LIVE OAK WILDERNESS CAMP
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Mission Statement
Live Oak Wilderness Camp brings summer camp to life all year long with fun, friendship, and leadership development for our diverse community of outstanding New Orleans kids.
About This Cause
Our mission Our mission at Live Oak Wilderness Camp is to connect and empower a diverse network of our community’s most talented kids through a summer camp full of fun, adventure, and leadership development. In our first year we have taken on the bold task of building a fully functional summer sleep-away camp for outstanding 10 to 12 year old New Orleans kids. We successfully served 110 campers from 36 public, private, parochial, and independent schools, including KIPP, Lusher, Newman, Firstline Schools, Metairie Park Country Day, ReNEW, and many others. We offer a unique approach to connecting kids who otherwise would have limited avenues to develop as peers and friends. We successfully launched in June 2014, after being incubated in the highly selective Propeller Social Venture Accelerator Fellowship. At Live Oak Wilderness Camp, we believe that the next generation of leaders in New Orleans must be a diverse network of young people who know, respect, and believe in one another. Our program model has proven to provide public charter school partners a new and valuable way to invest in their top students’ development, and in our first year we have built partnerships with all of the largest public charter schools to select and fund part of their campers’ tuition to attend Live Oak. This is demonstrative of their belief in the quality of our staff and the value of the experience, and it signals that they view Live Oak Wilderness Camp as a critical additional experience for their highest potential future leaders. At KIPP, for instance, Executive Director Rhonda Aluise not only invested in 22 seats for KIPP students to attend camp, but she also encouraged her own daughter Ella to apply and attend. Ella’s reflections are captured in video link below. Live Oak Wilderness Camp was created to address the fact that in New Orleans schools today, there are very limited opportunities for kids growing up in public schools (45,000) and kids growing up in non-public schools (19,000) to connect and develop alongside one another as young leaders. In order for our beautiful, one-of-a-kind city to embrace its greatness and overcome its challenges, we must be united; this fact was on particularly vivid display during the Katrina 10 remembrances in August. Yet still today, there are too few opportunities for our young people -- our community’s future leaders -- to interact, learn from, and grow alongside one another. This lack of connection leads to division and makes it much harder for our city to find a new way forward. Live Oak Wilderness Camp brings diverse cohorts of New Orleans children into nature and uses summer sleep-away camp and its powerful culture to remove barriers, build friendships, transcend differences, grow a sense of community, and develop the leaders who will build a better tomorrow for our city. These are lessons that continues to deepen as our Live Oak campers come together as a larger cohort once per month back home in New Orleans, and they will guide our children as they become the next generation of leaders in New Orleans. In our model our campers join forces with a team of exceptional teachers who serve as summer camp counselors, and together they connect and grow as leaders through the eleven days of camp experiences that balance fun and leadership development. Then they reconnect at six monthly leadership retreats for all campers back home in New Orleans. This yearlong set of experiences deepens their connections and forms a network of future leaders for our city. We continue to see strong demand from across the city for a high-quality experience like Live Oak Wilderness Camp. Prior to the summer we tested the demand for a concept like Live Oak Wilderness Camp and produced weekend camp experiences for 72 outstanding campers from 22 different schools across New Orleans. In addition, we grew a part-time team of 24 camp counselors and staff members. This exceptional and diverse team is comprised almost exclusively of top Teach For America corps members and Teach NOLA fellows who collectively have decades of summer camp experience, and they have brought their skills and talents from New Orleans classrooms to the summer camp environment. Our Results There are two periods of program execution with significant achievements, and we will build upon these again for our 2016 program year: 1) Summer Camp in June and July, 2015, and 2) Pilot Weekend Camps in December, 2014 and March, 2015. Summer Camp: We executed four eleven-day summer sessions and received extremely positive feedback from our diverse collection of campers and families. This quote from a mother of a Lusher Charter School student who will continue to be able to attend Live Oak as she gets older is illustrative of camp’s impact: “She had a MARVELOUS time at camp. Life changing. John and I are beyond thrilled that the age is extended!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH.” Here are two powerful video reflections from campers that illustrate the impact of camp, too: - Kolbe Cage, rising 7th grader at KIPP Central City Academy: https://youtu.be/1uHFI1PPHIg - Ella Aluise, rising 7th grader at Isidore Newman School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC1cZrS3toc Weekend Camps: This winter and spring we led three weekend camps with a diverse group of 72 campers from across New Orleans. Campers advanced from 42% to 70% strongly agree or agree on the question, "I have spent a lot of time thinking about what my strengths are as a leader." We had powerful responses from campers, too: "I changed a lot. Instead of being quiet I found my voice" (Nai’mah, KIPP Central City). Given the demand we have seen, we will continue to lead these Weekend Camps throughout the 2015-16 school year in order to build a pipeline of future campers for Summer enrollment. These campers will be a different group than our summer campers, yet as we have seen they often transition to become summer camp attendees, too. Weekend camps allow us to increase our enrollment of campers and establish partnerships with schools with which we have not yet established partnership. Who We Serve In our first year, Live Oak Wilderness Camp served outstanding 10-12 year olds from across New Orleans who were recommended by a principal or teacher. As we grow, we plan to serve campers ages 10-14. Our sliding scale model and intentional recruitment from across New Orleans public, private, parochial, and independent schools means we have a diverse group of campers at each camp session. We have male and female campers who come from every zip code across New Orleans. They are diverse in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. At Live Oak Wilderness Camp, we are open to campers who demonstrate the potential and desire for leadership, are recommended by a leader in their school, and want to learn about the outdoors, themselves and their community.