Growing Together: Open Forum

Hello! 

I am in the midst of planning for summer camp 2025 as I'm sure some of you are! I'm curious if anyone has experience with running a youth junior counselor program. I am looking to engage slightly older youth to help with camp in a volunteer capacity to help give them leadership experience in assisting our Camp Instructors (for reference, our camp instructors have been ages 17+).

I keep playing around with different ages and I would love any advice or ideas if someone has experience with this. This will be year 3 and we are still figuring out what works best for our space and program. Our camp was for ages 7-12 year old last year, but we are thinking of changing that to 7-10 or 7-11. Our Junior counselors will be ages 12-16 or 13-16. I don't want to leave anyone out, but I also want there to be age gaps between campers and jr. counselors. 

Also, any experience you can share about how your program worked well, didn't work well would be greatly appreciated. 

Thank you so much!! 

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Ariel Christian
School & Out-of-School Program Specialist
Olbrich Botanical Gardens
Madison, WI
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Hey Ariel,

I ran summer day camps at our former science and technology museum for several years. Best job I ever had.

I used youth counselors all the time, but my instructors were all adults. This allowed me to provide educational content and supervision to campers ages 5 through 12. 

I found that pairing a junior counselor with a college-age mentor had good results. When the helpers are barely older than the campers the dynamics would become.... well let's just say even my mature 16 year olds would revert to childhood at times. Especially if there was any type of bouncing round object. The maturity flew out the window. Usually to humorous effect. I must note that several of my campers grew up over the years to become counselors themselves.

I worked with several mentoring programs through the county that paired middle and high school-aged students with a college-aged mentor and I had them work in pairs to aid the instructors. Perhaps there is a program in your area that could provide volunteer labor. My mentees recieved a stipend from the county so it saved me on labor. They got community service hours to count towards graduation and other merit goals.

I hope these ideas are helpful. Please feel free to reach out if I can be of further assistance.

Anne Washington

anne@plantlivegrow.com

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Anne Washington
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