On Thursday, October 28, 2021, Advancement’s Buckeyes for Charity coordinators hosted a lunch and learn event at University Square North featuring Camp Oty’Okwa.
Camp Oty’Okwa is a residential camp located in the forests of Hocking Hills State Park and Nature Preserves. The camp has been operated by the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Ohio since 1942. It is open year-round for summer camp, environmental education programs and rental by other groups. Camp Oty’Okwa has access to over 700 scenic acres with the immediate facilities set atop one of the highest hills in the area. The camp is surrounded by steep terrain, mature woodlands, rock formations, hollows, and two large caves, providing an excellent site for exploration and appreciation of nature.
The speaker, Rick Perkins, is the Director of Camp Oty’Okwa. Rick started at camp in 2017 after a full career with the National Park Service working at multiple National Park Service sites including Hopewell Culture NHP, Isle Royale National Park, and Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska. Rick has been a resident of Hocking County for the past 17 years. He attended Hocking College and Ohio University where he obtained degrees in Outdoor Education and Field Biology.
Ohio State employees looking to volunteer their time are encouraged to become a “Big” in Big Brothers Big Sisters, or to contact Rick at rperkins@bbbscentralohio.org to discuss needs at the camp. Employees can financially support this and other nonprofit organizations serving central Ohio by pledging at the Buckeyes for Charity website at https://buckeyesforcharity.osu.edu.
Below is a captioned recording of the event, followed by an excerpt of the transcript.
Introduction
Dan:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dan Keck. I’m one of the Buckeyes for Charity coordinators, along with Alex Augenbaugh, Julie Burgess and Pam Thompson-Cook. And we are lucky and honored today to have Rick Perkins from Camp Oty’Okwa to talk about that camp.
Camp Oty’Okwa is associated with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Ohio. That is how it is associated with our charity drive here at Ohio State. Let me switch to the other video here. Looks like we have Alex, Julie Burgess, and Kristen Forshey on here.
Rick:
And Pam and Sarah here in the room and Dan, thank you for inviting me up here. I’ve been up here all morning, so it’s an easy trip for me to come up to talk about Camp Oty’Okwa, part of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Ohio.
I’m Rick Perkins. I’m the camp director at Camp Oty’Okwa. It is one of the arms of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Ohio. Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Ohio is one of the larger affiliates of the National Big Brothers Big Sisters.
That’s all around the country. Not only do we have Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Ohio, we have arms that reach all the way to Cleveland as part of our branch that we help facilitate. We also have Chillicothe, Union County, Springfield, a number of different areas that we assist, a whole bunch of different Big Brothers Big Sisters.
Hocking Hills State Park
Photo by kcgiles
As I said, I’m camp director down in Camp Oty’Okwa. Camp Oty’Okwa, for those who do not know where it is, is down in Hocking County, It’s 1.6 miles from Old Man’s Cave. So if you’ve ever been to Old Man’s Cave, you know right in the heart of Hocking County is where this camp is. The camp started 79 and a half years ago. We’re about ready to do our 80th year in operation. And when it came into existence, it was during World War II. At that time, it was just called Big Brothers.
Big Sisters didn’t get added to the affiliate until the 1970s. But what took place back in World War II? As you can imagine, there was a whole bunch of kids that were at home as dads were serving in the military.
Moms were serving in all the different industries to support the war. And a couple of individuals took off on a drive from Columbus here and ended up down in Hocking County on Purcell Road next to Old Man’s Cave.
They kinda got lost as the story goes and pulled over and there was this farmer farming a field up on top of a ridge, and they ask for directions. And they proceeded to ask the farmer if there was any land for sale because they wanted to open up a camp.
The farmer said, You can buy my land. And it was about that simple. Some of those early pictures from back in the 40s have still rows of corn on there and mules in the picture. And then it has a bunch of these cool tents that kids would sleep in, and that’s basically how camp came into existence.
There’s only two camps for Big Brothers Big Sisters in the nation now, One is the one I’m talking about, Camp Oty’Okwa. And the second one is in California outside of Los Angeles. And it’s more of a summer type of camp.
I love it when our kids get lost, in the sense that they get out into the wilderness of Ohio and enjoy it.
Camp Oty’Okwa has 777.5 acres. I just added 0.5 acres two weeks ago. When we can add to the size of it is important. So there’s 777 acres of protected land that we either own or manage. Most of these purchases started taking place there back in the forties, fifties, eighties and some recently here in the last 20 years, or donations in this case where people donated to the cause because they like what we do. Not only is it the 777 acres, but it has about 10,000 other acres that the kids go out and get lost in. And when I talk about getting lost, I love it when our kids get lost, in the sense that they get out into the wilderness of Ohio and enjoy it.
So we have Old Man’s Cave, we have Conkle’s Hollow, we have Rock House, all the natural features that Dan and I know from Hocking County from living down there, to go out and explore in. We have four main programs that we run.
Again, I’m talking about the camp program, not as much as the Big Brothers Big Sisters program where we’ve got the “Bigs” and “Littles” and the mentoring. I’m talking more about Camp. You can always come back and have the mentoring center come and talk about what the Bigs and Littles do, which would be a great program for you guys to see because we’re on a run to try to get more people to adopt littles, to help mentor. There’s a big push to get more of those kids. Because, you know, there’s a lot of this out there. The four main camp programs that we run at Camp Oty’Okwa is the Adventure Camp. The second one is our Life Skills Camp. The third one is our Environmental Education camp that Sarah participates in. And the last one is our rental program.
Adventure Camp
I’m just going to go right down the list of those and talk about what each one of those camps do and what the goals of those are. The Adventure Camp is the one that is the most well known for what we do as an agency. In 2019 during the summer, we had 945 kids come to camp and when they come to camp, they are coming and this is just the summer before the rest here. When they come to camp, they come in on a Sunday and they stay at a camp all the way through till a Friday afternoon.
It’s a residential camp and the kids get dropped off. We pick them up in Columbus, at our main office on busses and we drive them down to camp and they get off there. The Adventure Camp program has a wide variety of goals that we’re trying to do.
Kids’ ages range from 6 to 13. And they mostly are coming from the Columbus metropolitan area and then Appalachia, so probably 85% from the Columbus area and 15% from our Appalachian counties, down mostly where we are, which includes Vinton, Hocking, Athens, primarily. Some of the donations or funding sources we get to help run the camp come specifically from some of those counties, so we target some of those kids as well. We don’t charge any fees for the kids to come to camp because we know the families that we are looking to get.
They don’t have the funds to typically pay. The demographics that we’re working with, our kids are primarily victims of crime kids, and these are kids that have been exposed to crime at some point in their lives.
This is young kids I’m seeing on a regular basis a lot more grandparents that are bringing the kids there. It’s important to think about when I say we don’t charge for the camp. Most kids at some point have that opportunity to go to a residential camp if their parents pay for it.
What’s nice about Camp Oty’Okwa, we’re targeting the kids and parents that can’t pay for camp. If they didn’t, if we weren’t in existence for the thousand or so kids that we work with, they’d never have that residential camp experience that they get.
What’s nice about Camp Oty’Okwa, we’re targeting the kids and parents that can’t pay for camp. If they didn’t, if we weren’t in existence for the thousand or so kids that we work with, they’d never have that residential camp experience that they get. Most camps charge anywhere from $700 to $1000 for one week of camp. We were lucky enough that a donor in the Columbus area, who is affiliated with a camp in Illinois. wanted to send our campers to their camp, which was a seven week camp. But it’s $10,000 to go there for about seven weeks.
You can start to see the issues related to this. What’s really nice about them, not to digress too far, is that a couple of our kids who have been going to our camp for the last four years go to that camp. And now we’re taking a sailing program where they sail and all that kind of stuff out of Lake Michigan, and getting that exposure. It’s great that someone loves Camp Oty’Okwa, but also loves that camp as well.
What typically happens when the kids come to camp for Adventure Camp, is that they they get on the bus in Columbus on Sunday. They come down to the camp; they unload in the first three hours at the camp; they’re right directly into the swimming pool. It’s the best way for the kids to get to know each other.
It’s the best way for the counselors to get to know the kids, In a normal year, we’re trying to get 140 kids at a time in the summer camp, so that’s 140 kids jumping into the swimming pool and playing. What’s really neat about what we do is we serve multiple different demographics.
We have pretty much every cultural group that’s found in the Central Ohio area that’s coming there. And a lot of the kids, like I said, the demographics for having been victims of crime when they get to camp, they’re all put on the same playing field just because of the nature of being in nature.
If you’re coming from a community that you’re normally into a fighting mode and all that kind of stuff, everybody’s put on the same playing field. And it’s wonderful to watch that because if if you have a chip on your shoulder, it falls off, that’s you’re not going to have an opportunity.
We separate the kids in multiple trail groups. Trail groups are the ones that then move into cabins and they will be together for the entire week. So typically, we try to do it by age and/or anyone how well they’re developed, either mentally or physically and all that stuff.
Typically, all the younger kids, 6-7 year olds will be in one group, 8-9 year olds, 10-11 year olds all the way up, the list of the kids. And that’s also indicative of what they end up doing for the whole week.
Another beautiful thing that we do is if kids start coming at the age of six, we definitely want them to come back at 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. That way we get as many touches of these kids as we can, exposure to the camp.
It’s really, really cool to see. I’ve been at camp now five years. It’s really nice to me to have these relationships with kids who have been coming for five years as you can see their growth. And there’s one family in particular that I got to know when they first came to camp. They brought all kinds of turmoil with them and boy watching them grow. And what our little part of that is is pretty darn amazing. That’s just one sample family. That’s four kids, and they’re no longer with their parents. They’re with other foster parents, and they’re just growing as individuals.
What we also like to do, and the second camp here, is if they hit the age of 13, when they start aging out of our Adventure Camp, we put them into our Life Skills Camp, and Life Skills Camp goes from basically 14 all the way up to 17 years of age.
I’ll talk about LIfe Skills here in a minute. But the other important part of that is that they’re moving into our Life Skills Camp. It’s probably kids that we want to be counselors at some point. So we put them into our CIT program, which is our counselor training program, and we continue to develop these kids.
Once they hit 18, they’re paid staff. Sometimes they’ll be paid if they’re ready to go at 16 or 17 years old and they are mentoring the younger kids. And then we have a number of wonderful young women that are Latinos that are just tremendous camp counselors, they’ve been coming since they were five years old and six years old, and now they’re 17, 18, 19 years old. And this, by the way, I’m just thinking of Maxie in particular, because she’s just a tremendous, tremendous counselor. But then she’s giving back what she experienced all these years, and this is her 14th year going to the camp.
It’s one of those great things. Even the director of the Adventure Camp, Matt Smith, he started off as a Little within the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. He went to camp as a six year old and now he’s 32 years old and he’s been there all the way through it.
Now he’s finishing up his master’s degree in social work. So this is his love, and he loves to wait and see what camp can provide these kids, that exposure.
Dan:
So it’s a real success story.
Rick:
Yeah, it is. And by the way, those–thanks, Dan–those success stories. My career was with the federal government, with the National Park Service. I spent my career with the National Park Service and decided this was a great way to spend more of my life here and I find this just be as rewarding as it.
Literally, it’s almost on a weekly basis. Someone will drive down there, someone, like you, Pam, who decided to go down to Hocking County but they went to camp at some point in their life. They pull back and they come down Purcell Road and stop at camp and say, I used to work here and this place saved my life.
Or they say I was a camper and I came to camp three years in a row, I had a guy come by the other day. He runs a business up in Columbus and sells swimming pools. And he’s like, I want to help you with your swimming pools. Because I came here in the 1980s in seventh and eighth and ninth grade. And Sarah we have in the room here,
Sarah used to come to camp in the Environmental Education Program. And it’s the same thing. We had 50 years of experience with Upper Arlington schools coming to camp. So the exposure is wonderful, the kids get. So during the Adventure Camp,
It’s at 6:00 a.m. the kids are in a Trail Group, which we try to keep as small as we can. Last year with COVID we had our camp down to 50% capacity. We had 534 kids come to camp versus the around 1000 number that we typically would have.
The trail groups are down to 6-7 kids with two counselors. We always have two adults with all the groups at all times, which we all know why those are out there. And they get to do all kinds of things. They go hiking every day.
They have to go on a camping trip at some point within that six day period that they’re there. So they go out and they “open camp”. It’s not in tents. It’s actually open camp where they sleep underneath the stars and when you’re down to that area, there’s almost zero light pollution, so once you get out there, the noise pollution is almost absent. They’re out there and into the nature and doing it. Or they get into the rock shelters. And if you’ve been to Old Man Cave… Camp, with 777 acres, there’s about twelve nice rock shelters.
Very similar to Old Man’s Cave or Ash Cave. not as big, but that’s an idea. And they will sleep on the ground inside these caves. if it’s a rainy night and and just sit there with the waterfalls coming off the front and they build their campfires.
It’s just pretty cool to do that. I’ve walked out to check on groups. And I just stay a couple hundred yards away and just listen to the conversations and stories that the counselors are telling. But what’s also really neat is the kids telling the stories back.
Or we pick a themed book every week and they read the themed book, whatever it might be. Hunger Games was one of them for a number of years, when that was popular, and so every child reads The Hunger Games. Either the kids read it, or the counselors read it with the kids, and then those conversations happen throughout the camp, whatever that themed book is.
Hocking River
And there’s a bunch of other books that are part of that. So this last year, almost every one our our kids got to go canoeing on the Hocking River. I got grants from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Watercraft, and they were able to purchase a whole new fleet of boats for us this last year.
It’s really a wonderful experience once again. The Hocking River is a beautiful river, as you experienced, and the kids get to go jump on the river and they go swimming and they cook. They actually build a campfire along the river for their lunch. They cook hot dogs or whatever meal the counselor chooses for them to do.
Then they canoe the entire river. What we implemented this last year–and it wasn’t by anybody being smart and thinking through it–we decided we wanted more kids to go. But typically we only used the older kids: eleven, twelve, thirteen year old kids to do that.
We started putting the younger kids, the six year olds in the middle of the canoe, so we have three kids in the canoe. And so the older kids were able to kind of mentor the younger one and they had a paddle.
So, everybody participated with that. To me, I just loved launching the kids. And then at some point during the day, there’s a couple areas along the Hocking River, if I’m in town shopping for groceries or whatever I’m doing, I listen to all of our kids go by.
So just watching, I videotaped a lot of times, but there are times. I just watched what’s going on. So they do the canoeing. And then we do astronomy programs and then we talk about a lot of other things that we do, which is, “hiding the broccoli”–because the kids don’t like broccoli–but we “hide broccoli” in everything, “broccoli” in this case is the educational components of what we do. So now we go down to the streams, and do stream studies. But that’s the broccoli. And it’s like, “Let me catch fish.” But they’re learning about what is in the streams. We do forest ecology.
A portion of my staff are hired as environmental educators, and they actually do more science-related programs. Because you can’t go through Hocking County without seeing the geology and the years of history. And again, when you’re in a wilderness type area like Camp Oty’Okwa, you can’t not talk about trees, it’s just one of those things.
Dan:
It’s cool that you probably have a lot of background to help you explain that stuff.
Rick:
That’s my background, and that’s easy for me, which is a really good complement between Matt Smith, who runs Adventure Camp and Rachel Gratz, who runs the Life Skills team. Both of those folks are licensed social workers, so it’s a good complement to have both of those folks who understand the dynamics of managing kids that have been through traumas in their life. And me having an understanding of the environmental education component. Right now, it’s just a really, really good team of us. We see that we play off of each other.
Pam:
Do all the families, the kids that come to your camp, are they already a part of Big Brothers Big Sisters? And do they have to apply to go?
Rick:
The answer is no. Our goal for every one of our camps– and let’s say we have 100 kids in every one of our camps. Our goal is that at least 25 of those kids, or 25% of those kids, that are already affiliated with Big Brothers Big Sisters attend, being they might be one of the Littles of a Big. They’re part of one of the school-based programs out of one of the Columbus public schools, so we definitely want them to be a priority.
But the other 75 kids, or 75% is kids where we have relationships with already or we are working the different groups. Village Network is a good example. The Hopewell clinics down in our area, kids that are in Franklinton schools, West Broad, I get a lot of kids from West Broad Elementary.
So those are the other 75% of the kids that we work with. A percentage of those, which is also one of those remarkable stories, are kids of parents that went to camp. So we are getting people that have become adults and they’re having kids and they want their kids to have the same experience that they did.
They give us a call and we fit them in. So the unfortunate thing is that if we served a thousand people, a thousand kids in the summer, I know we could serve 3000 more if we had the capacity.
There are that many kids out there, that need the experience, need the exposure and need the residential experience. So to answer your question, it’s kind of all the way around. One of the grants that we do receive from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office is the Victims of Crime.
With that, it has to be a child that’s been exposed to crime, which is why it’s easier for us to work with some, the Village Network is a good example. Not all the kids at the Village Network would be exposed to crime.
But there’s a good chance some of that has happened, so whatever that is, and that could be drug abuse in the family, alcohol abuse in the family, outright gunfire, whatever, whatever one of those crimes could be. That’s pretty much just what’s there. The beautiful thing is once the kids are there, we prepare all the meals for every one of the groups that are there, and in a given year we will prepare 50,000 meals. And the kids always have food like these wonderful cookies in front of me. Except what I did implement a couple years ago is: we got rid of the packaged foods. It was part of our–it became inherent because it’s easy. And we went with the fruits and all those type of things, which the local food bank helps us out with. Which is a wonderful thing. We didn’t do it this last year because the timing wasn’t good, but typically on Wednesday we go up and get whatever produce, whatever fruits, whatever stuff they were willing to give us. So, the Mid-Ohio Foodbank
There’s one down in Hocking County we’re also partnering with.
Dan:
The Southeast Ohio Foodbank
Rick:
Yeah, through HAPCAP.
Alex:
I actually have a question about philanthropy for your camp, specifically: is your philanthropy driven through individual donors or is it driven through foundations or groups of businesses or corporations locally to your area?
Or do you branch out further?
Rick:
It’s all over the place, I think it’s the best way to answer that. And there’s other people within Big Brothers Big Sisters that could answer that more specifically. The Columbus Foundation is a great example of a group that I’m commonly helping our grant writer fill out grants, mostly for infrastructure repair. I didn’t talk about infrastructure.
But we are our own village. We treat our own water, we treat our own sewer and we have gas wells on the property. It’s just the nature of where we are. And so the infrastructure is a constant cost, as you can imagine, with facilities that sleep upwards of 330 people if need be.
The Columbus Foundation is one of those that helps us out tremendously. They give us an annual maintenance. We apply for it. I hope I’m not being presumptuous, but it’s been the last four years they’ve given us a $10,000 grant for a targeted project.
Then sometimes we’ll go for a larger one. Individual donors, boy, those are the ones that come out of the weeds all the time. I had someone send me a message, an email the other day and said, I have $2,000 that I’d like to give you.
Is there a project that I can earmark for it? And I said, yeah, our kiln for kids to take our art classes, it blew up and it died finally. And she came back and said, okay, I’m gonna give you $3,000. You know, one of those types of things. It’s a targeted thing that someone might be interested in environmental sciences, environmental education.
There’s a lot of people that love what we do for outdoor education, and people might be targeted directly with that. So, yeah, it’s kind of across the board. And for Big Brothers Big Sisters we do Bowl for Kids’ Sake, which you guys might have heard of. It’s our largest fundraiser every year.
That supports all of, not just camp, but supports all the Big Brothers Big Sisters in central Ohio. We do A Taste for kids in the spring. So multiple different areas.
Julie:
My daughter is a first grade teacher and. it’s a certain school district she works in, and she sees what you’ve mentioned, but her kids live with aunts and uncles or grandparents.
This is her sixth or seventh year teaching. She’s had multiple students where one or both parents are in jail, and she works a lot then with different school administrators and support staff at the school. So could one of the counselors or whatever feels this camp would be good for one of their students.
Is there something just on your website they could go to to apply?
Rick:
Absolutely you can. We do have a website or I can make sure that I have my email available for you. And you can actually get that and just email me directly. But it really worked well this last year. Even though we were at 50% capacity, we were able to fit in most of the kids that wanted to go.
Our goal was to have them sometimes come twice in the summer because we could really develop what we did the first week when we put them into the second group. But yes, matter of reaching out, just like you said.
Julie:
OK, thanks.
Rick:
Yeah, thank you, because there’s those kids everywhere. And I know one child, she’s just become one of the people that she gets to camp and hugs everybody, so everybody knows her. But her mother is no longer alive and the father is in jail and the grandparents are going in managing and growing and doing everything. But they love what she’s growing into. And now she’s my own daughter’s best friend. So it’s just kind of funny. She’s out of Circleville.
Life Skills Camp
I talked about Adventure Camp. The second part of our program that’s directly related to camp is our Life Skills program. We started that three years ago. The Life Skills program is working with those kids that are that are typically 14 to 18.
If you look at the state standards for that, it’s actually 14 to 21. Because when we developed that program, really we wanted to work with foster kids, and then we found out that so many of our kids were aging out of our program.
That just made sense to do it. The Life Skills program is less kids. But we do more, more contacts. They come for the summer. They can come for the six days, but they also come for the weekends, one weekend a month throughout the rest of the year and during the summer.
What’s really cool that Rachel does with that is she gets in there. They all get to go swimming the first day, depending on–again, we’re talking about teenagers, so it takes a little bit of difference for teenagers, because of the things that teenagers have–
I have one–in regards to their discipline. But what they do on the first day is that everyone gets to know each other, but on Monday morning, we take them all. They all get to do the menu planning on Sunday. They get broken into groups of three kids and then we take them to Kroger and they have to do all their own shopping.
They’re getting $40 each amongst that, and they have to–or depending on–it could be $30 when the kids are in the group. But they have to plan the menu out, and then they have to go to Kroger to spend the money, and then they have to come back and have to cook for the rest of the group.
That’s one of the parts. The Life Skills program is doing the menu planning, the food preparation, the cleaning. They’re doing tire changing. One whole day is just auto mechanics, changing tires on vehicles. They’re doing oil checks and all the liquid checks.
They’re doing budget planning for a budget, they’re doing resume building. We have a whole bunch of different uniforms–not uniforms, but suits–that have been donated to us. So it gets them to dress up and they get to practice doing different interviewing techniques.
We had a person in Westerville that donated six sweing machines, so they get to learn how to sew buttons on, and do some basic sewing. I have a person down in Hocking County that helps that out. They also get to go canoeing. They also get to go on a camp out. They get to do what the younger kids do, but they do more of it.
The Life Skills program has got a lot of momentum, as you might imagine, trying to get kids ready for adulthood. And that’s important. Again, the kids coming through our program from six years old, they hit that fourteen, we want to put them right into the Life Skills program to get them to continue to come to camp. Or what we do is: Job and Family Services out of Fairfield County. Their life skills instructors, program leaders will come to camp and they’re bringing their kids as a whole group, so they’ve been working with them for a whole year. But they also want their kids to get a camp experience, so they will come and then we will work in partnership with their folks.
That’s the same with Franklinton here in Columbus. A lot of kids coming from that. Actually, in 2019, that school was about ten kids for about four straight trips, so you can really build on the momentum.
Pam:
You have people helping? So you said that you offer the cooking the meal thing. The kids have never … it’s like, microwave, right? So they don’t cook. Do you have people that help them?
Rick:
Absolutely. We have people that are sitting right there with them, We have two to four counselors or seasonal people. We actually hire 40 people for the summer. And then we have a permanent person that is always managing and always right there to make sure that’s happening.
I’d like to take like three months each winter for the kids that are 18 and 19 year old and try to find a way to get a trade skill. We push the idea of college. We encourage people who want to go to the military to go into the military. I’d love to see a way to do trade skills and get some kind of certificate that they come to camp for three months and they learn a trade
Personally, I’d love to take some of our winter months, and this is where I like to digress. I’d like to take like three months each winter for the kids that are 18 and 19 year old and try to find a way to get a trade skill.
We push the idea of college. We encourage people who want to go to the military to go into the military. I’d love to see a way to do trade skills and get some kind of certificate that they come to camp for three months and they learn a trade or they get some kind of certificate, and then have the community at large be ready for some of these kids that we picked up get into the job force, versus just being idle. And that’s a problem with this.
As I see it, the foster care program is you kind of get kicked out, although there is good funding and good programs that just happened here recently. But outside of that, you get to that age: what do you do with the rest of your life?
We talked about Adventure Camp. We talk about our Life Skills. But we didn’t talk about Adventure Camp, like Life Skills, is those kids once a month throughout the rest of the year,
We bring 50 to 70 kids back to camp for a weekend. So typically it’s going to be probably 95% of the kids that were there during the summer. We bring them back for September, October, November, one big Christmas camp, and then the rest of the year.
So, we get to experience camp in the winter time. And we continue building on whatever growth happened the year before. And some of it’s just relationships. Like I said, the kids jump off the bus and they start hugging each other, even in COVID times.
We had our own policies, and we were very successful this last year. One of them was: no hugging. It was impossible. When a bunch of seven year olds love the counselors they had the year before and the counselors are still there and they jump off the bus.
It’s a tackle. They love the counselors, to do that. And I’ve talked about the counselors. And that’s always our biggest challenge. It’s like everybody right now, I think: hiring the right people, having enough people hired. We hire about 40 people on, 40 part time people.
Most of our counselors are 18 and 19 years old, either just graduated from high school or just starting college and trying to decide what to do. So we have a lot of young counselors that are being exposed to the hardest job I think they’re going to have in their life watching what they do as they’re with the kids 24/7 and they’re dealing with everything that these kids are bringing with them.
Most of our counselors are 18 and 19 years old, either just graduated from high school or just starting college and trying to decide what to do. So we have a lot of young counselors that are being exposed to the hardest job I think they’re going to have in their life watching what they do as they’re with the kids 24/7 and they’re dealing with everything that these kids are bringing with them. They’re doing washing laundry in the middle of the night, if there’s bedwetters in the group. Whatever the problem might be, these counselors are a rich source for these kids for that week, and I can’t say enough about that.
My heart goes to the counselors. I like seeting them grow as individuals over an eight week session. That’s how many sessions we have. There are eight session. And so it’s watching them grow as individuals, watching them crash as individuals, and building themselves back up is just tremendous.
One program that I didn’t mention in the summer is we have do grief sessions. It’s from a bunch of local grief counselors here in Columbus, and we have 100 kids that come there that someone close to the child has died either naturally or violently.
The kids are going to grief sessions. It’s another one of those wonderful programs that happens with the counseling happens every morning before they get turned back to our camp staff to go off an do the woods stuff.
Environmental Education
Another program is our Environmental Education program. We have 22 schools, and this is a revenue based program, but it’s also education where schools like Upper Arlington, Circleville, Athens, Plain City, Delaware, Buckeye Valley, just to name a bunch off the top of my head, sent kids to camp with their teachers.
Then we do the environmental education, which is forest ecology, the geology, the stream ecology, whatever the program that is complementing what is being instructed in schools. So I hire six to seven environmental educators to assist the teachers.
We run about 2300 students through camp through the environmental education program like you did, Sarah. as a teacher, I think you were there. Which was 50 years. For those on screen that’s 50 years of Upper Arlington schools coming to camp.
Even before we started the environmental education program, but the goal of that is to teach about environmental education, which a lot of us… That’s a lot of reasons kids go to camp with their schools, such as the environmental education program. Like I said, it’s revenue-based.
We do charge the schools and families the cost to go there, which helps pay for the kids to go to camp in the summer. It’s a marginal amount. Most of it comes from donations, but it’s a marginal amount from camp, because it’s a year round camp, and that helps.
Rental
Another thing I do, which I manage, is the Rental Program. It’s a weekend rental program. So if we don’t have any of our Big Brothers Big Sisters camps running on a Saturday and Sunday, I’ll do everything I can to rent the camp. To Ohio State University, the cross country team is one of those. They come down in August after camp ends, and they build on whatever Khadevis wants to build on before the season starts with the cross country team. Yeah, they run every day, but they also have trainers there and they do multiple different things. And Hocking County is a great place for runners.
One of my summer camps in the middle of is Myers Running Camp, who is three brothers that want to teach kids how to run better. They teach a lot about how to apply to go to college as runners.
It’s about 100 kids from wherever they draw their folks from to do it. And Chad graduated from Ohio State and ran for Ohio State and was in the Olympics. So it is a good program. And then we have a lot of church groups, you know, lots of church groups that will rent camp on weekends, the Columbus Audubon Society comes to us. Columbus State just was here last week. It’s a Silent Weekend. And all those are revenue-based to help pay for the cost to run the camp. This camp has 14 cabins. It has a dining hall that will easily seat 180 people. Full commercial kitchen.
That’s part of that because it takes all those different things to do it. We have multiple lodges. The main lodge is environmental educators, probably the one you experienced, that sleeps 130 people. So multiple different things just for the infrastructure. I have six permanent staff, including myself, that are there full time, one maintenance person, two in the kitchen and then three of us that run the different program areas.
Pam:
What is the camp name? Is it Indian?
Rick:
Camp Oty’Okwa is Indian, and back in the 1940s. 1950s, there was a contest basically that went out to say, what is a good name for camp? And someone came up with this name. Camp Oty’Okwa is a Native American name and it stands for “brotherhood.”
At the time, they were just Big Brothers, so let’s make this “brotherhood.” And if you look at “brotherhood” and the definition in the dictionary, “brotherhood” is not just for boys. It’s for all people. So it fits. It fit back then, and it still kinda fits today.
Dan:
This is kind of random, but your 777 acres, is it all contiguous or do you have to …?
Rick:
It is all contiguous. Part of it is owned by another land preservation group called Crane Hollow. They deeded over the land to Camp to manage. It’s owned by them . There’s about 300 acres, 250 acres that they own, but it’s all one big chunk, one big chunk of forest. When I say, it’s fun to see the older counselors, older being more experienced. I love when they get off our trails and go get lost. We know where they are. They tell us where they’re going, Every single one of them has a cell phone that we know works everywhere except back in the far parts of the cave. We can track where they are, if need be.
It’s literally we know where they are. Plus there’s all roads surrounding the whole area. So if they do make a mistake, they can call us and say, hey, we’re coming out on 664 or whatever road it is. But typically we say, OK, sorry, is everybody OK?
And they say, everyone’s OK, and we say, keep finding your way. We do take all the electronics away from the kids, so there is no phones. We take the personal cell phones away from our counselors. But we give them the one phone that they communicate with us, so that they are forced to do their jobs. Years ago, everybody was sitting there watching movies on the overnights. That’s not what we wanted.
Dan:
There’s actually cell towers out there? Because I know there’s a lot of places in Hocking County with no cell coverage.
Rick:
There is. There’s a Sprint tower right next to Old Man’s Cave. It doesn’t help if you bring AT&T down because it’s there. We have very poor wi-fi, though.
I’m still trying to improve our wi-fi at Camp, It’s very poor, which keeps corporate America from wanting to rent camp away, because most often they won’t do that. I did have another group from Ohio State that was there in August, from the College of Business, THRIVE.
They brought in a whole bunch of kids. They brought the kids down there for a one-day retreat. But they were able to have everything on their laptops, to stream out or bring something in.
Pam:
So the counselors are doing life–I don’t know if you call it “life skills”
Rick:
They’re doing life skills as well.
Pam:
Life skills and grief counseling. Do they have to have some kind of a degree or something?
Rick:
The grief counselors are professional counselors that are already working here in Columbus. I know we use “counselors” both ways, but they are truly licensed individuals. Some of them have their own grief counseling business, how they get the kids. So our counselors have… we target kids that are interested in social work, interested in environmental education, and/or just education to come to camp.
That’s the three main areas that we target, but it doesn’t prohibit someone who might be in business management to be a counselor if they fit in. Fitting in is the biggest thing in being able to do the job.
I went someplace in the middle of the summer this summer and met with people similar to what we’re doing here. And someone asked the question: What worries you? And I said, Well, I got, you know, 25 eighteen year olds managing 100 fourteen year olds. What could go wrong?
Most of us who work there, we don’t sleep in the summer because we worry about what can go wrong. This last year, knock on wood, we had only one hospital visit, which ended up being a sprained ankle. And this child came to camp with a sprained ankle and re-sprained it. But we couldn’t tell if it was broken or not. So we did it again. Lots of bumps and bruises, bugs. We had one young man that had 23 bee stings, hornet stings. He stood on a hornet’s nest and didn’t get off fast enough. But he is fine.
Poison ivy. Obviously, we’re going to get all those type of things, We do have a nurse that we hire for the summer. A lot of our young women have their first period at camp, because you look at the numbers. And the nurse is just tremendous. She was one of our younger girls. She grew up through our program and then became a nurse, and she works at Children’s. And she finds a way to sneak out during the summer to come back down to us.
She just knows what we’re working with, and is tremendous. One of the hardest positions to fill is a nurse, especially during COVID. Everybody’s working and it’s hard to get that.
And then the amount of kids to come with medications. It’s also a thing where the nurse has to manage the medication program. We can’t just let the kids have it. So we take it around, depending on what the prescription is, every meal time or whatever, it’s supposed to happen.
I didn’t mention one of our trails, that is the old-growth forest trail. It’s open to the public 24/… during the day anytime. I can’t say 24/7 or someone might fall off a cliff. So if you decide to go down to Hocking County, whereas Old Man’s Cave and the Hocking Hills are being loved to death right now.
The traffic has increased dramatically. It’s been busy forever. But the last two years since everybody has moved outside, which I think is a great thing, but, boy, it’s been loved to death. And this here, we don’t advertise it, so I’m advertising it I guess. It’s open to the public and you could be down there and think about split rocks. There’s a whole bunch of the size of this room, rocks that basically fell out of a large rock shelter like Old Man’s Cave. And it’s a maze of rocks and you can get lost in it. There’s tunnels underneath it. Obviously, our kids love to get lost there and do all kinds of great things there.
Kristin:
I also wanted to say, thank you so much for sharing about this because I actually was a student intern at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Ohio and through Ohio State’s College of Social Work in 2018 and 2019.
But I never really got a chance to learn about Camp Oty’Okwa. I just heard a lot of people talking about it. I’m appreciative to learn about this. So thank you.
Rick:
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, and that’s your intake program. Unfortunately, you missed that part of it. We try to get everybody who is new to Big Brothers Big Sistsers, I give them a tour once a day (I have someone coming tomorrow) so they get that exposure to what camp is, because you don’t know what it is unless you go there.
It’s just so important that we do it. There’s lots of magic that happens at that place. And I know I say that, but there’s still fights that break out. I’m not going to sugarcoat everything. There’s definitely problems that happen.
There’s definitely things that go on that we have to keep track of. We’re looking at teenagers that want to be with teenagers and making sure that they have all eyes on everybody all the time. It’s just, you know, the problems that we try to eliminate.
We do the best that we can. And all the moving parts, so many moving parts at that place. My maintenance guy called me today and goes, do you want the good news or the bad news? And I go, what is it, Dan? And he goes, dId you know the main dining lodge was built with inch-and-a-quarter PVC for plumbing?
I go, OK? Is that good or bad? He goes, They don’t make it anymore, and we have a leak. OK, so OK, I get it now.
How can I help?
Dan:
I do want to make sure I ask, you know, if we’re here and we think this is a great facility and a great thing, what can we do to help?
Rick:
Multiple different areas. If you want to be a Big and sponsor a Little with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Ohio, that would be one great way. If you’re looking at financial resources, then that’s a matter of getting back with me.
Is that kind of what you’re thinking about, right?
Dan:
Financially, we can definitely do our employee payroll deduction through the Buckeyes for Charity program. We, of course, are encouraging everyone to do that. So I guess mainly beyond financial is what I’m interested in, if there’s anything we can do.
Rick:
Have a retreat at camp. That way, you get your exposure. I think that is the best thing. I think that is how people fall in love with what we do, is you come to camp, I just had Express, which is a corporation, they deal with clothing and everything. They just came in with 42 people last week for a volunteer day and they painted buildings all day, just because I had enough hands to paint. So we don’t have the person-power to paint a whole building at one time, because Dan the maintenance guy is constantly doing that.
So that’s one of those other ways. That’s more for us, maybe to talk later, Dan, specifically about. It just depends on where it is.
You know, there’s probably one way to be very helpful. I’m looking at West Broad Elementary. It’s one of Columbus Public Schools. Huntington sponsors that school, so they do all the fundraising, and they raise $6,000 a year to send all those kids to camp every year.
And that would be an ideal thing for environmental education programs, for more of those public schools, is to have a group that says, look, this is what we’re going to fundraise for. It might not be $6,000. It depends on how many kids come. There’s usually around $4,000 to send that many kids there, is a better way to do it. This way, you can send, through your program here, you could be sponsoring any one of the Columbus Public or even the schools anywhere in this area that might not be able to afford to send kids to do that. And then they get to come to camp. And again I made it sound easy because you have to have the right teachers. You have to have the right principals and you have to have teachers and then you have to be able to fund the kids. West Broad is a good example of: those kids wouldn’t be coming to camp if it wasn’t for Huntington, who raised the money to send those kids to camp, and pay that every year. And then we have one key teacher in that program that continues to push for that experience that you did.
One other thing I didn’t mention, just because it’s up here at Ohio State, is the Byrd Polar Institute, we’re partners with them, we did a large grant with them through the National Science Foundation, so we’re the camp–unfortunately, it’s been troublesome for the last few years–but we also work with those folks on a yearly basis over there.
They’re educating about the ends of the Earth. So we’re actually doing the Antarctic and Arctic programs as part of that. That connection is there.
Dan:
We want to encourage everyone and anyone watching this later, get in contact with Rick: rperkins@bbbscentralohio.org or go to Camp Oty’Okwa’s website: campotyokwa.org.