Staff Orientation

Introducing Staff Week

• Daily Schedule Review 

  • 9:30 am: Informational

  • 11:15 am: Job-Specific Training

  • 2:00 pm: Informational

  • 4:00 pm: Activity or meeting

  • 7:30 pm: Typically fun, laid back, more optional

• Weekly Schedule

  • Health Inspection

  • Day off
    
    

Meeting Expectations (Make this list together!)

• Meet your own needs

  • If at any point we aren’t meeting your needs, let us know.

• Pay Attention

• Take Notes

• Be on Time

• No Cell Phones?

• No WiFi day?

Facilitator Note:

• Facilitation is hard, y’all!

  • Pointing out bad handwriting

  • Pointing out misspellings

  • Pointing out mispronunciations

  • Call backs & jokes, don’t let them go too far at the person facilitating

Professionalism at Unirondack

What does professionalism look like at Unirondack? It’s easy to joke and roll our eyes but we do adhere to certain facets of professionalism that resonate here at camp.

• Showing up to work on time

• Wearing appropriate clothing for the task

• Respectful language - what does this actually mean?

• Maintaining a level head when things get heated

• Working through disagreements (Out of sight of campers)

• Interactions in front of/with parents

• Interactions with the community surrounding camp

• When campers won’t respond to anything else?

• In crises / emergencies

• Cleanliness of workspaces

• Add examples

How do we tell the difference between a time to access or exhibit higher levels of professionalism and times when we can be more informal or silly?

What are the benefits of using that professionalism amongst ourselves? (with people outside of our staff it’s pretty obvious)

What are some mainstream professional standards that Unirondack does not subscribe to?

What are some professional expectations we can hold ourselves accountable to?

2023 Drills, Emergencies, and Abuse Reporting

Unirondack's Politicized Policies

A mediated discussion about the ways Unirondack’s values impact our policy at camp. A note that we try to foster a healthy environment of questioning the rules, especially when they do not uphold our values. Notably, these are policies that are often deemed as political. We would like to draw the distinction that they are not political. They are deeply personal and connected to our values as compassionate people who care about creating space for others. However, these believes are often politicized as a means of weaponizing their impact for harm.

Warm up:

Write down your values, remember a time when your political values impacted your decision making, share out some of those values with popcorn

What are camp’s values?

Comprehensive inclusivity

Continuous Growth

Autonomy

Accessibility

Anti-Colonialism

Anti-Oppression

Anti-Capitalism

Radical Acceptance

Respect of the Natural World

Radical Education

Restorative Justice

Youth Empowerment

Responsible Levity

Intentional Community

Celebration of childlike wonder

Empathetic Care

Your personal values might not always line up with camp’s values, and that’s fine. You are entitled to your values, and you will never be asked to be dishonest about them - however it is our expectation that you do not undermine camp’s values. 

If asked directly about a value of yours that contradicts with camp’s values, here are some possible responses:

“I’m still deciding where I land on that.”

“I’m still learning about that.”

“My opinion on that diverges a bit from the rest of the community - and that’s ok.”

Campfire - 101  must read for all Staffers     written by Eric Nasemann in the late 1970s

 "a welter of stygian darkness penetrated only by a storyteller's hushed voice"   only Eric Nasemann could write like this

to be a camp counselor

First Year Staffer Theo 2026

Ira Bass: Our last story is from a one-time-camper-turned-counselor, Theo. While many people-- maybe you reading at home-- have spent many summers as a youth camper some people only go once before they age out. The transition from camper to counselor isn’t always easy. How do you balance the joy that comes with being at camp with the responsibilities of being on staff?. For Theo, this summer on program staff was better than he could have imagined.  

Theo: My name is Theo and I was a camper for just one week for what was then Ballou I. I found camp through social media and took a risk and begged my family to drive me hours away to this place I’ve never been before. Somehow I convinced them, and that week I learned so much about the importance of taking risks to have fun. Camp for me is a place where I could just be silly and free, there’s something wildly warm that I felt when I first arrived (and maybe the check-in cookies helped with that!). I spent that week watching myself grow, with every one-shot; the silly, the gross, the adventurous and the creative ones, I overcame my fears of speaking up and sharing how I feel. Slowly but surely I was learning lock picking, singing along to songs at campfire, laughing with friends in a hammock, running around, being scared in the best way possible during the horror evening program. It was the most fun I had been able to experience in a while, and, at the same time, it was so much more than just fun. As Unirondack does, I was able to find my voice, even if it shook, I was able to try again and again, and to choose a new adventure everyday.

This past summer I tried another new adventure, I became a camp counselor. I was pretty nervous about if I had it in me or not. But I kept in mind how freeing it felt to be at camp. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if  a program is perfectly planned out. It was the community and that unexplainable camp magic that made camp so impactful for me, and so I held that magic close with every character I played during evening program, each program I worked on, every game of “odds are”, and when getting to talk to campers. Being so nervous about being a counselor made every end of the week feel so much more fulfilling, I didn’t expect campers to tell me that I helped to make their camp experience amazing. It meant the world to me to hear that. But what I also didn’t expect was how much the campers make camp magical for counselors too. They taught me to be silly, asked me questions I didn’t have answers to that I got to figure out, and they asked me for help with camp pranks. They looked up to me and in a way, I looked up to them too. This summer I learned that we all bring our own magic together to create Camp magic. Each person at camp brings their own perspective, their own silliness, their own curiosity,  and we create this magical experience in this community.