Life at Camp

Kupugani Declaration of Empowerment

The first week of our girls second session is coming to a close. This week has been filled with river floats, dam jumping, volleyball and other camptivities. In a counselor vs. camper volleyball game, the counselors prevailed, but the campers have an opportunity to show us up on Saturday at the annual camper vs. counselor soccer game! In teams, the girls have been progressing individually and as a group. They are growing into even more independent and strong women. Today at lunch one of our teams shared an amazing Declaration of Empowerment […]

Opening to Another Great Session

Greetings and salutations! It’s another lovely day here at Camp Kupugani. Our second session has just begun. and we are so excited! Our staff is ready for another two weeks of hiking, singing, rock climbing and canoeing. We’ve swept out arts and crafts and the gaga pit is good to go! Yesterday our staff greeted campers and families with smiles on their faces and a skip in their step. We shared yet another incredible barbecue potluck picnic. A few games were played and introductions were made. Eventually everyone made the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Progressive Camp Program

I got an inquiry today from a prospective staff member wanting to get a sense of our Camp Kupugani philosophy and approach to multicultural community-building, and what kinds of skills camp teaches kids in order to help them work through differences and address inequalities. I was excited for the question. The cool thing is that–at Camp Kupugani, we uniquely combine the fun of the camp experience with an empowerment program, to allow our campers to have fun while changing their world. As far as the kids know, they have a […]