Career and college readiness through summer camp leadership opportunities

The University of Utah Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism and the American Camp Association have been working collaboratively to advance youth learning and positive development through summertime camp experiences for over a decade. The specific activities targeted through this research-practice partnership are twofold 1) to understand the best ways to engage older youth in structured leadership opportunities and 2) to understand how to recruit, train, and retain high quality program staff for seasonal out-of-school time programming. The research team’s focus is to better understand what these young leaders and camp staff learn and how they develop through their summer experiences. Specifically, we are interested in promising practices that can be adopted by summer programs to enhance career and college readiness through these summer leadership experiences. As the American Camp Association is the accrediting body and community of practice for organized camp summer youth experiences, research findings are quickly translated to professional practice that directly impact the millions of youth attending camps each summer. ,