איך לבנות תרבות מחנה, תיאום ציפיות, ולחבר את כולם

Topic: How to build a camp culture, shared expectations, and get everyone on the same page.

Hi! I'm Magpie!

This was my sixth burn and first year leading a theme camp, The Empress.

The Empress is an established camp, but this year we only had 5 returning members of a camp of 46. Almost half our campers were virgins. Three separate campers also joined us unexpectedly on Playa. I knew only a handful of the campers before the burn (although many were friends of friends).

Looking at some of the posts here, it looks like we might have broke the mould on how to build a camp while maintaining cohesion and not going insane.

I spent a lot of time communicating expectations, building personal relationships, and establishing roles and responsibilities.

We used FB groups for discussions, GoogleGroups for posts by Leads, an Excel Document to track budget, tasks, roles, shifts, contributions, and anything else you can think of.

I think the top three successes were camp PowerPoint, delegating responsibilities to everyone, and having a sponsorship program. We also had a mandatory camp meeting on Monday morning for everyone to introduce themselves, pass points on their Lead position, conduct a Authentic Relating Game for everyone to cross-pollinate clans, and give a quick run down on tea operations/Lucifer. The Authentic Relating Game was the most important thing we did all week on playa.

Mostly, I just feel lucky that everything worked out and that we had a kick ass camp experience! (Although, we did have a handful of camp surprises including one member being flown off by air ambulance).

I wanted to share our camp PowerPoint with the hope that others might find it useful. I also would like to solicit comments, questions, and discussion on how to run a camp, what other camps use to build culture, and what values might be included or excluded.

You might notice in this document does not discuss the Ten Principles. I don't know if that is a mistake or not. I feel like Burningman runs on the Ten Principles, so why not my camp? Or does Burningman run on the Ten Principles and so does my camp, just in more explicit terms. I don't know. For discussion.