Summer Camp for All - A Partnership with Children's Hospital LEND Program

Over the past 6 years, Cincinnati Parks and Children's Hospital have partnered on select programs and events to serve more children and families with developmental disabilities and sensory friendly needs. We began with a soft opening for our Winter in the Woodlands event, where we accepted registrations for a Sensory Friendly Hour before the public start time. Families who registered could attend the event with a few adaptations to meet sensory friendly needs, as well as supportive materials and staff to assist in attending the event.

That went really well, so we created some Sensory Friendly Maple events based on the same model of creating a time for families with these needs to attend, support materials to assist, and familiar and trusted staff to greet and assist them. THAT went really well, so we were looking at ways to expand our partnership.

During our 2021 summer camp season, deep into COVID protocols, we had a camper who had some sensory sensitivities. Thanks to the partnership with Children's, we were taught some useful skills to recognize and adapt for children with these needs. "Sebastian" was a bit apprehensive on the first day of summer camp. He was very interested in the way I was taking his and everyone’s temperature at the start of the camp day. Showing Sebastian his temperature reading and writing it down for him was calming and broke the ice. So of course we plotted his temperature throughout the week. Sebastian was pretty overwhelmed by flying insects, and my staff found an old bee helmet that he could put on when he needed to. We watched Sebastian grow and flourish throughout his week in nature, so of course that led to an idea: Let's do a full camp!

Being the excellent partner that Children's Hospital is, they said yes! Not only did they say yes, but they thought of a potential funding source to make it happen more readily. This grant, the Center for Clinical and Translational Science Training Integrating Special Populations Implementation grant, funded staff, resource materials and some adaptive equipment to help us make this camp experience possible for our audience of children with developmental disabilities and sensory friendly needs. We also offered two staff trainings: one for all Cincinnati Parks summer camp staff, to bolster the staff at our 5 different camps with skills to recognize and quickly adapt programming for children with mild sensory processing assistance needs. We will also hold a second, more in-depth training for the core staff of Summer Camp for All.

There is a lot of great work being done with children with physical limitations. Camp Joy near Cincinnati is a great example. We were stumped in looking for existing examples of a camp experience for children with developmental disabilities more on the sensory processing, mental, or behavioral end. Some of our children have a combination of physical and sensory/behavioral needs.

With a wonderful, highly skilled group of partners from Children’s Hospital and our own amazing camp counselors, Summer Camp for All campers visited the creek, the meadow, did a craft, played games, met animals... the full "greatest hits" summer camp experience. Campers and staff all had a great time, and it set the stage for the entire summer of camp fun here at Cincinnati Parks!

Our camp for 2024 is quickly filling up, and we are so very excited to hold Summer Camp for all for up to 40 children this year!

Written by Gia Giammarinaro