At a camp I worked for, we had several anarchists and communists as counsellors/directors. Hell, even the old minister who ran the non-profit umbrella we were under would describe herself as a marxist(until it came time to recognising the value of her workers, that is). One counsellor had visible anarchist/egalitarian(eco?) circle logos on her chest; the A and the E in circle designs. Someone gave all the workers/kids tickets to a football game, and she brought her scruffy boyfriend and they kicked back like 20 beers while the kids and their families loved her and kept waving at her, it was hilarious.
We did gender-neutral bathrooms without problems years before it even became an issue in the mainstream, same thing with pronoun checks, and taught kids as young as 5 about the need to give consent before touching people (because it is necessary in life, and also some of the kids were really sticky and kept trying to grab workers lol). It was fun to see lil 5 year olds giving/not giving consent to each other to hold hands.
Also, one kid was trying to suck up to his favourite counsellor by saying homophobic stuff his mom taught him, but the counsellor was an openly gay, fabulous drag queen, and he ended the camp by thinking it was ok for people to be gay.
I think the counsellors with the 5-year-old group had taught them popular protest songs of the time, so they were always marching around downtown yelling it at the top of their lungs, lol.
I think a few years previous, it was an explicitly christian camp.
Well, the camp itself was essentially atheists, Hindus and people with indigenous animist beliefs.
We just had some old minister running the charity of which we were a branch of, and she just hired me and my friend and let us decide all the staff, so no Christians really had a say in what we made. The minister who liked calling herself a marxist kinda struck me as someone who probably went to protests in the 60s-70s and then forgot all about it when she was not doing much solidarity with worker conditions after we had that running.
Sorry to be a party pooper, but the atheists and heathens of the world had the most say in things.
Only if you can pay the exhorbitant fee of 40$ Canadian / week(flexible depending on income levels/refugee status, ofc), so that we can fund more yoga, farming, and graffiti workshops while paying our workers above minimum wage!
We had a notorious graffiti writer come in and do an 'art class' with the kids, that fell on the day we were being monitored by the city lol. Like, had active cases & investigations against him notorious. Apparently, the inspectors liked the workshop though.
After the graffiti workshop, you'd see like half the kids designing tags, or overhear stuff like "Some people say graffiti is a bad thing, but I think it's good actually!"
I wonder what that camp is like now tho. It was amenable to being out-of-the-ordinary before me and my co-director started to run it, but I wonder how much things stayed the way they were from that period, as everything is very dependent on who is bothering to program the activities and hire people(and of course we were very pro hiring gay/trans/activist types).
Yeah, even by camp standards, we were essentially, or sometimes literally, charging people nothing so their parents could find work in the province and start adapting to the place before going to school. I recall jogging by a sign for an 'affordable' camp in college that had its own soccer fields and pool, yet were charging more per week than we'd charge for a whole season.
But we were geared to low income/refugee families. I think we had like 10-15 languages spoken at camp. It's where I started to learn russian and mandarin. :lenin-pensive: :mao-clap:
Though I will say, our camp wasn't in Toronto. We had a fair amount of ontarian counsellors shocked at how little we charged and what we could do with it all.
At a camp I worked for, we had several anarchists and communists as counsellors/directors. Hell, even the old minister who ran the non-profit umbrella we were under would describe herself as a marxist(until it came time to recognising the value of her workers, that is). One counsellor had visible anarchist/egalitarian(eco?) circle logos on her chest; the A and the E in circle designs. Someone gave all the workers/kids tickets to a football game, and she brought her scruffy boyfriend and they kicked back like 20 beers while the kids and their families loved her and kept waving at her, it was hilarious.
We did gender-neutral bathrooms without problems years before it even became an issue in the mainstream, same thing with pronoun checks, and taught kids as young as 5 about the need to give consent before touching people (because it is necessary in life, and also some of the kids were really sticky and kept trying to grab workers lol). It was fun to see lil 5 year olds giving/not giving consent to each other to hold hands.
Also, one kid was trying to suck up to his favourite counsellor by saying homophobic stuff his mom taught him, but the counsellor was an openly gay, fabulous drag queen, and he ended the camp by thinking it was ok for people to be gay.
I think the counsellors with the 5-year-old group had taught them popular protest songs of the time, so they were always marching around downtown yelling it at the top of their lungs, lol.
I think a few years previous, it was an explicitly christian camp.
That actually sounds incredible. Uncritical support to christian communists in their struggle against every christian who isn't a communist
Well, the camp itself was essentially atheists, Hindus and people with indigenous animist beliefs.
We just had some old minister running the charity of which we were a branch of, and she just hired me and my friend and let us decide all the staff, so no Christians really had a say in what we made. The minister who liked calling herself a marxist kinda struck me as someone who probably went to protests in the 60s-70s and then forgot all about it when she was not doing much solidarity with worker conditions after we had that running.
Sorry to be a party pooper, but the atheists and heathens of the world had the most say in things.
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Only if you can pay the exhorbitant fee of 40$ Canadian / week(flexible depending on income levels/refugee status, ofc), so that we can fund more yoga, farming, and graffiti workshops while paying our workers above minimum wage!
We had a notorious graffiti writer come in and do an 'art class' with the kids, that fell on the day we were being monitored by the city lol. Like, had active cases & investigations against him notorious. Apparently, the inspectors liked the workshop though.
After the graffiti workshop, you'd see like half the kids designing tags, or overhear stuff like "Some people say graffiti is a bad thing, but I think it's good actually!"
I wonder what that camp is like now tho. It was amenable to being out-of-the-ordinary before me and my co-director started to run it, but I wonder how much things stayed the way they were from that period, as everything is very dependent on who is bothering to program the activities and hire people(and of course we were very pro hiring gay/trans/activist types).
deleted by creator
Yeah, even by camp standards, we were essentially, or sometimes literally, charging people nothing so their parents could find work in the province and start adapting to the place before going to school. I recall jogging by a sign for an 'affordable' camp in college that had its own soccer fields and pool, yet were charging more per week than we'd charge for a whole season.
But we were geared to low income/refugee families. I think we had like 10-15 languages spoken at camp. It's where I started to learn russian and mandarin. :lenin-pensive: :mao-clap:
Though I will say, our camp wasn't in Toronto. We had a fair amount of ontarian counsellors shocked at how little we charged and what we could do with it all.