Camp Champions Blog

This blog is written by Steve Baskin in response to Meg Clark's The Hidden Danger: Saving Our Children From Social Media. 

First, I want to thank Meg Clark. In fact, I feel a need to thank her for many things. Allow me to share a short list.  

14 years ago, a dear friend and exceptional camp professional named Meg Clark started a new camp called Camp Lonehollow - a rare and daunting task.  From the start, we at Camp Champions felt a great kinship to Lonehollow.  Like us, Meg saw camp as a uniquely powerful opportunity to help young people grow into caring, confident and contributing adults.  She shares both our passion for teaching life skills (from leadership to collaboration to resilience) and our concerns regarding social media.  Camp Lonehollow is now part of the Young Life family, but Meg continues to be a leader in our industry serving on the Board of the American Camp Association.

In a recent conversation, we simultaneously suggested the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” to each other.   We see it as a clarion call to parents and young people to understand their challenges (even threats) of social media.  Since she is a thought leader without a platform, I have invited her to share her thoughts on the Camp Champions blog.  Thank you for sharing your wisdom Meg!

“We help make strong kids.”

Each year, we are asked to make presentations at national camp conferences about our high school leadership program.  We call it the Senior Camper program and it serves teens finishing 9th, 10th and 11th grades.  Here is an overview of the program.  I hope you can see why it has become an nationally recognized!

(This is the fourth in 4 articles on the “Four R’s” that we stress at Camp Champions)

As you might have seen in a previous article, we focus on the “Four R”s:
1. showing Respect,
2. taking reasonable Risks,
3. Reaching out to others, and
4. taking Responsibility.
This article talks about what we do to stress Reaching out to others.

I occasionally run out of inspiration for blog topics.  [Note: some of you may deem that I have already done so and continue to write nonetheless.  There are days I agree!]

I have shared this story with parents and with counselors for years.  Last year, a former camper asked that I write it out for a leadership class he was working on.  When a parent also asked me about it, I decided to share it here,