On National Camp Kindness Day, Foundation for Jewish Camp Spearheads Research to Help Transform Young People into Empathetic Leaders
NEW YORK — As summer camps across the country spotlight kindness during this year’s Camp Kindness Day, Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC) is spearheading research to help camps transform young people into compassionate leaders. In summer 2024, FJC provided grants of approximately $15,000 to five camps to join the second cohort of its Character at Camp Initiative.
Character at Camp is a three-part initiative combining research, programs, and communication to further understand how Jewish camps develop young people’s character and provide resources that empower camps to expand on their existing success. Run by FJC and funded by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the initiative began with a landscape survey of 120 camps in FJC’s network to understand which character strengths Jewish camps emphasized most. One trait stood out in particular: Kindness.
“Kindness, or chesed, is a core Jewish value that’s woven into every aspect of the camp experience — from programming to informal interactions in bunks,” said Jeremy J. Fingerman, CEO of Foundation for Jewish Camp. “On Camp Kindness Day, FJC is proud of all the work the more than 300 camps in our network do to develop young people’s character, and are excited to build on that success through the second cohort of our Character at Camp Initiative.”
The camps in the second cohort are spread out across Pennsylvania, California, Georgia, and Canada and include BB Camp (Manitoba), Camp Havaya, Camp JCA Shalom, Camp Mountain Chai, and Camp Barney Medintz. Character at Camp funding supports various initiatives at these camps, including camper, family and staff surveys, staff remuneration, and the integration of additional leadership roles for staff to be ambassadors of character development practices.
“We’ve known from multiple sources that Jewish camp offers a transformative experience for young people. But Character at Camp is enabling us to dig deeper and understand how camps nurture young people’s growth,” said Nila Rosen, Director, Learning and Research at Foundation for Jewish Camp. “By studying how camp experiences and camp relationships influence youth development, we are gaining new evidence about the importance of camp and the practices at camp that nurture the growth of compassion and kindness.”
Last summer, at URJ Crane Lake Camp, campers and counselors worked on a Kindness Mural Project, splashing “Spark Kindness” in bright orange letters. At Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, one camper spoke of a culture of mutual support — from assisting each other with Torah readings to cheering on friends at basketball games. A group of “Virtue Ambassadors” at Camp Laurelwood suggested that they “observed moments of kindness every day, in every place at camp.”
At FJC’s 2024 Leaders Assembly, which will take place December 9th to December 11th in Chicago, the Character at Camp Initiative plans to reveal the latest data on character development and to release a short documentary led by filmmaker Hannah Roodman, featuring footage from one of the camps in the initiative’s second cohort. Next year, FJC’s Character at Camp Initiative aims to publish data and findings in a peer-reviewed journal.
About Foundation for Jewish Camp
FJC advocates for over 300 day and overnight camps that provide nearly 180,000 campers and counselors each summer with a meaningful, personal, and lifelong connection to Judaism. FJC is the only public 501(c)(3) charitable organization solely focused on Jewish camp. jewishcamp.org
