Camp Building Bridges

Iris L.

One of our emeritus members, younghope1, aka Tracy Mobley, had started a camp for children living with a parent or grandparent with dementia. It was a way for the child to have a free week of respite doing kid things. She and her chapter raised money to provide scholarships for the youngsters.

I was thinking about Tracy and decided to post this. Perhaps someone would be interested in offering such a camp this year or next year. A local chapter could contract with a regular camp and raise funds.

Iris

Ed1937

Iris, I haven't heard of that before. Thanks for posting, and thanks to Tracy for helping the kids get some form of normality.

Jo C.

I remember that camp from long ago but did not recall Tracey's name; she was a lovely person and as I recall, she had Alzheimer's and worked very hard at staying in the swim of things and doing good. Building Bridges camps names are no longer affiliated with Tracey, but some with that name have now been put into place for justice purposes and there is also one for Autism. At least that is all I have seen for today's Building Bridges named camps.

Everything now is so costly and comes with so many requirements, it would be lovely to have a camp for children whose LO has dementia, but today it would take a larger charity to get it off the ground I would imagine. As I recall, Tracey's camp was funded by one woman and her daughter as much as they could do.

Thanks for the reminiscence Iris, it certainly brought back memories. Tracy was a lovely person and she was deserving of many thanks for all she tried to do and achieved.

J.

Iris L.

Wow, I have sticker shock! I was estimating a cost of $300/5 day week x 10 campers. $3,000 would not be a lot of money to raise. But I searched summer camp costs, and the average cost is about $450/day! That would be $2,250 for one week, and then $22,500 for 10 campers. That's a lot more money to raise over a few weeks.

Well, I posted because I thought it would be a good project for a chapter to take on. BTW, Tracy's diagnosis was changed to FTD. She wrote a book, I believe it was called "Young Hope The Broken Road". It's on Amazon.

Iris