Summer camps struggle with staffing

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, June 22nd. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: summer camp!

Like many other in-person activities, summer camps saw huge drops in participation the last few years due to COVID. While it appears camper numbers are on the rise this year, many camp leaders say they’re still struggling to find staff. Some camps have had to cut back on programs and a few have even closed for the summer. WORLD’s Lauren Dunn reports.

LAUREN DUNN, REPORTER: Diane Wheeler is assistant director of camping ministries at Westminster Woods, a 400-acre Christian camp in Fall River, Kansas. She says the pandemic forced them to find new ways to recruit staff.

WHEELER: And we used to have big dinners with everyone. And they would bring friends and they would bring potential people and we recruited that way. This year we chose not to do that just because there was still a lot of people that were a little unsure. But what we did is more word-of-mouth recruiting.

Wheeler says that this summer they were able to fill essentially all of their staff positions. But many camps around the country are still needing staff even for this summer.

In Spring Mills, Pa., Josh Boyd is the executive director of Krislund Camp and Retreat Center. Almost 400 campers are registered for programs throughout the summer. Their first camp session starts this weekend.

BOYD: We actually just hired somebody yesterday, which was great. But we're looking for 30. And we're at 12 right now. And I'm hoping to get to 14-15 in the next week or two, if I can.

Krislund works with programs like Camp America to hire international applicants, but this year six of their seven hires were denied visas at the last minute. That unexpected drop pushed Boyd to cancel one of Krislund’s summer programs.

BOYD: Our community camp is a program where we go out into our community, and which takes three of our staff, but because of the shortage, I was having to cancel that and bring that staff back to fill holes that were in our residential and day camp programs that are on site.

Many camps have struggled to cover staffing needs since 2018, and the pandemic only made it harder. In 2020, most camps canceled their programs. Gregg Hunter is president and CEO of the Christian Camp and Conference Association, an organization with over 850 member camps.

HUNTER: When you say you cannot have a gathering of more than 20 people, and a camp has 250 beds and 250 kids who want to come, you can't just have camp for 20 kids, you have more leaders who are going to be there than that.

Most camps reopened in 2021, but many experienced severe staffing shortages. Hunter says this year camps are still trying to fill hundreds of openings. It’s significantly worse than he’s ever seen.

HUNTER: If you think about the best way for camps to recruit, and it's through those who are already on summer staff this last year. And they can go home and recruit their friends and tell them how great the experience was and what they learned and how they grew. The way we refer to it, as we'd say, the pipeline was dry.

The Christian Camp and Conference Association website lists open camp ministry positions. As of last week the website showed over 400 job openings ranging from kitchen assistant or maintenance technician to lifeguard or boat captain or even horse wrangler.

Jacob Sorenson is the founder and director of Sacred Playgrounds, a research group focusing on Christian camp ministries. He’s only heard of one or two camps that have closed for this summer because of a lack of staff, but almost all of the 30+ camps he is working with don’t have enough staff.

SORENSON: So I was at a camp last week, and I was leading some of their staff training sessions. And the director had to leave the session, because he had to go interview potential summer staff, and they were in their final week of staff training. And so we don't know the numbers because it's still playing out, camps are still trying to hire and desperately trying to fill gaps in their staffing roles.

As businesses scramble to find employees in a competitive job market, Sorenson says many young adults can more easily find better-paying jobs than camp positions. Some are opting for internships in their field of study. Josh Boyd said that Krislund is looking into developing internships in fields like education, recreation, and kitchen management or hospitality to encourage students to work at the camp.

According to Sorenson, some of the hardest staff positions to fill are often the most specific: high-ropes coordinators, back-country guides, lifeguards. Gregg Hunter from the Christian Camp and Conference Association says another difficult position to fill is kitchen staff.

But nineteen-year-old Julia Starnes wasn’t put off by the long hours and often hot conditions in the kitchen. She’s an architecture major at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She just finished her freshman year.

STARNES: I felt a lot of pressure from some of my peers this year that if you don’t get a good internship every single year you’re studying, you’re not going to get a good job.

Starnes attended camp at Westminster Woods starting in middle school, and she knew she wanted to return.

STARNES: I just value this so much to be out here and be a part of this community. And to build these friendships, you know, there's nothing like it. I'm still growing as a person and taking time to build myself and building my faith. That will give me a firm foundation for everything else I do.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Lauren Dunn in Fall River, Kansas.

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