Better Summer Staff Wages in 2022, Our Giving Tuesday Focus

Summer Staffers waving to campers after a great week

Giving Tuesday will be here at the end of November, and we have a worthy cause for you to support on this day for directing some holiday spending to your favorite non-profits. Three of our Oregon-Idaho UM camps are teaming up to better support paid Summer Staffers and open up greater possibilities for those with fewer resources to pursue a summer working at camp.

For years, camp leaders in the Oregon-Idaho Conference have wanted to better compensate our Summer Staffers who are the backbone of our youth and family program camps. Camp summer staffs are predominantly made up of young adults who more consistently deal with mounting debt and a lack of well-paying jobs. These issues have grown in exponential ways in the past 20 years where many who would have served on Summer Staff in earlier days do not feel they can choose it now.

Camps Latgawa, Magruder, and Suttle Lake have the ambitious goal of paying our Summer Staffers $540 a week for the irreplaceable service they provide to change lives for our campers and retreat guests. We recognize this is still a modest wage compared with the greater job market, but it is a 50% increase to our previous Summer Staff wages.

To hire the 8 Resident Counselors who will serve for the summer at each of our three sites, we estimate this will increase our collective budgets by $15,000. To avoid covering this increase exclusively through camp fee hikes, we are kicking off a campaign to raise the $15,000. Your gift will help us provide a fairer wage for this important work, attract incredible new young adults, and build a more diverse core of young leaders involved in our camp’s ministry.

Giving Tuesday is November 30, 2021. Our sites will be posting on social media throughout the day 
offering easy ways to give digitally. If you want to be on the Giving Tuesday team, making fun posts to spread the word, contact troy@campmagruder.org. Your help makes a big difference in our success.

We hope for a future where our young adults do not have to make the decision to follow their dreams of serving on camp staff solely because of financial considerations. If we can better support our Resident Counselors in their life outside camp, we know they will provide the joyful, creative leadership to change lives when they are here and when they go out into the world.