Diversifying Summer Camp Staff - Anti-Racism in Summer Camp
Campers need to see counselors, program specialists, and administrators that look like them.
Pay camp staff more.
I could end this installment here. I believe this is the number one cause of our lack of diversity in camp staff currently. But increasing pay won’t automatically make our staff more diverse, or our staff more welcoming to people of color.
While we start looking for room in our budget to pay more, let's work on some other problems along the way.
Hiring and recruiting
First of all, why is it important to have a diverse staff?
We can look at this in a similar way to other jobs in education. There is plenty of academic research on why students of color do better when they have a teacher that looks like them.
Camp is no different. In order for campers to have a successful time at camp, campers need to see counselors, program specialists, and administrators that look like them.
We need to recruit and hire folks with different backgrounds. This will be difficult and expensive. Many of our practices have been developed along the way because they are easier than the alternative. It’s easier and cheaper to recruit just from within our alumni, CIT (counselor in training, or whatever you call the bridge program between campers and staff) program, and their friends than outside, but only doing what we’ve always done will only give us what we already have.
How do we get the word out that we are hiring?
Consider changing up your recruiting strategies. If you already go to local colleges or universities to recruit, add the nearest HBCU or a visit to the Black Student Union on your campus circuit. Do what you can while recruiting at colleges to get your message directly into the hands of Black candidates.
Set up staff exchanges between urban and rural sites within your organization if possible. For camps in rural areas, find a partner in an urban setting where you can:
recruit staff
host a camp out for their staff
connect staff for a team building workshop.
Connect with a Y, Scouts, or community center, especially those that have teen programs; offer to help them out with a weekend of programming. In exchange, you can recruit from their program graduates to work for you in the summer.
What other creative ways can you think of to recruit staff from a more diverse pool?
As we recruit for summer camp staff, another question to ask is about job descriptions and requirements. Are our requirements actually a requirement for the job, or just a gatekeeper?
Do you have to have a HS diploma or be enrolled in college to be a good counselor? This is different from an age requirement. Being over 18 might or might not align with having graduated from high school or enrolling in college. Removing requirements that don’t actually pertain to the ability to do the job will allow more diversity in candidate pools.
Things like typos in cover letters are often used as a disqualifier. Do you have to be perfect at written English to lead a soccer game?
Many camps overlook grammatical errors in applications from international staff. Let’s extend the same idea to domestic staff with a different background than we typically see.
Taking this idea one step further, previous camp experience will be a barrier if we are trying to recruit staff from a population that has not historically been part of the camp bubble. Experience working with children is a better indicator of a successful counselor than having attended camp as a child.
Being a camper is different from working at camp, and I need counselors who can work well with groups of children.Teens and young adults who have experience babysitting, tutoring or coaching at the local elementary school, or who grew up in a large family will actually show me more of the skills I’m looking for in a counselor.
After reviewing our requirements and recruiting a new batch of applicants, we need to get them through the application and interview procedures. This is a particularly easy place for our implicit biases to sneak in.
We need to combat this with Bias Identification training for all staff who are involved in the hiring process. There are organizations you can hire to do this for you, or online resources for conducting it in-house, but it needs to be done annually for everyone involved. The data for this is backed up easily by numerous studies on resume review and white vs Black sounding names.
Get rid of “Good Fit” and “Gut Feelings” in the hiring process. Humans tend to have “Good gut feelings” about people who are like us. Someone who is a “good fit” for staff is a person who acts, thinks, and looks like the folks already there.
Hiring without bias will mean taking all human feelings out of it, which may be especially difficult for camp pros. With practice though, it gets easier.
A tool to use to remove bias from hiring is to develop and use a rubric to qualify and quantify requirements.
Decide in advance which requirements are the most important.
Assign them a point value.
Quantify all resumes using the rubric.
Invite the top candidates to interview.
A separate rubric is used during the interview, and top candidates are offered positions. A quick Google search for “hiring rubric” reveals about 2,100,000 examples, at least one of them is applicable to working with camps.
Training & certifications
We’ve now hired more new folks from outside the traditional camp staff onto our team. This, however, exacerbates the next problem, training and certifications.
Do we expect new hires to complete training before their hire date (unpaid), or get certifications on their own dime? Certifications like CPR, belaying, or lifeguarding take time and money to complete. Putting that burden on new staff before they start earning money will be prohibitive for some. All staff need to be paid for the time it takes to complete the training and the cost covered upfront.
Many camps might approach this problem by giving a bump in pay to those who complete trainings on their own or already have certifications. This makes sense on paper; in essence, it’s a way of reimbursing them for getting a certification. However, it leaves behind those who are unable to go through the training without the financial support to start off.
Related is we often pay people with college degrees more, even if their degree has nothing to do with the job they have at camp. With obvious exceptions for positions like camp nurse for whom education and certification is required, there are plenty of camp directors out there who don’t have degrees and do just fine.
CIT/LIT programs
As we work on hiring more counselors of color, and increasing the number of campers of color, we also have to fix our bridge program. Whether you call it Counselor in Training, Leaders in Training or any other youth leadership program, bridge programs need to be designed to be anti-racist.
The first question to address in regards to these types of programs is whether they get paid, have to pay, or are somewhere in between.
Programmatically and logistically, arguments can be made for any of the above. Keep in mind that making them pay will reward campers that have the means to pay to play. Especially for the 16-18 year olds, who would be eligible to get a job elsewhere for the summer.
You may have legal or licensing requirements to consider when deciding if you can give a stipend to the younger participants, but if you can, paying them is the best case scenario.
If you can’t pay them, making the program free is second best, including room and board. This can also be helpful if your local schools have a community service requirement for graduation. It is great to be able to provide an opportunity for older teens to knock out their 40 hours in one week.
Finally, if you have to charge for the program, make sure you don’t require this program for consideration when hiring. If payment is required for the program, it needs to be focused on really developing teens for their future beyond camps. Teaching life skills and general leadership to the teens rather than making them into free labor.
If we are able to pay teens, that’s great! Camp can be an amazing place for kids to get experience at their first job. But hiring minors can be a challenging endeavour.
We often look for teens who have the ability to communicate directly with us, and disqualify or look down on youth whose parents communicate on their behalf. This is something to reconsider, especially as we move towards working with teens who have not grown up in the camp world.
Parents of minors in this situation might have more questions, and we need to be willing to answer them. The teens need to be able to communicate on their own, but the parents might need reassurances in their own right. This could take the form of a forum or meeting, but remember that parents have a variety of working schedules and all meeting times might not work for all families.
We want teens to be self-advocates, and responsible for things like communicating their schedule with their family. But for some families that might not be realistic. A teen with lots of siblings, in a family with one car, might need help from their family to make a schedule that works for everyone needing to get to their summer activities. Helping this process by being willing to communicate with a minor’s guardians can help make staff more inclusive.
Pay
This brings us back to the conversation about pay.
First we need to include and be transparent on pay range/scale in job postings. One of my favorite bloggers, Vu Le from NonprofitAF describes this way better than I can. Knowing the pay rate upfront helps everyone.
Even if you post it, we need to pay more. Camp pay is traditionally abysmal, especially considering that we can make exceptions to the FLSA minimum wage requirement as a seasonal recreational establishment in the US.
For teens and young adults with generational wealth support, that can be fine. It's okay to not bring home much cash if you are only worried about discretionary spending rather than rent, bills and groceries. But for teens and young adults who are expected to support themselves or contribute financially to their family, it's not going to cut it.
Providing housing as part of the pay package doesn’t always help, as many people have to still pay rent at the place they live the rest of the year. And families don’t generally pay less on rent and utilities for one teen being out of the house.
In her autobiography Becoming, Michelle Obama calls out her summer spent as a camp counselor as a great experience, but one that left her so broke at the end that it wasn’t sustainable. I can’t in good conscience advocate for increased recruiting of counselors of color without us first addressing pay issues. So INCREASE PAY.
~LEILANI NUSSMAN
I am a mixed-race Kanaka maoli (Hawai’i) and white summer camp director. I use she/her pronouns. I live on the ancestral lands of the Duwamish people, past and present. I speak for myself and from my own lived experience. I still have work to do.
Newly added Resources
Curriculum and training organizations
Previous Resources
Intro to Race Discussions/White Fragility
So You Want to Talk About Race - Ijeoma Oluo
Stamped from the Beginning - Ibram X. Kendi
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? - Beverly Daniel Tatum
Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Paulo Friere
White Fragility - Robin DiAngelo
How to be an Anti-Racist - Ibram X. Kendi
Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome - Joy DeGruy
Black Faces, White Spaces - Carolyn Finney
*Amazon affiliate links support the Equal Justice initiative
Articles
Click to see the Other Posts in this Series:
A Note From Travis
We are thrilled to be welcoming Leilani Nussman as a writer on the Go Camp Pro blog! Leilani is a Camp Pro from the US Northwest and she has spent her summer as part of our Camp Mavericks discussion on Racism, Privilege and Summer Camp. I was THRILLED when she asked if she could capture her thoughts on Anti Racism and summer camp in this space.