Growing Together: Open Forum

Hi Community! 

2025 will by our 3rd year of running camps at Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Wisconsin and I've been playing with the idea of getting ACA accredited. I'm wondering if any other gardens that have small, day camps have experience with this. Would you recommend? It seems like a lot of work, although accrediting day camps seems much easier than residential camps. I have already learned quite a bit about the process, so I'm more curious about your experience and opinion if you have done this or thought about it. 

Thanks much!

For starters, I wanted to say y'all have a really amazing space and systems! I visited the Gardens last month and had a fantastic time, and nosily eavesdropped on a school field trip that was happening there to compare some things with how we run our field trips here. I'm actually wearing my Olbrich hat as I write this - the world is very, very small!

I have not gone through the process before, but the summer camp I worked at before my current job explored the idea pretty seriously. We ended up not going through the process as we had a relatively straightforward and contained camp - students were on an elementary school campus, spent limited time outdoors, and did not participate in a lot of the activities that the accreditation process seemed aimed at. We ultimately decided largely that the feedback would be helpful, but because of our limits in altering the physical space we operated at, as well as the actual content of the camp, that the feedback would largely not be actionable, and therefore opted not to pursue the process.

Does seem like the accreditation is a big selling point to the guardians making decisions on where to send students sometimes, so there's a big messy cost-benefit analysis here that's going to vary a lot from org to org.

Hope that's helpful!

Hi Community! 

2025 will by our 3rd year of running camps at Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Wisconsin and I've been playing with the idea of getting ACA accredited. I'm wondering if any other gardens that have small, day camps have experience with this. Would you recommend? It seems like a lot of work, although accrediting day camps seems much easier than residential camps. I have already learned quite a bit about the process, so I'm more curious about your experience and opinion if you have done this or thought about it. 

Thanks much!