The daylight stretches into the evening hours now which means summer is just around the bend. We are seeing a lot of parents working hard on their forms for camp. Thank you!
Did you know on your Runoia Camp in Touch (CIT) dashboard you can find all your forms? In addition to the forms we need from you, your dashboard gives you some critical info for planning and packing for overnight sleepaway camp in Maine at Camp Runoia. Between the forms page on your dash board and the www.runoia.com page on FAMILIES, you will find:
There is an explanation of “What to expect on opening day” at Camp Runoia.
You’ll find the official Camp Runoia Packing List.
Check out the options for sending emails to your camper and where you can look at photos posted every 3-4 days during the camp season.
A link to the official outfitter of Camp Runoia – Lands’ End.
Looking for vintage Runoia gear? It’s classic and revered. Go to Amerasport.com and search for Runoia to order your throwback Runoia gear.
The Parent/Family Handbook – this is a handy document to peruse and bookmark for future reference.
The Camp Runoia app is also available on our FAMILIES page. The app allows you to keep in touch with picture posting in the summer, connect with your CIT dashboard and see scenes from around camp.
There’s much much more on your dashboard so be sure to check it out. Just picture us in the Runoia office eagerly awaiting your forms!
The end of February comes quickly with the short calendar month and the longer days in Maine’s winter season. Every day the sun shines longer and brighter and we dream of the days when we hear the screen doors slam, girls voices in laughter, song and friendship.
So much happens at camp.
Wilderness Trips Build Lifelong Skills
There’s growth and learning, building of lifelong skills in activities and receiving support to navigate independently within the community of camp. Other aspects:
Becoming your personal best
Finding friends and building relationships throughout the summers of youth and beyond.
Working through the agony of defeat and experiencing the glory of trying something for the first time.
Guiding our Runoia campers are dedicated youth professionals; coaching, supporting, and making campers laugh when they thought they were going to cry. Basically camp counselors become the adults campers treasure and look up to for years to come. Counselors focus on campers building skills, increasing self-esteem, learning to advocate and being the “stand up girl”. They also create a lot of laugh-out-loud moments in the process.
Skill Building at Camp Runoia…… Happens All Day Long
Our parents are thankful Runoia is so much more than s’mores and fun. Sure we have that going on, but, the depth of camp: learning about yourself and what you contribute to the whole, intentional youth development and life skill building is farther afield for your every day camp program.
One parent sent me an email and this link this week:
A letter to a daughter which applies to all young girls and woman – so perfectly written and seems to fit with the Camp Runoia way so wanted to pass it on:
When I read Dr. Flanagan’s letter to his daughter I had to share as he so eloquently expressed the message my husband and I hope our 14-year-old daughter and 16 and 18-year-old sons live by. I only hope my husband and I are teaching these lessons daily by our example. I am a bit disheartened at the direction corporate culture has taken, not only increasing these societal expectations on young girls but also more recently targeting young boys as well. The eternal optimist in me knows we have wonderful examples all around our children – teachers, neighbors, camp counselors, scientists… to name a few. We simply need to help our children and ourselves understand these are the people we need to emulate rather then the false role models created by corporate marketers.
This week Camp Runoia recognizes National Eating Disorder week. We encourage parents to take stock in the Runoia parent’s declaration (above). Also:
Explore resources with your children that include media literacy*, including awareness of advertising and marketing manipulation of girls (and boys).
Help your children to understand how they are marketed toward to “fit in”, “feel good about themselves” and the falseness this perpetuates at the risk of their own youth and their self esteem.
Leadership Skills Happen at Every Age Group at Runoia
Hats off to camps around the nation that delve a little deeper into the camp experience; to the camps practicing 21st century skill building, youth development and creating communities to belong to without fear of prejudice, exclusive cliques, look-ism or humiliation.
Thanks to our Camp Runoia parent who brought Dr. Flanagan’s letter to our attention enabling us to share with our camp community, peers and professionals in camp.
And, finally, how many days before we are back in our camp “bubble” where our girls can take pressure off themselves, rub a little dirt in their palms and grow into the young people they will become? Not too many – its nearly noon and the sun is still high in the late February sky!
*www.hghw.org is a girl-serving organization teaching media literacy and much more – check it out!
A package arrived in the mail this week from a camper. The box was addressed:
Camp Runoia – the most wonderful gift of all
Inside was a beautiful tree ornament of a glass kayak. The family wrote a note describing how every year they pick out an ornament that represents something important in their lives. This year, the kayak symbolized camp and how important camp was to their daughter. They thought it appropriate to mail one to camp to show their gratitude and appreciation.
At Runoia, we are thankful for the thoughtfulness of this family and also feel the gift of camp is an amazing, life changing, skill building, educational and fun experience you can provide for your children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. To all our families and all who believe in camp – thank you!
I love November and it is tied to Thanksgiving and being thankful, being around loved ones and feeling warm and fed. Thankful being the key word.
When I saw a note that said “if you left your brand new board here, we have it, call us”, it reminded me when we returned a woman’s purse and how good that made US feel (needless to say the woman!). The fascinating part of that story is that we found the purse on a hiking trail in Carrabassett Valley. When we found the ID in the wallet, it was for a student from the Bahamas. Seriously – what do we do with that? Well, when back at the condo, we searched Facebook for the purse’s owner and I shared one friend with that young woman. What are the chances? I texted my friend and viola! Purse returned. And, I digress.
November is the ultimate month for paying it forward (now a verb – the entire action of doing something for someone else after someone does something good for you).
We use the phrase liberally – giving to someone else when you don’t expect anything in return or passing along a good deed or surprising someone else with a good deed. Perhaps it’s a stretch from Lily Hardy Hammond in her 1916 book In the Garden of Delight, nearly a century ago. It was brought to current day society through Helen Hunt, Kevin Spacy’s sweet film based on a novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde – written and directed by two women, btw. Haley Joel Osment who launches a good-will movement. I hear the phrase more frequently now that social consciousness is a school yard and coffee shop subject. Maybe the film helped provide momentum for the movement – good stuff!
Overall, we just want to do GOOD. When I think of the camp experience and all the focus we have on helping others, thinking of others, including others, working as a team, giving to others, I feel #camp is all about Pay it Forward. As a camp business, we want to create good feelings, provide great experiences and hope that all the people we connect with do the same for others. #MaineCamps are exponentially doing good with thousands of campers and staff every summer and those campers and adults are going into their home communities and doing GOOD there.
So, greet November with a warm hug – go do something good for someone else with no expectation and see how great you feel. Pay it forward is easy and effective and far from overused.
It’s a sad sight seeing the empty “Kickball Field” at Camp Runoia, Belgrade Lakes, Maine. This grassy area outside the dining hall is the center of camp in many ways. Although desolate (but nice looking grass I might add) this time of year, it’s a bustling town center in the summer.
The Runoia Kickball Field is where Pet Shows, Name that Tune and Miss Tacky Runoia take place.
It’s where outdoor summer meals including lunch picnics and evening suppers and even Camp Runoia’s Sunday morning sleepy pajama breakfast are served. Of course we can’t forget the infamous saying “dessert will not be served until the kickball field is clean!” which is shouted with glee by all at the end of a Maine camp supper.
On closing days it’s the central stop for parents, families and campers reunite. A place where on quiet nights a random porcupine might be spied.
And yes, we play kickball games on the Kickball Field! We can’t wait until the Kickball Field is full of faces and fun at camp in 2014!
There are people in your life who influence your life, add to your life, perhaps even change the course of your life. I would like to acknowledge three women who were significant in my career. When I became a small business owner of a girls’ summer camp, I was enthusiastic and had a passion for being successful but in both cases it was because of the belief of others in me.
I have a lot to be thankful to my mom, Betty Cobb. There’s the obvious. There’s the whole camp director role model thing. But surprising to most, it was the way she affected people and how they grew from her leadership that inspired me the most. My mom was a tough woman, all about do the right thing and sacrifice and for the better good, etc. She had high morals, was often unyielding and worked very, very hard. She loved her family, her students and her campers and counselors. There was a tiny moment when she loved French cooking, too. I enjoyed seeing her explore that because I didn’t see my mom explore a lot that wasn’t innately part of her. She was an excellent cook and I think French cooking was a reach that gave her a new lease on life. One winter she when I was a girl, she went to France and went to cooking school. I digress. Anyway, my mom inspired me to be a hard working, do it yourself person. I wouldn’t be the camp owner/director I am today without my mom. Here’s a picture of her with my dad when she was a young camp owner and director.
The other two women come in tandem. They were both camp directors. Twenty five years ago they approached me together at a camp conference. Like cheerleaders, they rallied and pepped and told me ecstatically how they were happy I was listening to the calling of my family and becoming a fourth generation Cobb family camp owner and director. At the time, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do it. They made me want to do it. There was such glee and infusion of energy in their combined assault on me in the conference lobby of the Center of New Hampshire in Manchester, that I believed in myself that day. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I can remember the clothes I was wearing, the way the light filled the hall, the sound of the conference dimming out behind them as they chimed in unison and gushed over me in excitement. It was a moment in time that has stood still for me. It’s a framed like a picture in my mind. These two camp women, June Gray (with Pat Smith on left) from Camp Wawenock and Jean McMullan from Alford Lake Camp were catalysts for who I am today.
In honor of International Women’s Day, I’d like to thank these three women in my life for helping me believe in myself and carving out the quarter century of my life that has been the center piece of my adult career. I haven’t even started on the hundreds of young women and children and parents I have met on account of my life in camping. That I’ll have to save for another blog.
