What Makes A Great Camp Counselor?
As summer draws nears, I get more excited about this summer’s counseling staff.
Having an excellent staff, in my opinion, is the number one success factor in making a child’s experience truly excellent. I’d argue that if Camp Huawni had no piney woods, no Critter, and campers lived in tents, our campers would still experience something great and want to come back year after year with a great counseling staff.
So what really makes a great counselor? I mean, how do we really sift through all those applications to find the best counselors?
The first thing we do, or have the luxury of doing, is hire remarkable young people who have already been coming to Huawni. Many of our best counselor choose to come back, year after year. Looking at this summer’s staff, only 12 out of 45 (26%) are spending their very first summer at Huawni.
Likewise, one of the most significant things we do in our hiring process is set clear expectations. We really call young people to a higher standard, asking them to abide by the same standards year round. So what are those standards?
We ask our counselors to agree to three main expectations. First, we expect counselors to be role models and lead at and away from Camp. This means that their words and actions matter, all the time, and that they are the same person at Camp that they are away from Camp. Secondly, we expect counselors to obey the law. Ultimately, we want to know how potential counselors respond to submitting to authority. And finally, we expect our counselors to be teachable. We expect staff members to have a stance of humility, realizing that they don’t know everything. This means respecting camp leadership, knowing we have their best interest in mind. I would say that being teachable, or as my dad says, “being coachable”, is one of the most difficult expectations for young people to follow through on.
This summer we’ve hired what I believe to be our best staff yet. This group has a passion for really investing in kids. They love it. This group knows how to have fun, I’m talking about out-of-the-box, silly, high-on-caffeine kind of fun. This summer’s staff has integrity- they are very confident in who they are and do what’s right because it’s the right thing to do. And finally, this group is coachable. So many of this year’s counselors come from a stance of humility and learning, much more than I had at their age.
Want to meet this summer’s Huawni Staff? Click here.
