Camps Over

Hi All,

So August and September were the months of camps. Always my busiest but also my favourite time of year. This year I met up with a new group that I had never heard of called M.Y. Camp (Motivated Youth Camp), what an amazing camp to find this year run by some of the best people ever! The founder of the camp Julien Braun McLeod and I sat down for a little bit before the camp and what was supposed to be at most a one hour meeting turned into several hours of discussion and laughter. Julien started the camp with a group of friends, all of whom are university students. This truly is a camp for youth run entirely by youth.

At M.Y. Camp I found the most extraordinary thing-youth who were really engaged in every part of the process. The youth have a lot of say on what goes on and love just about everything the does go on at the camp. It was interesting for me to walk around the camp and talk to many youth before it was time for me to spend a bit of time talking to them about passions and how to use them when navigating career chaos and deciding what they want to do for the rest of their life. It was interesting because they were all so polite and open and willing to chat about everything and anything. This group of youth were outgoing and just generally excited about life! In fact I laughed in my head when my time did start because as they were coming in I handed out a sheet of blank paper and almost every single person thanked me; none of the students knew what the paper was for but they all looked me in the eye and said thank you. To me this is just not something I was used to.

Presentation time rolled around and I had a lot of fun discussing personal branding and how that can lead to discovering the path that one wants to take in life. The campers even got to start on their new life maps which was a lot of fun.

Now from that leadership camps to athletic camps. This year I was involved once again in both Carleton U's hockey camp and Ottawa U's rugby camp. However, this year it was just a little bit more difficult in that they were both running at the same time; this meant much travel and changing of clothes between the two schools. This however is always fun for me to see the new young faces coming into camp trying their best. It was a trying two week process with many wonderful athletes coming out on both sides. I am also very excited for this new year to begin as both teams are looking very strong.

Ok so before this turns into a novel I will stop here. The bottom line is that I have once again found many many reasons for me to really enjoy the work I do. Youth in general always feed my energy. So thank you Camp season for rejuvenating me!