being Catholic,” said Megan Raymond, director of camp services for the Archdiocese of Seattle’s Office of Youth and Young Adult Evangelization.
“For a long time we were basically like YMCA camp or Camp Fire, and we didn’t really have an identity of who we are,” she said.
Last summer saw an added emphasis on morning and evening prayer, discussions of social justice, eucharistic adoration for high schoolers, and “making sure that Mass was the heart of everything we did at the end of the week.”
“Because the faith development of the young people at the camps — that’s the critical thing that we’re trying to do,” Raymond said. “We want the kids to walk away with a better relationship with God and a better understanding of their faith in a very practical way.”
The response from parents and kids has been “tremendous,” she said, even among non-Catholic campers.
“We had an email sent to us this fall from a youth minister in a parish about a kid that had attended camp for a few sessions at Hamilton that was actually interested in being baptized, so we’re definitely pushing into that mode of evangelization.”
Registration on the riseIn addition to the spiritual rejuvenation, the CYO camps are also getting a physical facelift.
“The archdiocese has really kicked in in the last few months to help us with a decade-long list of deferred maintenance,” Raymond said. “We’d kind of been limping through for the last few years,” without the funds for necessary repairs.
At Camp Don Bosco in Carnation, bathrooms with leaky fixtures and curtains for stall doors are being remodeled, and the roof of the kitchen is being repaired.“It’s going to make a much more comfortable experience for those kids,” Raymond said.
A third arena is also being built for the popular horseback riding camps, which were consolidated at Don Bosco last year. In the past, horse camp had also been held at Camp Hamilton in Monroe.
There are already 44 percent more campers registered for horse camp — 405 total — than attended all last summer, Raymond said.
The recent addition of an “extreme” camp featuring paintball and a high-ropes course has also helped turn around a negative trend in junior high enrollment.
Overall registration for the summer camps is well ahead of this time last year, and CYO is hoping for another 10 percent increase in enrollment, to 1,554. At the pace enrollments are going, there could even be hundreds more campers than that, Raymond said.
Making camp accessibleCYO is also working to make camp more affordable. Last summer, families received more than $90,000 in scholarships, Raymond said.
CYO has started offering free buses to camp from the further reaches of the archdiocese, like Bellingham, Port Angeles and Vancouver. The burden of driving children to and from camp was preventing some parents from signing their kids up, Raymond explained.
With “the amount of time they would have to take off of work, plus the cost of the gas to and from, it was not financially feasible” for some parents to drive their kids to camp, she said.
So far, the program has been a success. “We had full buses a lot of the time,” Raymond said. “We had very thankful parents.”
This year, CYO is starting a partnership with Catholic Community Services, allocating scholarships specifically for needy children served by CCS and Catholic Housing Services of Western Washington.
“We’re looking to send between 20 and 30 kids” through the partnership, Raymond said.
She said the CYO staff is “really excited about where we’re going and what we’ve done in a very short amount of time.”
“We’re not quite where we want to be, but I think that we are making great headway in re-establishing Catholic camping as an important element of the archdiocese.”
April 25, 2013