Project:Camp

Provide care for children, relief for families, and resilience for communities in disaster.

Project:Camp’s vision is to provide care for every child impacted by disasters. The emergency response ecosystem wasn’t designed with children in mind, and the trauma of a disaster can have long-lasting negative effects on kids, according to studies by the CDC and Kaiser. Those same studies, however, show that providing trauma-informed care and a stable environment for kids to process these traumatic experiences helps mitigate those negative outcomes and set kids on a positive trajectory.

That’s where Project:Camp comes in. We pop up free, trauma-informed day camps for children impacted by natural disasters. Children process extreme events very differently than adults and we create unique spaces to help provide them with structure and normalcy, giving parents, first responders, schools and child care networks time to implement a plan for what comes next.

Accomplishments
Provided more than 20,000 hours of free camp to kids impacted by disasters
Helped prepare more than 20 counties to provide childcare services during disasters
Popped up more than a dozen camps in eight states across the US since 2021

Goals
Update Camps program, including staffing plan, response models, deployment structure and decision making, and trauma-informed care model.
Develop and expand state-wide government relationships in 4 states (CA, FL, and 2 TBD) and engage our community preparedness process in 15 counties across 3 states (CA, OR, FL)
Build Project:Camp's profile as an expert in the field

Sustained, program-wide funding to ensure that we can launch camps anywhere at any time, regardless of visibility of incident
Legislative support to implement emergency preparedness program statewide
Help to elevate the problem we address nation-wide
Funding to implement preparedness work in rural and ex-urban communities on the frontlines of climate-related disasters
Advocates in education to enable schools to be part of the disaster relief ecosystem

Project:Camp is an organization that is national in scope - we respond to disasters anywhere in the US and its territories. We are currently focused on several Southern California counties, including Orange, Imperial, San Bernardino, Riverside, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Los Angeles.

Pop-up Day Camps
Our camps provide trauma-informed care to children during and right after emergencies. We pop camps up within 48 hours to ensure that care is delivered quickly. Our camps:
Incorporate volunteer childcare professionals (teachers, camp counselors, etc.)
Offer critical social-emotional learning and mental health support
Provide stopgap continuity of care for first responders and schools during disasters

Community Preparedness
We build relationships with the right organizations and people so connections and plans are already in place when disaster strikes. To organize a community we:
Create a plan to address the needs of children and families during times of crisis
Provide the language to use in existing emergency operations plans
Train local volunteers on our approach to trauma-informed care

Project:Camp is an innovative solution that addresses overlapping crises facing our communities: disaster due to climate change, youth mental health crisis, and a lack of childcare in rural and marginalized communities. The organization has had lots of success implementing their trauma-informed care model in response to wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and flooding in 8 states across the country. It has also implemented its community preparedness model in many communities as it seeks to re-center children and families in disaster relief. The organization faces challenges scaling in navigating government agencies, networking with local youth organizations, and leveraging that collaboration to care for every child impacted by disaster.