MANSFIELD — If it takes a village to raise a child, the same may be said for running a summer camp, especially during a pandemic.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what happened in Mansfield. More than 80 elementary students attended free CommUnity summer camps that ran from July through mid-August at three different locations in Mansfield.
The camps were funded by a $22,000 contribution from United Way of Richland County and ran by community volunteers. The camp program was new to the area, said Dan Varn, executive director of the United Way of Richland County.
They were planned in just six weeks by a committee that included Terry Conard from the Friendly House, Angel Ross-Taylor from the City of Mansfield Parks Department, Debra Weaver from the Mansfield Arts Center, Tracee Anderson and the staff of Community Action for Capable Youth (CACY) and Pam Rembert from Children’s Cupboard. Hudson and Essex provided healthy meals to campers and volunteers.
“More than anything, we felt that children in our community needed a fun, structured, and healthy program for the summer,” Varn said. “The COVID-19 pandemic certainly affected many children who had been indoors and without fun interactions and programming since school was closed in March.”
Campers attended three days a week and stayed in socially-distanced pods throughout the summer.
“We made contact with Womama Co., a local company, who created 6 seat social distancing mats that we used at each camps,” Varn explained. “All the mats were different colors and all the children had t-shirts, made by American Graphics in Mansfield, that corresponded to the color of their pod.”
The planning committee arranged fun, educational curriculum through various partnerships within the community, including the Ohio Bird Sanctuary, the YMCA and the Renaissance Performing Arts Association.
“It was an absolutely marvelous experience to work with this youth collaborative,” said Debra Weaver of the Mansfield Art Center. “As a group of youth educators and servers of the youth, we sat down when we were watching kids programs get cut and we were trying to determine if we could do this, how we could do this safely and what it would look like. It took a lot of work.”
The Mansfield Art Center provided S.T.E.A.M. programming each day, which integrates art education with lessons in science, technology, engineering and math. According to Weaver, S.T.E.A.M. education models have been shown to improve children’s focus, motivation, academic outcomes and ability to learn.
While Weaver enjoyed bringing S.T.E.A.M. curriculum to the campers, she emphasized that the ultimate purpose of the camp was to meet a community need.
“This was really about making an effort in helping our community where we felt that our community really needed help,” she said. “At the center of that was, of course, education but also making sure we were contributing to kids having a safe atmosphere and allowing parents the ability to work during the day and also to make sure that our families were being fed.”
Both Weaver and Varn said the camps wouldn’t have been possible without numerous volunteers.
“We did this as a total community effort — from the locations, to the presenters and presenting agencies, to the supplies, to the food — all of it was done locally and showed the power of what happens when we all come together towards a common purpose,” Varn said.
