I am very pleased to report that we have had an incredibly successful camp season at Easter Seals BC/Yukon! While success can be measured in many ways, for us at camp this looks like smiling faces in the pool, new friendships around the campfire, and campers challenging themselves on the climbing wall, in addition to numerous magical moments of self-discovery, confidence building, and shared experiences.
This year held multiple improvements to our camp facilities, with the pool at Camp Squamish being reopened, new accessible climbing gear at all three sites, and new life jackets for the waterfront at Camp Shawnigan. These improvements helped us to welcome over 900 campers, including 169 new overnight campers, with many more new families joining us for our family camp programs.
We are very grateful to have continued to work with our partner programs across all three camps, ensuring campers from all over the province have the additional support required to attend camp. A special thank you to many of our programming partners including, Canucks Autism Network, CNIB, and Camp Liberte.
This season we hired over 90 staff members, with many joining us from all over the world, in addition to staff members supported by the Canada Summer Jobs program. This season we expanded our student nursing program with UBCO, having three full camp weeks in which we provided an opportunity for up-and-coming nurses to provide support for campers with complex medical needs. Many of our staff members go on to pursue teaching, medicine, and other careers in which their experience at camp creates a baseline for quality care, support, and inclusion. We wish all of our 2024 staff the best of luck in their future careers, and we are honored to have been a part of their journey.
We also welcomed staff members from Evan’s Lake, in which they participated in our healthcare training sessions to support their new inclusion programming. We are so proud to be a part of creating more opportunities for campers to participate in the magic of camp across our camps and others.
Looking ahead to 2025, I am more than happy to announce that we will be offering more family camps at Camp Squamish, creating more spots for children at Camp Winfield, and continue to work towards improving our waterfront at Camp Shawnigan.
We can’t wait to see you next summer!
Dale Kilgour
Director of Camps and Recreation Programs
P.S. Providing access to accessible camps is expensive; it costs Easter Seals BC/Yukon on average $3,600 to send a child to a week-long overnight camp. Your support funds necessary improvements and ensures that our camps are kept affordable, so that our campers can thrive.
