Our Philosophy

Adirondack Camp: 25 Steps toward Becoming One of the Great Summer Camps in America

1. Create a safe place (physically, emotionally and psychologically) that encourages children to take risks in exploring their true selves. 
2. Co-develop with each child a series of individual challenges that can lead to small and large accomplishments -- that will stay with a child for life. 
3. Structure the days to enable increasing choice, challenge and responsibility. 
4. Leave a good part of the days to the comradeship of cabin life, impromptu discoveries, jam sessions and campfires under the stars. 
5. Choreograph the events to preserve spontaneity and wonder.  
6. Impart with each instruction and each small act of friendship the qualities of sharing, creativity, cooperation, growing, effort, courage, responsibility, leadership, independence and spirit.  
7. Emphasize, in one breath, family and community, and in the next – individual growth and self-respect. 
8. Organize everything under the guise of having awesome and outrageous fun – but never forget how serious the mission is.
9. Constantly experiment over the first hundred years, and then some.
10. 

    Never lose sight of the essential purpose: to build strong young hearts and character, while focusing on the whole individual and personal growth. 

11. Build a time line for a program that is tailored to build upon itself, week by week, enabling each camper to grow exponentially in personal accomplishments and confidence. 
12. Make the program so attractive that -- despite a fragmented, remote control world -- three out of every four eligible campers will return every summer, taking pride in their increasing levels of privilege and responsibility.
13. Never forget the blessings of age and location:  continue to be a Bellwether during these times of Tidal Change, a throwback to simpler times -- with the wondrous open air cabins, floating wooden docks and Old Town canoes. 
14. Continue honoring times when it was taken for granted that you could combine core values with great fun and organized chaos! 
15. Build the Camp community large enough to bring in campers and counselors from around the world to participate in a very diversified program of “4 camps in 1”.
16. Build the Camp community small enough to know everybody by first name and to make close friends for life. 
17. 

    Choose staff as selectively and carefully as a first tier university selects it students.  Send them every year to Adirondack Camp University. 

18. Build the staff around a permanent core group of educators and parents to provide a ratio of better than one counselor for every three campers. 
19. Select only staff who love children, aspire to excellence and who are capable of being caring, loving and skilled motivators and mentors on a 24/7 basis.
20. Ensure staff are pied pipers, each and every one, who will bunk with their campers in the same cabins, support them in their aspirations and dreams and be capable of making a profound and positive difference in your children’s lives.
21. When the summer is finally done… and your children return home, let the proof be in the pudding.
22. Have them talk of little else other than a summer that, despite its action packed pace, helped slow them down from the pressures and ever increasing busyness of their school-year lives.
23. Build changes in them that are obvious in their glow of confidence and self-awareness, with their heads held tall into the sky, their feet planted firmly, still, on earth.
24. 

    After all is said and done and it is clear to your children all have learned certain secrets that will guide and protect them for many years to come – Secrets like…

25. 1. Knowing how to find fun and then wonder – especially wonder - in almost every little thing.
    2. Knowing of the ways of laying small accomplishments one by one, side by side and one upon the other. Building in that way, a foundation of strong heart and strong character.
26. This is our philosophy. This is our promise.