Camp Director
Residential Summer Camp for Girls Ages 7 – 17
Fort Ann, NY
Position open February 1, 2013 – July 31, 2013
Friends of Camp Little Notch (Friends of CLN) is dedicated to providing opportunities for all people to practice living in harmony with nature, each other, and themselves. We are seeking a camp director who is innovative, dynamic, conscientious, and organized—with the ability to create a cooperative community working toward the realization of our vision. The camp director will complete all program preparation, design and facilitate staff training, and direct our one-week residential summer camp program in the southern Adirondacks.
Position Purpose:
- To support the mission of Friends of CLN by co-creating and collectively providing a safe, high quality, innovative, and self-empowering summer camp program for girls.
- To support the success of an emerging healthy, powerful, and diverse community and organization through contributing to the further development of CLN's vision, goals, policies, and practices.
Responsibilities:
- Work with the executive director and volunteers to design, market, deliver, and evaluate our summer camp program.
- Acquire necessary permits for camp operation.
- Work with organizational volunteers in outreaching to prospective campers/camper families.
- Hire all camp staff and volunteers and ensure that they work as an effective team.
- Oversee the business management of the summer program.
- Ensure that all necessary program, health, nutrition, and sanitation supplies are acquired in a timely manner and within the allotted budget.
- Use and ensure the maintenance of the camp registration database.
- Work in collaboration with organizational consultants to develop and deliver comprehensive staff training for all summer program employees and volunteers.
- Direct the daily operation of the summer program.
- Work in collaboration with entities partnering with Friends of CLN in various capacities.
- Develop relationships with prospective campers, current campers, alumni, and their families.
- Share your unique experiences, talents, skills, and leadership with your new community.
- Create a nurturing, invigorating, self-empowering, and safe learning environment for our campers to acquire life-long knowledge, experience growth, and build relationships with each other, the staff, the land, and themselves.
- Participate in Friends of CLN's work to become an inclusive, multi-cultural, and multi-racial community in which all members are valued and celebrated.
Qualifications:
- Passion for and knowledge of youth development, environmental sustainability, social justice education, and creating cooperative working, teaching, and learning communities!
- Bachelor's degree or sufficient camp-related or school-related experience in the field of outdoor education and/or youth development.
- Three years of experience in the administration of a camp or equivalent experience in the administration of youth educational programming. (Department of Health requirement.)
- Experience in social justice training and facilitation.
- Experience working with children ages 7-17.
- Proficiency in word processing, data management, and use of the Internet.
- Excellent communication, facilitation, conflict resolution, and organizational skills.
- Stamina to work extremely long and rewarding hours.
- Ability and desire to ensure all campers have access to Camp Little Notch.
- Ability and desire to live and work in a tight-knit, diverse community.
Compensation:
The camp director will be compensated up to $3,500 for the contract period: February 1st through July 31st.
Camp Little Notch--Summer Program for Girls
Camp Little Notch helps campers find their strengths and unique voices and supports young women through their transition to adulthood. By connecting young women of diverse backgrounds with each other, positive mentors, and the land, our campers cultivate their resourcefulness, wellness, creativity, teamwork skills, and responsibility. Girls ages 7-17 attend a 7 day session and participate in challenging and fun activities, including social justice education, rock climbing, adventure programming, creek walking, arts and crafts, nature study, canoeing, hiking, and low-impact camping. The social justice component of our program, in conjunction with outdoor education and leadership training, support our mission to provide opportunities for campers to practice living in harmony with nature, each other and themselves.
How is Little Notch Unique?
- While many summer camps and afterschool programs offer intensive programs with organized sports and activities, Camp Little Notch gives campers more freedom to create a self-determined experience within a comfortable routine. This type of freedom encourages creativity, builds decision-making skills, and helps girls take responsibility for their development. In addition, girls have several opportunities throughout their stay to choose activities to do independently from their group. Following our reflection of our 2012 camp program, we have determined that the social justice curriculum will not be optional or a part of the self-determined programming, but will be built into camper's daily schedules, and the remaining activities are chosen and collectively organized by campers.
- Operations at Little Notch facilitate an ongoing appreciation and interest in land conservation and promote consciousness about the Earth and our role as stewards. Campers learn to live in harmony with nature through a variety of daily practices and opportunities for exploration and discovery. Environmental justice education is a part of our social justice curriculum, offering campers new frameworks to see their own as well as institutional and governmental roles in both creating sustainable systems as well unsustainable ones. Little Notch campers practice sustainable, low-impact living so they may bring these practices back to their everyday lives.
- Camp Little Notch is for all girls. Therefore, Friends of CLN is committed to working in partnership with systemically under-funded communities, communities of color, people with varying abilities, people of all gender identities and expressions, and people of all sexual orientations. We use outreach strategies in striving to ensure that our program is accessible to children from all backgrounds. This commitment ensures that our campers have the incredible opportunity to experience living in an inclusive community that represents the world we strive to create.
- Camp Little Notch provides a dynamic environment to bring girls of various backgrounds together through reflective and active social justice curriculum that provides opportunities to name and acknowledge differences as assets and not deficits. Shared physical and creative activities are a key component of the curriculum and, thus, break down barriers between campers, creating a camp community where girls value themselves and each other. Camp Little Notch strives to celebrate diversity, encourage community building, teach conflict resolution and communication skills, facilitate sharing of traditions between people, and confront all forms of oppression, exclusion, discrimination, and prejudice on personal, inter-personal, and institutional basis in our interactions, operations, and activities.
Location: A Beautiful Summer Home
Camp Little Notch is located in Fort Ann, NY, an hour and a half drive north of Albany, NY. The 443-acre property includes an 80-acre private lake, a mountaintop (Putnam Mountain), miles of mountain streams, an historic iron smelting furnace, and complete camp facilities. Accommodations are rustic, and the property is magical. For pictures and more information, please visit our website at www.friendsofcln.org or e-mail Ellen Tuzzolo at ellen@littlenotch.org.
