Camp is About More Than Having Fun!

Camp Wannaklot is a place to develop life-long friendships, gain independence, and learn responsibility.  For the last 25 years, Camp Wannaklot has been a place where campers learned to infuse factor, made a friend who also has a bleeding disorder, and met some caring adults who dedicated a week every summer to make camp possible for them.  Our campers are given opportunities to develop decision making skills and make choices about what activities they would like to participate in at camp.

Over the last four years, Kim Williams, Director of Camp and Client Events and Deniece Chevannes, Director of Health Promotion and Evaluation have been looking at the research behind what we observe every summer at camp.  At the end of camp, we asked campers to complete an evaluation created from a subset of scales from the American Camp Association’s Camp Youth Outcomes Battery to look at Friendship Skills, Independence and Responsibility.

Results from our camper surveys for the last four years were compared against average scores from other special needs camps at our host camp facility, Camp Twin Lakes, and with ACA benchmark scores for Friendship Skills, Independence, and Responsibility from camps across the country.  Camp Wannaklot campers scored above average on all three indicators.

We presented a scientific poster at the Research Forum of the 2019 American Camping Association Conference. We presented evidence that Camp Wannaklot provides substantial benefits to youth with hemophilia or other inherited bleeding disorders. This poster allowed HoG to demonstrate with data that Camp Wannaklot is a place to have fun while developing essential life skills.