Full Circle

by Meg Campbell

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Miniwanca. My mother and aunt had grown up in Saginaw, Michigan and had attended YG and OG in the 1930’s. My five siblings and I were raised on Founder Hearts, the concept of four-fold living and the AYF motto, “My own self, at my very best, all the time.” Although we lived in La Jolla, California, there was no question that we too would attend. When my two older sisters returned with songs, tales of tribal competitions, vespers, sailing, cabin friends, and nights doings, I grew more excited.

The summer after my 6th grade year, I joined my older sister at camp. My piper cabin mates included two granddaughters of AYF founders: Ellen Danforth Miller from St Louis and Annie Orwig from Berea, Kentucky. Their stories made their grandfathers real to me, and the idea that their grandfathers had started an organization which I was attending forty years later made a lasting impression.

My first year I was extremely homesick, crying myself to sleep for weeks. When I finally turned the corner and fell in love with camp, there was no looking back. I cried even harder having to leave at the end of the summer. I was excited about setting my four-fold goals and eagerly awaited the counselor to approach me to set a time for our interview. She appeared from the back of the dining hall, and we set off for a long walk along Lake Michigan which ended at Minisino’s outlook. I had brought a journal with me to take notes, and had confided to her that I was writing a novel about camp. If she smiled to herself, she didn’t betray it to me. She allowed me to stay at the dune’s lookout to continue my writing after the interview was over.

I was a bookish, not particularly athletic camper yet I had ample avenues to build my confidence and leadership skills at Miniwanca. I came to view camp as the “summers between” the forward rush of the academic year. Camp was where I had time to play, reflect, daydream, make close friends, and think deeply about what kind of person I wanted to become. The shared experience brought me closer to my siblings.

Years later, I applied for a job at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, to direct a collaborative between the education school and Outward Bound, focused on experience-based education. I had never been on an Outward Bound course, but during the interview, I spoke about my camping years with the American Youth Foundation. I explained that I had attended a values-based camp, and that I saw important similarities with Outward Bound’s philosophy and approach to teamwork and human development. They are kindred organizations. Charged with adapting the ideas of Outward Bound to serve school reform and design in grades K-12, my AYF experience continued to inform my work as Executive Director of Expeditionary Learning Schools.

In 2001, I founded Codman Academy Charter Public School, a small Expeditionary Learning high school in one of Boston’s most challenged neighborhoods, serving 120 students and their families as well as alumni. Admission is by lottery and 99% are students of color. I wanted students to have the opportunity I had at camp. For six years, our entire student body, faculty and staff have spent three sparkling days and two nights in the fall at Camp Merrowvista, entrusting program to the caring and skilled Merrowvista staff. We are camp. We climb to the ledge, rotate kitchen duty, scale the climbing wall and other ropes course elements, and strap together logs to make a raft to paddle out to retrieve graham crackers hidden in an empty canoe in the lake. We think about and share our individual intentions for the coming year. We have Council Circle and walk back to cabins under the starlit night. The quiet and peace and stunning beauty of fall foliage immerse our school community in a sense of safety and possibility. We can’t wait to return each October.

We believe that every student is at school to learn. If a student has made a choice that is “not on task,” he or she is asked to leave class and go to the reflection room. One of the questions students must answer is, “What choices can you make now so that you are your own self, at your very best, all the time?”

Last summer, two of our students received camperships to attend a Merrowvista summer session. This year we are hoping to send students to the Leadership Conference at Miniwanca. American Youth Foundation has generously assisted us by partially underwriting the cost of our school-wide fall program. I look forward to the day when Codman alumni become AYF camp counselors.

Now in our seventh year, we have had three graduating classes. Students have gone on to a range of colleges including Bowdoin, Bates, Holy Cross, Brandeis, Mt. Holyoke, Trinity and UMass Amherst. I am confident that one day, one of our graduates will attend Berea, the college that I first learned about from Annie Orwig when we were eleven years old. This fall I received a call from Codman alum Sherika Aljoe, weeks after starting her first year at Landmark College in Vermont. “I love it here,” she told me. “The people -- and all the stars at night -- remind me of Merrowvista. It’s like camp. I feel at home.”

Originally published in the Spring 2008 issue of "The Founder Fire," a newsletter of the American Youth Foundation.