Author: Pam Cobb

The Harmonyville Quilt Project

Posted on by Pam Cobb

We are commemorating our summer of Harmonyville Camp during the 2020 pandemic with an all camp quilt project. This fall I was catching up with my friend and camp director peer, MJ Parry. She is the executive director of Fleur de Lis. She gleaned some ideas from me about how we ran camp during Covid and I picked up this idea of a camp quilt project from her.  The greatest part of the camp industry aside from helping youth and adults stretch and grow and build lifelong skills, is the way camp directors share and pool knowledge.

My co-director, Alex Jackson, and I have talked with numerous camps who wanted to know what we did to run camp safely in 2020. We have been on a panel discussion with through Maine Summer Camps Education Committee to help other directors see a path forward in 2021.  I have been interviewed for a blog with CampMinder, a national online camp information tool. One of our doctors is being interviewed for the American Camp Association’s “Camping” magazine about how we ran camp. We share.

I shared the quilt idea with Alex and she latched onto it with excitement. I asked Alex if she would write a limerick to showcase the quilt project. She is so clever!

The Great Harmonyville Camp Quilt

Harmonyville camp was a blast

Great memories that will certainly last

“Masks up and Let’s Go!”

We soon got in the flow

This quilt will commemorate the past

We came up with the instructions people would need to make their square.  Alex mailed the quilt squares to all the Harmonyville campers and staff so they can contribute their square to the quilt project with the limerick and instructions and some fun stickers on each envelope. We are seeking quilters to help compile the project this winter. The finished quilt(s) will hang in the Dining Hall and Den to remind people that Runoia girls have grit, determination, courage, love and kindness.

Love,

Aionur

P.S. Are you one of the CRH participants who enjoyed camp this past summer? Do you have a square of fabric sitting on your desk or counter top?  Sketch out your design of what the summer meant to you and get it back in the mail to camp soon!, A deadline of December 15 is set for your square to be included so our quilters can quilt this winter. Let’s go #runoiagals!

 

 

The Work

Posted on by Pam Cobb

We started our work this summer with the pressure of COVID and a full-on effort to provide camp with physical and emotional safety for campers and staff being paramount.  The rest of the world was going on outside our bubble including the tragic killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Aubery, Dion Johnson, Travon Martin, and too many others. We were all consumed in our mission about Camp Runoia Harmonyville 2020 and not thinking about the message silence was creating for our organization.

On June 2, I received a wake up email from three of our 15 year old campers. “We are disappointed you have not made a stance on Black Lives Matter. What is your stance?” We were so focused on how we could operate camp during a global pandemic that we had overlooked the importance of sharing our belief that Black Lives Matter and moreover, being a strong female organization where girls specifically need to be lifted up, that Black Women Matter. Thanks to Emily, Keira and Margo for helping us to get to work.

And we went to work. I didn’t even know the expression, The Work, I’d known Diversity, Equity and Inclusion work but not The Work. Hello! I like it. For 30 years we felt we started the work. We had reached families of color to include them to attend camp, we reviewed our hiring practices to try to find more people of color for summer camp jobs in with college students majoring in education, health care and social work. We provided staff training about celebrating differences and inclusivity. I’d been on conference panels about diversity in camp in our very white northeastern privileged resident camps. We were doing work other camps hadn’t even considered. In the late 1990s we added our Community Statement in our Staff Manual – a statement that needs revising and updating:

Camp Runoia has fostered a culture of celebrating diversity and encouraging campers and staff from around the world with a spectrum of socio-economic backgrounds as well as different religious backgrounds.  Each person in the community is treated with respect and acceptance regarding their race, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, creed, socio-economic standing, gender, disability, and culture.

Our work so far is just the tip of the iceberg. We need to do more. This summer we did a few things immediately to support Black Lives Matter thanks to the prompts of our 15 year old campers. We researched and made a plan. We celebrated Juneteenth with staff (camp was not yet open on June 19), we implemented a three part anti-racism training for staff during our upcoming staff training with anti-racism trainer, Love Foy.  We added books to our library on diversity and inclusion as well as novels with black protagonists. We created a Black Women Matter advisory board to the Runoia administrators with four alumnae who are people of color, plus a representative from the 15 year old group and one Runoia administrator. We removed the old bell post at camp that clearly screamed cultural appropriation that we had never seen before. It had just always been there and was carved by two women back in the 1930s. It seemed innocent although I never liked that there was a man at the top of the bell post at our girls camp. Blinders are hazardous. We took it down to go in our future museum and our 16 year old CITs with no prompting proposed they make a new bell post. they did it! Incredible!

When I read the newsletter, Ideas in Progress, by Crystal Williams, Vice President and Associate Provost for Community and Inclusion at Boston University, I realize we have so much more work to do. Our book club just met to discuss How to be An Antiracist. I purchased it from a black owned bookstore. If you’ve not read the book and want to visit with Brene Brown and Ibram X Kendi, here’s the podcast. Supporting black owned businesses is another way we are doing the work. I need to pace myself because I feel we are so far behind it is overwhelming. After just attending a conference on DEI, in virtual breakout rooms I heard from others that they feel overwhelmed. We can take small steps toward affecting change and success. Here’s one way we can start. Share with your family about 10 phrases that are racists that you may be surprised to learn and practice removing them from your vocabulary. Be kind. Be patient. It takes time to unlearn.

In summary we have a lot to do. Alex and I have been connecting about how to honor the people who lived and walked on the land our camp is on before we arrived. Stay in touch and we’ll have more to share!

Love, Aionur

Our Alumnae Organization Has Been Busy!

Posted on by Pam Cobb

We are excited to share the Camp Runoia Alumnae Organization’s new website. Here they share about their mission and action plan which provides campers with financial assistance to attend camp, the upcoming 115th reunion for alumnae, the most current alumnae news, featuring the president’s letter, operating camp in times of Covid in 2020, our work with Black Women Matter and the replacement of the Bell Post – the CIT project of 2020, wedding and birth announcements and more!

A big congratulations and thanks goes out to Roberta “Boop” Tabell Jordan, the CRAO president, who organized and inspired the help of Marie-Claude Francoeur, Betsy Nicholson (both serving as co-chairs to the 115th reunion), Jenny Sachs Dahnert, Chad Diamond. We give a special shout out to Sofia and Zipporah for sharing why camp matters to them.

The goal of the CRAO board in our 115th year is to inspire 115 NEW donors to donate to Runoia. Might you be able to join in and be a new donor? One of the most exciting bits of news is a few generous alumnae donors have agreed to pool together and match every dollar donated with three dollars! So, if you donate an amount like $25, it will actually turn into $100!! $50 becomes $200, etc. It’s very exciting to have people believe in the experience of camp and broaden the Runoia experience to girls who may not be able to afford camp on their own. No gift is too small! Do you need inspiration to give? Listen to Jen Dahnert’s compelling video message. Roberta has also done tremendous work on camp genealogy. Check out some of the Runoia Family Trees Boop has created – they are so cool!

You can also explore the camp logs  and learn or sing-a-long with some of the camp songs. As Jen says, click around and see what we’re all about! There is also information about the 115th reunion. For alumnae over the age of 18, you may sign up for the reunion. Gather your camp friends and come together! Alumnae under the age of 18 need to have an adult staying at camp with them during the reunion.

More information on Maine history and Maine camps is on the Maine Memory Network!

That’s the news for this week!

Love, Aionur

 

 

The Unique Treasures of Maine

Posted on by Pam Cobb

When we share the unique treasures of Maine, we reveal the value proposition of our magical Pine Tree State.  During this unprecedented pandemic, we Mainers feel fortunate to live, work and play in a state where clean, fresh air, quality water sources and majestic natural settings are just a few of the vast resources that help keep us healthy, happy and safe.  We also live in a state where the elderly nest, millennials ignite and baby boomers find their roots.

There are indeed economies of scale, but there isalso incredible opportunities to embrace “the way life should be”. If one can find the best balance of work and innovation anywhere, they can find it in Maine. Helping our buyer & seller clients to find their best path of lifelong learning and living in Maine is like making the best patch of chocolate chip cookies.  You only want to use the best ingredients (your strategic partners).  Follow a well-crafted plan of action (the best recipe).  Pay attention to the bake time (do your due diligence).  And finally, share the baked goods with the ones you love (the dream home).

If you want to explore Maine, I’m here to help you find your dream home. Also, my real estate partner, Derrick Buckspan, and our REMAX Shoreline team are available to hear about your favorite house recipe and share our best approach about buying & selling  Maine real estate .  We’re here to help you mix up your very best patch! Please feel free to give us a confidential call or contact us @ team@mainepropertysource.com or 207 831 8159

Our friend, peer and camp director of Birch Rock Camp , Rich Deering wrote this guest blog this week and we asked him to put in his contact information. He is a friend to many, lives the BRC motto “help the other fellow” and is the 2020 recipient of the

 

 

Halsey Gulick Award

Thanks Rich!

Love, Aionur

Collect Loose Change – Start Now!

Posted on by Pam Cobb

Camp Runoia families’ efforts to collect loose change from their homes, autos, drawers,
dresser tops and neighbors is making a difference in

Maine. Thanks to our campers who arrived with their change purses filled, and in some cases baggies full of coins, AND those families who mailed in their collection, we were able to raise $344.90. Matt Hoidal and his vision at World of Change WOC has made giving as easy as this

  1. Collect loose change from around your home, vehicles and from relatives
  2. Bring it to camp
  3. We combine it all and Alex delivers it to WOC
  4. WOC partners with organizations in Maine (and other states for other organizations donating).

This is the second summer Runoia collected and donated to WOC as well as our December holiday gift on behalf of our 2019 campers and families. Our donations have contributed to feeding people, providing school supplies, supplying beds to children who sleep on the floor, and more. Check out what WOC is doing and where your change goes.

Our 2020 donation was donated to The Locker Project. From TLP’s website :

Maine has the highest child hunger rate in New England and one of the highest in the nation. One in five Maine children regularly experiences food insecurity. One in three students in Cumberland County and more than half in the Portland schools are at risk of going hungry.

See how The Locker Project is managing to operate with donations and volunteers during the pandemic.

Be on the look out for reminders to collect change for next summer and find out how you can start your own collection in your community with WOC’s ideas about birthdays, Bat Mitvahs, school and business collection sites.

Last year we were able to provide backpacks and school supplies as well as one bedroom set for two children. This year we are feeding many children. Thank you for those of you who collected and contributed to make a difference. It feels good to provide food and meals to children who are food insecure and help to support them to have the band width to learn and participate in education without being hungry.

Love,

Aionur

 

 

 

 

Home School, Remote or Hybrid Learning – Runoia Can Add to Your Daily Schedule

Posted on by Pam Cobb

Trending across US education are hybrids of remote learning, home schooling and some in-person connection at schools or pop up play spaces. Let the experiential education of camp layer into your school year with these great tutorial videos from counselors. Last spring Camp Runoia staff put together about 20 videos of easy to do at home projects including science, crafts, exercise and more. You can find them all on the official Runoia YouTube channel.

Build in Break Times During Your School Day

Building exercise breaks into the school day helps increase attention and creates more brain space for learning! Fit in a break during the day by having Kara teach your children a yoga class.

Cooking is also a fun break and involves, following a recipe, measuring, learning about stove safety and more. Check out Jen and Natalie’s fun baking moments on the Runoia Youtube channel.

Craft Ideas – Stimulating Creativity

Crafts involve planning, organization and coordination – great skills. Get your Runoia “building lifelong skills” action happening by checking out our craft ideas on Youtube. Simple crafts from things around the house – join Callie to see what you can do with TP tubes or get more involved (pre-order supplies) macramé with “K” or nature imprints or marbled paper with MacKenzie. Abbie shows how to make a pipe cleaner flower, too!

Science Applied to Camp and Life Experience

Baking comes up again in the science category as does CJ’s 24 hour Egg Osmosis experiment. And, check out Ruby’s Best Paper Airplane Ever –add in some physics lessons about aero-dynamics and physics with this Scientific American article and learn how Bernoulli’s principals also apply to how a sail boat’s sails involves lift and how it harnesses the wind to move a boat forward.

Challenge your daughter to sing (and or learn and sing) Out on the Blue Waves – one of our favorite sailing songs at camp.

Love,

Aionur

The New Normal with Help from Comfort Food

Posted on by Pam Cobb

Okay. You’ve got your new normal plan for the day.

  • Early morning workout (earns the comfort food!)
  • All children are set up at their remote learning stations.
  • Recess and snack breaks and lunch are planned.
  • Dinner menu is in the works. Maybe.
  • Now dive into work and get as much done before you get interrupted and/or the school day is over.

And…what will we do after school today?

Let’s start with some fresh air and outside play.

Everyone can help fold the laundry.

Fall kitchen fun engages, educates and puts food on the table.  Food transitions from summer to fall is fun and refreshing.

We need comfort food now more than ever.

Start this apple crisps in your oven during the school day.

Preheat oven to 200 degrees. Thinly slice one apple per person. Leave the seeds in as it’s easy to eat around them. For four apples, toss with 4 teaspoons of sugar and 1 teaspoon of cinnamon. Take out a baking sheet and place a rack on the sheet, lay out the apple slices on the rack so they are not touching. Flip after an hour, check again an hour later. Will take 2-3 hours. Remove from oven when they are dry but still bend. They will continue to crisp after baking.

Try Bon Appetite’s salt and vinegar potatoes -a great twist on the roasted potatoes we all know and love.

And as a side for tomorrow night, the cheesy baked zucchini helps with the prolific zucchinis in your summer garden and involves the kids with cooking. Try Wholesome Yum’s zucchini gratin recipe making a fab low carb side for dinner. Looking up the definition of au gratin will even enhance their French skills! 

We sure miss camp food, wholesome, readily available, on time and prepared for us. Meanwhile, we can do this: plan, prepare, pivot. Repeat.

Hang in there!

Love,

Aionur

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Camp Helped Us Prepare for Teaching This Fall During COVID

Posted on by Pam Cobb

We hear great news from our teachers, now teaching on the front lines as essential workers in schools. We are grateful for their efforts at camp, helping Runoia have a successful summer, and even more grateful that they are navigating the ever-changing education landscape of teaching during COVID times.

Our Runoia teachers have shared with us about their camp experience and how it has helped them to prepare for being back at school. They feel much more prepared for COVID protocols and have less fear than their teaching cohorts who have yet to experience work with COVID protocols.

Although hand washing sounds so basic, it has proved to be an excellent practice. And, it takes repetitive practice to make into a habit. Our Runoia teachers landed back at school with a routine of mask wearing, hand washing and sanitizing and surface cleaning. They also have helped institute systems in their schools for using things like books and then putting the books in a quarantine area for 3 days. Simple things like getting children to wash hands, cover their cough have come in handy going back to school. Also, knowing and monitoring symptoms of COVID comes second nature to them now, etc. We are so impressed with their efforts.

We are happy to have help prepare both teachers and students alike to dive into the school year. Whether back to school includes hybrid, online or in-person learning and teaching, #Runoiagals are ready to roll!

 

 

A Shout Out from Dr. Dora Mills

Posted on by Pam Cobb

 

Put Your Hands in the Air! 

The sister of the Governor of Maine and former CDC Director of Maine, Dr. Dora Mills posted this about the summer camps that opened in Maine this summer:

A few weeks ago, there were numerous news stories about summer camp outbreaks in Georgia and other states. People were wisely asking why they were allowed to open. And when they did open, why weren’t they adhering to known effective strategies, e.g. masking, distancing, and cohorting? The good news is that Maine’s overnight youth camps have recently adjourned after a successful summer. They hosted campers and staff from most states in the U.S. as well as a number of other countries. I understand that it appears we did not have one summer camp outbreak. Maine’s guidance required camps to implement all of the known effective strategies. They used a great amount of creativity to implement them, and seemed to have done so very successfully. 

Although summer camps are not the same as schools, the experience here this summer gives me optimism that we can do the same for schools and other venues. Having worked with many youth camp directors over the years when I led Maine CDC, I found them and their campers a most creative and flexible group. Teachers I know or have known (including my own mother, grandmothers, aunts, and nieces) as well as school children are similarly innovative and adaptable, which are key ingredients to reopening camps as well as schools. We are also fortunate in Maine to sustain low levels of pandemic activity, although some recent outbreaks are concerning. This gives us higher chances to reconvene schools successfully in the coming weeks.

The Summer of 2020 – It’s a Wrap!

Posted on by Pam Cobb

It’s a wrap!

We made a plan, we followed the plan, we had a successful summer.

Campers connected with other campers and adults who genuinely wanted to be working with children and providing a camp experience. We had an amazing health team including two doctors who helped us navigate the ever-changing landscaping of Covid protocols.

We ran a small camp, overstaffed with lots of competent, fabulous people. We started camp in small groups, expanding the size of our groups eventually into “neighborhoods” so campers could interact with different age groups and different people. We wore masks a lot at first and as our confidence grew about the overall health of our community, we were able to interact during outdoor play without masks.  Girls got to do nearly every activity in camp including riding, ropes, waterskiing, baskets, arts & crafts, swimming, sailing, archery, canoeing, kayaking, riferly, windsurfing, volley ball, yoga, soccer, drama, evening programs, capture the flag, skits and talent show and more.

Meal times were by neighborhood and were served by staff.  Everyone wore masks in the food line and neighborhood groups lined up after washing hands in our new dining hall sink set up.  We added capacity with outdoor seating under the big tent and often ate meals outside picnic style when the weather cooperated. A big shout out to our kitchen crew and other admin and staff who helped in the kitchen. It was hot and we wore masks and gloves all of the time. The food was comforting and the snacks at shacks were a fun twist for everyone.

The weather was amazing all summer with the lake temperature getting up to 82 degrees by August. We had a few fun summer thunderstorms just to keep it real.  Sunsets did not disappoint. Many an evening ended with girls enjoying the fresh air outside while glancing up at the evening sky.  By August, dusk came early and we spotted the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the North Star and a lovely waxing moon early the month.


Our mail was delivered by the mail boat on Great Pond. And the no-package policy was a help to Runoia staff with all the pieces to manage, we got a break from packages. Campers enjoyed daily showers at their assigned time and everyone in camp helped to pick up after themselves and clean up after themselves. Life skills learned by all!

Kudos to our staff who remained on campus for nearly 6 weeks to help create this “camp bubble” of safety. It was a summer we will never forget. And now as we close up camp for 2020 we are already planning for 2021. Registration will be open by August 25. Meanwhile, here are the camp dates for 2021 to start planning for next year!