Woot! Camp Conference

Teri, Tom and I just got back from the Tri-State Camp Conference which is held every year.  It's a gathering of people from all facets of the summer camp profession.  As you can imagine, most of the attendees are directors like us.  But there are also camp counselors, professional speakers, child psychologists, camp nurses and administrators from the American Camp Association.  There are also plenty of vendors who sell specialized products and services to camp.  The people who sell us our sports equipment, the company we buy our skate park pieces from, even the guys who take care of our insurance needs were among the many in the exhibit hall.

Most of what we do at Tri-State is attend sessions on various topics of professional development. This year I went to some of the best sessions I'd ever participated in. I went to one that fit the Campus Kids philosophy particularly well. It was all about alternatives to intense competition. The speaker, Rick LaVoie, has a special needs background but his message was aimed at all camp and school programs. He stressed that competition could be excellent when the sides are fair and when people get to choose to participate. But if you're forced to compete or have to compete in situations where you don't have a chance to win, it can be a negative experience. He taught lots of ways to promote cooperative activities where working together makes them fun. Rick challenged the idea that classrooms and camps should be competitive to get kids ready for the "real world" which appears to be obviously competitive. We talked a lot about how hard some companies work to increase the cooperation among their employees in order to make that company more successful in a competitive marketplace. Interesting stuff, eh?

Now this may be more interesting to the parents out there than the campers, but the keynote speaker of the conference was Seth Godin. Seth is a best selling author and successful entrepreneur. He was the founder of several companies including Squidoo, one of the most popular websites in the world. On www.squidoo.com you can basically find user-designed pages on any topic of interest or make your own page. It's pretty neat stuff. Seth talked about how it's good to be different - "You've got to be worth talking about if you want people to talk about you and promote your business". To this, I say, is there anything better that telling people about Campus Kids?

One more thing, before I go away on a week's vacation! WOOT! Remember when I was telling you about the CD Mixes we made for the staff retreats? Here's a video that highlights the mix from the staff assistant retreat and the songs they contributed:

 Hope you liked the video! Talk to you all when I get back!

~Jeremy