NeighborScapes

Summer is almost here. The teenagers are out of high school, the college students are back in town, the children are about to leave grade school and junior high. If all was right in the world, the teenagers would have summer jobs, the grade school students would have had somewhere to learn and play for the summer, and the junior high students would be transitioning between, testing out their fledgling feathers in loving, supportive environments.

This is not what is happening.

Summer is almost here. The jobs bill has not even made it to Congress yet, let alone passed. The commercial industry cannot support the hordes of teenagers about to enter the job market for the summer, let alone its artificially glutted state produced by the recession and so-called “jobless recovery.” Parents of small children cannot afford to send their children to day camp, even for $20-$25/day like NeighborScapes (the industry standard is $38/day). Teenagers and children are staying home for the summer, or gathering in social groups to watch television, hang out, and otherwise vegetate. They will go back to school in August without the enriching, positive experiences of a structured social environment in which teenagers are taught to be adults and children are guided in educational, interactive, healthy play. Summer will not mean swimming, or science, or structured social dynamics. Summer will mean Spongebob.

This is not what is happening. Nobody here will let that happen.

Summer is almost here, and one of the few resources that is left in abundance is time. I have spoken with countless teenagers who are eager to volunteer, as long as they are doing something of substance with their time. So even though I have bills to pay and am always worried about money, and I am a volunteer for NeighborScapes myself this summer, I am taking time away from my paying job to organize troops of volunteers to drive up summer camp enrollment. If you have a car, please call me at (877) 214 6630 and we’ll organize carpools to Chicago Heights, Matteson, Olympia Fields, and Park Forest and let people know about our camp, its sliding scale to families of hardship and its locations right in the heart of two staple communities in the South suburbs of Chicago. We need campers if we are going to keep the camps open, and if we are going to be able to pay our counselors minimum wage. Meanwhile, the team back at the office will keep fundraising like crazypeople and try to make this work on an infrastructure level.

Our Rich Central campus was secured two days before camp was to start. I am a pragmatist, but I do have room in my philosophy for miracles. It’s just, summer is almost here.

Chris Furuya is the program coordinator for NeighborScapes, a volunteering, community organizing, and civic leadership nonprofit located in the South suburbs of Chicago. Her twitter handle is earthangelNS.