Thank You

This is just a quick note to thank you for a great summer with your boys. It was a late night last night, with a keylog ceremony that lasted two hours. It is hard to explain what it is like to be able to sit and listen as the boys voluntarily express their gratitude and their love for one another, and even harder to explain that they all listened attentively even as the sunset turned to darkness and the sunshine turned to cold. With the final keylog ceremony, the Camper and Counselor Farewell speeches, closing slideshow and then the burning of the effigy, we sent off a group of boys this morning who were very tired, both physically and emotionally. Our boys did wake up to an amazing sunrise and a mysterious rainbow over camp. 

I hope that you have started to hear all about their friends and their counselors, their activities and the special days, the silly moments and the frustrating ones, the great food and the Council Ring sunsets. We are so grateful to be entrusted with the responsibility of guiding our campers through the highs and lows of summer, and hope that you are seeing a more confident, resilient kid than the one who left for camp four or eight weeks ago.

At camp tonight we welcomed our participants from the Four Star Fellowship! We began this program in 2018 at North Star when we welcomed 20 high school students from the South and West Side of Chicago to come up for a weeklong camp experience with their mentors from their community or school based programs back home. We have now grown the program to 75 young people this summer, and are so excited to have these guys here for the week. You can read more about the Four Star Fellowship Program on the Camp for All Kids website. The awe and appreciation that these young people have for the camp experience already has filled up the tanks of the tired North Star staff.

As a North Star staff, please know that even though your boys are back home with you, we are here for them (and you) all year long. If there is anything that we can do to help with the transition home, please reach out anytime. Please give your boys a big hug from all of us here at camp. We miss them already.

Thanks for trusting us with your sons,

-Andy

Today's Grace: There is a destiny that makes us brothers,
None goes his way alone,
All that we send into the lives of others,
Comes back into our own.

I care not what his caste or creed,
One thing holds firm and fast,
That into the days and deeds gone by,
The soul of man is cast.
- Edwin Markham