Camp Augusta
Flat Hierarchies, Fire Breathing, and Great Jobs
So happy to write about summer camp this week.
Use this form or reply to suggest a project, interesting link, or open role.
This Week:
Camp Augusta
A few quick links
7 open roles around the country
Camp Augusta
About a year ago, as APB's spring semester wound down, some of the good folk from Camp Augusta reached out to me seeing parallels between our programs from afar.
At that time, they were finishing their summer hiring campaign and curious if any of our students or staff were interested in joining them for their summer program.
For me, this was a moment of wonderful coincidence. I had heard about Camp Augusta a few years earlier while working at Four Winds Camp, my starting point in experiential education and the outdoors.
I grew more and more curious about it as I heard stories from friends who had worked there or attended as kids.
The camper experience sounded like a wonderland of imagination, self-direction, and agency, e.g. being woken up in the morning by an olde timey prospector or choosing between archery and fire breathing for the afternoon activity.
The staff experience was characterized by a flat hierarchy and consensus-based decision-making; something, at the time, I had been reading about in Frederic Laloux's classic Reinventing Organizations.
Designing project-based English classrooms in Mongolia had deepened my interest in both student self-direction and flatter hierarchies, but I still had a hard time imagining them (or fire-breathing) fully realized at a summer camp.
Honestly, the whole thing sounded a bit over the top, so, last week, I caught up with Randy Grayson, the long-time director of Camp Augusta to get a more complete picture than my tired memory from friends and friends of friends.
I quickly realized that what I had heard really wasn’t too far off. In many ways, Camp Augusta looks like a regular three- to four-week sleepaway camp, but, scratching the surface, the origins of those stories emerge.
In their words:
Campers choose four different activities each day, so there’s that element, but we spend more time thinking about the creative and expressive elements of the Camp experience.
We try to weave those into more standard activities, but they shine in larger design elements like special wake-ups, playstations, evening activities (which are never repeated, ever), and cabin story experiences.
As we talked, I particularly loved hearing about how their program design for campers mirrored their staff community’s formation, i.e. the process of creating community accords facilitated by a counselor among a group of campers matches, in many respects, how the staff determines its own governance and decision-making.
Importantly, the staff decisions and commitments carry on from year to year, allowing roles and responsibilities to remain distributed in a predictable fashion, though they remain up for renegotiation as time, energy, and impact allow.
Camp Augusta’s commitment to training and professional development helps make so much of this work. Randy thinks their training is the longest, most intensive of any summer camp in America. And in an attempt to make it even more valuable to their staff, they used to offer it as a 12-credit college course on psychology and human development.
In their words:
Camps started as a salve and anti-thesis for what was happening in the "modern" (late 1800's) world.
To varying degrees, that intention carries forth to this day. At Augusta, we look to highlight, soothe, and inspire, while:
Embodying a WIDE range of human creative expression and experience (where schools focus on knowledge and passing tests of such)
Being very close to nature, without nearly all of the things/comfort of house and home, hopefully appreciating nature up close for a long time, and realizing happiness isn't thing based.
Going from little knowledge of community and diverse connections, to bathing in it for weeks at a time. Augusta follows the "Dunbar Limit" of 150, so community is more readily felt/experienced.
Offering the staff about 400 hours of professional development before the first camper arrives, so that they can be the life changers we speak of.
There is certainly so much more, as traveling to a community for an extended period of time is like being enmeshed in a foreign country.
Camp Augusta is still looking for two Counselors and one Program Director for the summer of 2022.
Links
A great summer camp empowers campers to be themselves and to try out new identities. I felt this as a kid, supported it as a staff member, and am delighted to read research about this so-called “Batman Effect.”
A combination of being in Ireland and reading this article about South Georgia Island reminded me of the recent discovery of Shakleton’s ship, Endurance. If you haven’t read Alfred Lansing’s wonderful book, please do.
I was glad to see some movement of the needle to improve America’s forests. Of course, better federal forest management is sorely needed, e.g. more resources and manpower for controlled burns and load reduction. But I was also glad to see a reference to a “Guidance on Valuing Nature.” Much more is needed.
Great Jobs
Carpe Diem Education (International)
Seasonal (Fall): International Instructor
EdWell (Remote)
Full-time: Operations Manager
Family Engagement Lab (Remote)
Full-time: Project Manager; Customer Success Engineer
The Mountaineers (Seattle, WA)
Full-time: Associate Director of Grants
Southwest Conservation Corps (Durango, CO)
Seasonal (Summer): SCC Forest Health Partnerships Program (Americorps)
Washington Land Trust (WA)
Full-time: Executive Director
Wildland Trekking (Felt, ID)
Full-time: Assistant Program Manager
✌️
Ciarán