Families have chosen Maine camps for their children for more than a century.
Learn about camps from the inside! Camp directors and staff, plus parents, address everything from beating homesickness to favorite camp foods to how camp fosters resilience and independence, all in blogs dedicated exclusively to Maine summer camps.
When the summer camp season ends, most camp personnel return to their work or school endeavors. But Maine camps also have year-round employees, a core group whose members often wear many hats in performing the vast range of tasks associated with operating youth camps. Some of those year-round employees are in the early stages of their professional camp careers; many have ascended to their positions after years as campers and seasonal staff members. In the past year a group of such young camp professionals has joined forces to form the Maine Summer Camps Outreach Committee. Their goal is multi-faceted, says Kristy Andrews, assistant director at Camp Wawenock, a girls’ camp in Raymond. Andrews, along with Matt Pines, a director at...
Each summer, residential youth camps across the state enroll thousands of youngsters from throughout the country and around the world. And each of those Maine camps employs nurses to meet the health care needs of campers and staff alike. As pre-season planning moves into its final stages, some of those camps still have vacancies on their nursing staffs.
When camp personnel gathered in New Hampshire earlier this month for the annual American Camp Association-New England conference they were offered dozens of workshops for improving camp operations. Among the presenters was Sarah Gordon Littlefield, director of Vermont’s Aloha Camp, a residential camp for girls aged 12-17. Littlefield delivered a wide-ranging talk, offering her audience background on the current gender gap in the U.S., concepts underlying female adolescent development, characteristics of safe communities that help develop leadership skills, and ideas for creating those safe spaces. And her message was clear: girls can be resilient, confident leaders. And camps can help make that happen. Littlefield began her presentation with statistics exemplifying the...
Camp offers kids a vast array of benefits – time in nature, new skills, and lifelong friendships. But at many camps there’s another perk – weeks free from devices. No phones, no screens, no social media. And while it may take a few days of adjustment, camp directors say kids gain on a whole range of fronts, from their appreciation of the outdoors, to their ability to socialize, to the quality of their sleep.
Families looking for Maine youth camp experiences this summer will have a unique opportunity on Sunday to find out just how many options kids have. Maine Summer Camps, a non-profit membership organization supporting more than 120 Maine camps, will holds its ninth annual Maine Summer Camps Fair on Sunday, March 18. The fair will take place from 1-3:30 p.m. at East End School, 195 North Street, in Portland. MSC Anticipates 70 Camps to Partake in the Fair Ron Hall, executive director of Maine Summer Camps, says the organization anticipates about 70 camps to participate, “everything from magic camp to drama camp to music camp to science camp.” Hall says the fair will include traditional overnight camps, agency camps such as...
Lisa Tripler owns and directs Oxford’s Kamp Kohut with her husband, attorney Dan Rapaport. And back in the early 90s, when the couple contemplated purchasing the camp property, Tripler says she “managed to convince my husband that this would be the dream of a lifetime.” His response, she says, was to fully support her – and concede that at the very worst the purchase would be a sound real estate investment. But the dream has been coming true for a quarter century. Nearly twenty-six years after that purchase, Kamp Kohut continues to thrive as a unique co-ed camp, what Tripler calls a “brother-sister model.” “I want them to leave glowing,” she says, “just feeling really proud of themselves for learning...
When close to 80 Maine camp directors gathered Tuesday in Portland to discuss diversity and inclusion, they were challenged to consider the impact of differences and division, and to seek to “create balance in an unbalanced world.” The workshop was sponsored by Maine Summer Camps, a non-profit organization supporting the work of more than 120 member camps. It was led by Niambi Jaha-Echols, a former American Camp Association board member, an expert in the field of cross-cultural agility, and long-time advocate of doing “heart-centered” work to achieve human connection among different communities and cultures. Jaha-Echols and Meg Kassen, director of Hidden Valley Camp in Freedom, began the session by telling the group that the word “camp” has an early 16th...
Summer in Maine brings kids a whole host of opportunities. Camps and recreational programs expose youngsters to the state’s vast natural beauty and give them the chance to learn new skills, make new friends, and play hard outdoors from dawn to dusk. But there’s a Maine non-profit reaching thousands of children each year and teaching an entirely different set of skills. Come this summer, the organization will offer approximately 50 separate weeks of STEM education to day campers from Berwick to Ft. Kent. And, for the first time, it will offer two weeks of overnight camp, hosted by Colby College in Waterville.
Long-time Maine camp director and owner Sarah Seaward says there’s a camp out there for every child. Seaward has been at the helm of Raymond’s Camp Nashoba North for decades; her advice for families looking for a summer camp is straightforward. Do your research and listen to your child.
Caribou herds. Wolves. Evidence of native encampments. When youngsters embark on the Chewonki Foundation’s pinnacle wilderness trip to Northern Quebec and Labrador they see a whole different world. The George River Expedition first set out in the summer of 1991, a challenging canoe adventure through subarctic terrain. It’s a life-changing leadership opportunity, says Greg Shute, vice president of the Chewonki Foundation. “It all started to percolate in the late 1980s,” Shute says. After offering a number of month-long canoe trips to central Quebec, “it was clear kids on that trip really wanted to go to the next step.” That meant venturing further north and paddling more challenging waters. Shute and his now-wife Lynne Flaccus paddled the area in a sort...
