The Rest of the Year – Part 1
As promised earlier, we thought we would take time now and then to describe what it is we do ‘the rest of the year’! It’s the question posed to camp directors universally. What appears to be a fun and perhaps easy job in the summer, seems even less demanding once the campers depart from camp, right?? Well, in a way, yes! When you love a job – as we do! – it has a certain ‘easy’ quality to it. We can’t wait to get going every morning! But, it can be very demanding and time-consuming to address all the needs of creating the unique and special community each and every summer.
So, what are we up to at this time of year? We recently completed our year end report – a description of how the summer went and what we did to ensure it was another good season on Hunter Lake, wrapping up with how we can address any problems that arose and what we can do to make the experience even better next summer. It is a great way to reflect on all the intricacies of keeping the camp running smoothly. It’s not terribly exciting (at times its rather mundane) work, but it’s still fun to examine what went well and dream about what we can do differently. This report is not just for us, it also gives us a tool to share with our Advisory Board as well as the Dominican Sisters who are interested in how the camp supported their mission in the past year. In short, we get to share how much fun it really is at camp!
After all that reflecting and exploring, it’s time to take that info and use it to start figuring out how we’re going to get our campers to return and get new families interested in what WeHaKee has to offer. Like trying to capture lightning in a bottle, trying to explain the amazing quality of the WeHaKee experience to someone not familiar with the camp is somewhat tricky. How will they find out about camp? … from friends and neighbors? … through information on the radio, TV or in newspapers or magazines? … on the internet? It seems almost counter-camp to have to use all these artificial means to share the message of such a pure and unadulterated experience as camp. But if they don’t know about Camp WeHaKee, they will never come to experience it! So this time of year, a lot of time is spent exploring, researching, examining, discussing and agonizing over where to spend our money in our mission to share the word of WeHaKee! Today for example we spent time with a public radio representative exploring if sponsorship on their airwaves might be an effective way to reach families who would can appreciate a quality camp experience.
Similarly, we are also trying to determine the best way to get the word to new potential staff to let them know about this amazing opportunity and why they should consider giving a summer (or 2 or 3) to serve the Camp WeHaKee community! It takes time to first inform those potentially amazing counselors that this experience even exists, before we can even begin to encourage them to join us for the summer.
The beauty of all of this is that when we tap into people who have an interest, we get to talk to them … about camp! We talk about camp all year long, with anyone and everyone who wants to listen! The only thing that could be better is if camp simply lasted 12 months a year – now wouldn’t that make for a better world!
