I loved overnight camp. I made lifelong friendships, developed independence, and was given the opportunity to form my own Jewish identity. The summers spent in cabins along Muskoka’s shores were formative years, but they weren’t the beginning of my camping career.
Camp for me began at day camp. Sports camps and robotics camps, camps sponsored by the parks and recreation department and camps run by universities, backyard camps and private camps on acres of land, all filled my early summers with great activities and learning. For me, like too many, however, they were not Jewish experiences.
While our community is blessed with more than a dozen Jewish overnight camps spanning the religious and ideological spectrum, the field of Jewish day camping, by comparison, remains under-developed and under-utilized. Jewish day camps, housed in synagogues, schools, JCCs and elsewhere, have the potential to impact the lives of children and their families, instilling Jewish and Zionistic values and connecting Jewish families to one another.
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In addition to their own educative goals, day camps can serve another purpose. They prime the pump for overnight programs, gently acculturating campers and families toward the idea of spending a summer in cabins and actively recruiting them for overnight camp. Indeed, over the last decade, we’ve seen Ontario’s private overnight camps – many of which serve an overwhelmingly Jewish population – either buy or form deep collaborative partnership with Toronto’s private day camps. These pipelines are intentionally designed to drive campers from day camp to overnight programs.
The strategies are simple: offer overnight camp experiences for young day campers, and weeklong “taste-of” programs for slightly older campers; co-brand, ensuring the continuity of camp culture and a shared back office, among other things. It’s a successful strategy. Day camps benefit by offering new, value-added programs, and overnight camps benefit from a pipeline of campers through which they can fill bunks.
In the Jewish camping world, we’re behind on this trend. In a study we conducted in the fall we found that, of the small number of Jewish day camps in Ontario, exceptionally few have an intentional partnership with overnight camps, and across North America, the few camps that do have these relationships treat the recruitment of campers from one setting to another in an ad hoc manner, lacking the robust strategies to fully leverage the collaborative relationship.
This issue is not isolated to the field of camping. Rarely do Jewish early childhood centres intentionally feed into day or supplementary schools. Synagogue partnerships with camps – even when they lie within the same denominational movement – are weaker and less intentional than they should be. And only in recent years have we begun to make progress on linking high school students to the Hillels on the campuses where they will study.
Making this shift toward a fluid continuum of Jewish experiences will require the breaking down of institutional silos and the shifting of expectations and incentives.
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As one example, a Jewish preschool director is charged with recruiting students, offering the highest quality education, ensuring the health and safety of her charges, managing a staff, meeting city and provincial regulations, and ensuring the long-term viability of her institution. Today, she is not evaluated on how many of her children and their families continue on to other Jewish experiences, how many are members of synagogues, subscribe to PJ Library or go on to day or supplementary school. Would our community not be stronger if this were a key function of the early childhood role?
The field of private camping – where overnight camps have formed partnerships with day camps – is a model for us to replicate both in camping and in other settings. Doing so will require agencies and educators to see their role in expanding the lifelong Jewish journey of every individual.
