It’s a gift to remember. – Our Senior Director Ken Thomas started off Evaluation Week 2015 with a simple yet meaningful sentence. This statement has really taken shape over these past few days as we’ve carefully looked back before we looked forward. We’ve made sure that we haven’t moved too quickly ahead into Summer 2016, into big dreams for the future, and into new milestones before we take time to remember and celebrate everything God has just done. We’ve seen God at work this summer. We’ve seen campers, families and staff rally around the idea of HOPE. Hope Sees. Hope sees God’s promises even in our troubles. And that’s something we have to be very thankful for from Summer 2015.
Evaluation Week is our annual retreat where we get together as a full-time team to share what God did this past summer at all of our camps, and use what He has taught us to craft the ultimate camp experience. As we look forward, we are going to continue in this journey and dive down deep into what it looks like to FOLLOW Jesus in everything we do. We believe that our past themes of HEART and HOPE have laid an amazing foundation, and we are excited to see how the planning and preparation from this week help to kickstart what’s to surely be another Summer of a Lifetime!
And this group has been hard at work. We’ve been in sessions throughout each day where we’ve gotten to review 2015 data and numbers, celebrate over 1,800 salvations, and pinpoint areas of camp that can be made even more awesome next summer. We’ve begun analyzing skills, fine-tuning our staff recruitment process, selecting new merchandise and developing theme content. Our Day Camps and Overnight Camps, Staff Development and Theme Teams, and our Marketing and Camp Store Teams have been working hard to brainstorm and dream up what we like to call some Big Hairy Audacious Goals for 2016, and we can’t wait for you to see them.
But don’t think our brains have just been focusing on spreadsheets and flowcharts, on strategies and budgets. Oh no, we’ve definitely been having the best week ever! Eval Week is a very special week in the fact that it is one of the few times each year where every member of our leadership teams is able to be together, and therefore we make team building one of our top priorities of the week. We’ve shared meals together, done staff worship and morning devos, and gotten to catch up about our respective summers. As for fun, we started off Monday night with a surprise trip to a local glass studio where we all got to blow glass and make our very own Christmas ornaments, and tonight we’ve looking forward to our annual game of Speed Uno.
We still have two more days together and we can’t wait to continue on our way to bring these great ideas to fruition. Overall we are excited about leaning into our new them, and we know it’s going to take shape in our skills, cabin devos, Wake Ups and so much more. Take it from us, next summer is one you don’t want to miss! Stay updated as the ideas from Eval Week are discussed on our WinShape Camps Podcast coming soon!
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