Camp Kupugani Blog
A Great First Girls Session
The final week of session one has come and gone so fast we barely had time to blink an eye! As counselors said farewell to their campers and campers said goodbye to the many friends they have made during the past two weeks, heavy hearts filled camp. It was a bittersweet departure acknowledging they had to leave and appreciating the decision to come to Camp Kupugani for all of its inner and outer beauty, much like the journey of our campers. Summer camps have been a U.S. tradition for over […]
Happy 4th of July
Hellloooooooooooo from Fabulous Camp Kupugani, summer home of the most AWESOME campers on the face of the Earth! For all you citizens of the U.S.A., Happy Independence Day! For any remaining citizens of the planet Earth, Happy Day in General! You may be asking, “What happened? We missed you yesterday! I don’t want to lose another moment of that Kupugani super awesome happy fun time!” Don’t Fret, Don’t Frown. Yesterday was so action packed that we had to wait for today to sound off to you. So a quick snippet […]
Sending Our Son Away to Camp
As we enjoy our multicultural summer camp, because we’re in our girls-only session and our son is now of that age where he is part of the natural distraction reason we have single-sex programs, he recently left for a two-week camp on his own. Today, I came across an article that partially encapsulates the experience… “…sending kids to camp is not for wimps. It requires a leap of faith that the difficulty (and, I’ll just say it, that the cost) will be worth it. It requires an ability to manage […]
Cabin Quality Day
Today was a great cabin day at Camp Kupugani. We slept in, had delicious donuts with breakfast, and spent some quality time with our cabins. After a hike and a yummy picnic lunch, we headed down to the flats for an afternoon on the lake doing many different water activities, including dam jumping, canoeing, and going under the waterfall. Later, with a dinner of Mimmo’s pizza happily filling our bellies, we presented our cabin skits and songs and headed back to the cabins for a relaxing end of the day. […]
Amazing All Camp Soccer Game!
Saturday at camp was one of the most action packed days for both the campers and the staff! We started the day with activities such as leans and lifts all with the intention of facilitating with this incredible group of girls trust in one another, as well as helping them to trust themselves. We here at Kupugani believe that if a woman trusts herself then she is more likely to follow her true potential and become the woman that she has the ability to become. A particular highlight of the […]
Wonderful Wednesday at Kupugani
Good Morning! As the campers enjoy a breakfast with Natasha’s renowned coffee cake and the forecast of a warm, sunny day, we reflect on yesterday when we began our focus on conflict resolution during team building activities. Fostering those skills are an important component of self and character building. Another day’s highlight was having multiple campers successfully try rock climbing for the first time—definite empowerment as they challenged themselves to overcome any previously-held fears. Cabin color day also meant that the girls were encouraged to express their unified pride in […]
Staff Empowerment Striving for Child Empowerment
As yet another exciting Kupugani summer approaches, we reflect on the driving motivation associated with our all-girls program due to start in just three days. We exist for girls as they are, so they can imagine the women they can become. For our girls camp imminent start and our boys camp in just over a month, this means that we exist to empower young people to follow their dreams and strive towards their true potential. Over the past few weeks, our staff members have been excitedly training to strengthen and […]
Celebrating Father Figures
While we’ve been enjoying our counselor training session, Kupugani’s outgoing mailbox has been filling up with Father’s Day cards on the way to the families of our counselors, both near and far. As a multicultural empowerment camp, we recognize the importance of positive male role models in the lives of our campers. Father figures encourage us to be our best. June brings the sun, sport, and fun so often associated with both camp and Father’s day. This Father’s Day, we hope that you enjoy all that summer brings and take […]
Counseling in a Multicultural Environment
As we transition from activity staff training into Kupugani counselor training, the energy of camp increases with about twenty counselors eager to learn what the summer holds. We spent the first morning’s training sessions getting to know each other and finding commonalities. Given that Camp Kupugani is a multicultural summer camp, we as counselors reflect those values, hailing from countries all over the world and from every walk of life. We comprise a variety of different races, languages, and cultures; by coming together, we demonstrate to our campers the importance […]
Fostering Staff Flexibility and Empowerment
Staff activity training at our multicultural summer camp is now full speed ahead. The staff members are excited and ready to teach activity skills to campers on the water and on land. The weather so far this year has been even more varied here in Northwest Illinois than is “typical”. Some cold and rainy spells have provided staff with some necessary and valuable lessons as they prepare for our girls-only and boys-only camp programs. First, it teaches us that we sometimes must be flexible with our expectations. While we all […]
Staff Training and the Importance of Emotional Safety
Our son will be attending his first away-from-Kupugani sleepaway camp this summer. As intentional parents, we are now on the other side of the camp director-parent dynamic. Since our boy’s bedwetting—continual since he was a toddler (like his parents’ before him)—has seemed to increase of late, defeating even the best efforts of his pull-up style bedtime diapers—I gave the camp director a quick call. I wanted to just double check that the camp’s dealing with that issue would continue the process we have had at home of making sure that […]
Properly Serving a Changing Population
A recent Today show piece touted that Caucasian children won’t comprise the majority of children born in the U.S. within 5 or 6 years. This story isn’t news to us at our multicultural summer camp, which has been emphasizing serving who our population actually is for many years. It’s interesting now that is increasingly in the public eye. It hasn’t been news for a while. From the 2010 US census, non-Hispanic white children ages 5 to 17 (or roughly “camp age”) comprise only about 55.5% of that segment. “Minority” children […]