Jewish Camp @ Home
A Virtual Response to 2020 and Beyond
In late spring 2020, Foundation for Jewish Camp and Mosaic United announced a new partnership: Jewish Camp @ Home – helping camps pivot into the virtual space. Jewish Camp @ Home supports camps in their efforts to provide meaningful engagement with campers, staff, and families virtually, and to reach even broader audiences in this changing landscape.
Summer 2020 offered a rare opportunity to learn and explore the ways we can bring camp home. We experimented, listened, and have worked together with the field to build new opportunities for online communal engagement for year-round, lifelong connections to Jewish camp.
What’s available to my camp?
Jewish Camp at Home is a 4-pronged approach to support camps as they adapt to the current environment.
Operational Support, Training, Consultation, and Evaluation
Throughout summer 2020, the Jewish Camp @ Home team provided consultation and support as well as a series of training videos and webinars to help with the launch of virtual summer experiences and the transition to virtual fall operations. Over 70 hours of consulting were provided to summer camps through this initiative. All trainings are accessible through the Experience Shuk and include: Pivoting to Digital, All About Inclusion, Leveraging Virtual Recruitment, and Rising and Remote.
Content: The Experience Shuk
The Experience Shuk is the largest centralized marketplace of virtual Jewish content and experiences, providing camps, informal educators, and families with direct access to the best of creative and cutting-edge Jewish engagement.
The Shuk connects you to curated live and on-demand experiences and a collection of downloadable resources, searchable by a variety of functions including age of participants, cost, programmatic specialty, and language. Once you identify an experience of interest for your community, you can connect with the content provider directly to plan meaningful programs together.
Click Here to become a provider on the Experience shuk
Click Here for FAQs regarding the Experience shuk
Funding: Incubation of new, collaborative models
Jewish Camp @ Home also offered funding for response initiatives like www.jewishsportsnow.com, enabling Jewish sports camps to come together to collaborate on virtual trainings and encourage innovation.
Technology
After researching, listening, and innovating in summer 2020, Jewish Camp @ Home is launching a new, interactive app that serves as a virtual home base, offering camps a place to gather and connect in a space made just for them. The mobile-friendly platform will give camps a way to engage campers in the COVID era, and it will open up new avenues for camper engagement long into the future.
This customizable web app offers camp communities the opportunity for meaningful connection with their camp and each other all year long, including:
- A closed, social networking bubble that encourages campers and staff to connect with camp friends as well as upload and share photos and videos. Camps can create groups for bunks, units, or common interests.
- A pre-populated, ready-to-roll interface offering interactive Shabbat-o-grams, birthday banners, an upcoming events calendar, a camper-referral program, and more!
- An activity library filled with camp specific videos, pre-populated with videos from the Jewish Camp @ Home global library, or the ability to download content from our virtual Jewish Experience Shuk.
The Jewish Camp @ Home app offers camps a rare direct link to campers throughout the year. But more importantly, it offers a place where campers can feel seen and cared for throughout the year.
WHO IS ELIGIBLE?
Jewish Camp @ Home is FREE for Jewish camps in the FJC network. Our goal is to support existing Jewish camp brands, and help you reach even broader audiences through a camp experience with little to no barrier to entry. We hope to accommodate as many camps as possible.
How do we participate?
You can start the process by completing the intake form below and a member of the team will be in contact with you.
I Want To Participate
