Summer camp programs provide adolescent counselors with opportunities to work alongside adult staff, aiming to develop critical skills such as communication, responsibility, independence, and teamwork. Growing research supports the value of camp-based developmental relationships through youth-adult partnerships. However, tensions often arise as…

Make a Difference (MAD) is a sustainability leadership program for high school students in Auckland, New Zealand. It offers a residential camp and follow-up activities. This article documents a participatory, utilization-focused evaluation of MAD, based on a Theory of Change approach. We ran workshops with MAD coordinators and students and…

This paper reports on a New Zealand study that obtained firsthand narrative accounts from a group of Year 10 (14 to 15 years old) secondary school students who were provided with 27-exposure disposable cameras on which they were asked to take a series of photographs to record what a residential school camp was like for them. Follow-up individual…

Describes survey made as part of Youth Conservation Corps evaluation. Compares personal benefits of residential camping with benefits of nonresidential camps. Concludes residential participants benefited in different ways and to greater extent than nonresidential campers. Residential camping benefits measurable at least nine months after…

Both participants in the Ontario Camp Leadership Center at Bark Lake and their sponsoring organizations agreed on the benefits of the leadership development experience and enthusiastically endorsed the program. Researchers conducted a 19-question telephone survey of 202 program participants and a 32-question survey of 40 sponsors and 20…

The word "summer" brings to mind images of a relaxed, unstructured season--a time markedly different from other seasons of the year. In the United States, we have a particularly entrenched notion that summer is different--a notion reflected in popular assumptions about summer as a "break" and reinforced by carefree depictions…