New year, new blog!
Well, not exactly. Our Summer Blog will continue to provide a window into the camper experience and brief descriptions of camp happenings from June through August. In addition, our Year Round Team will be sharing helpful information and resources to camp families throughout the year via our blog posts. Just another way we hope to support our campers and their families!
If you’re not interested in receiving off-season updates from our blog, it’s easy to unsubscribe. You can always re-enroll once camp is in session! We welcome any feedback you may have, as well. Send us an email at info@norwester.org; we’d love to hear from you.
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For our first post of 2020, we’d like to highlight a research study from the American Camp Association (through whom Nor’wester is accredited). Launched in 2016, the 5-Year Camp Impact Study seeks to identify and explore “the lasting impacts and the ways camp experiences prepare young people for college, their careers, and their lives beyond camp.”
Independent researchers from an external research team have been interviewing current campers, former campers, staff members, and parents from a sample of approximately 70 ACA-accredited camps. Many important findings have already been reported, some of which are highlighted in the infographic here.
We love following the study and hearing from campers and staff about how they’ve experienced the value of camp. So many of the findings that the 5-Year Camp Impact Study is cataloging now correspond with the feedback we’ve been hearing anecdotally from Nor’wester alumni for decades. Relationship skills, emotional regulation, identity discovery, independence, teamwork, leadership, responsibility, stewardship, a willingness to try new things, and an appreciation for individual differences are frequently mentioned by past and current campers and staff as key take-aways from their time at Nor’wester. Many alumni talk about how their experiences at camp equipped them for successful experiences in college and in the workplace.
So the next time someone asks you, “What is your child gaining by attending camp?”, you might want to refer to this study! Or better yet, ask the Nor’wester camper or alum in your life what camp has meant to them.
To learn more about ACA’s 5-Year Camp Impact Study, visit https://www.acacamps.org/resource-library/research/camp-impact-study.