Here comes Shoestring Saints!

As summer draws tantalizingly close, many children in our neighborhoods are eagerly awaiting this year’s offerings of Shoestring Saints camps. These mini-camps are created and run by student volunteers from St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, which has been our dedicated and valued partner for close to two decades. At this point, hundreds of St. Andrew’s high school students have served as camp counselors! Shoestring Saints Mini Camps are half-day sessions that occur throughout our summer camp. These sessions give Operation Shoestring’s kindergarten through fifth-grade campers a chance to participate in a range of activities including sports, language development, dancing, music, girl power, and so much more. Our shared focus this year is on helping the children of Operation Shoestring, the high school students of St. Andrew’s, and their families heal from toxic stress, reconnect with their neighbors, and rekindle the joy that togetherness brings to our lives. This program also exposes St. Andrew’s high schoolers to the delight and responsibilities of working with younger kids and builds connections between children from many different neighborhoods. “These camps started out as a basketball camp, and have grown from there. We’ve changed our format over the years, but now we are back down to two-hour camps,” says Cyndi Irons, a middle school fine arts teacher and coordinator for Shoestring Saints counselors. “We ask our students what they are interested in, and then camps based on their abilities. We usually have art, music, and soccer. We always have outdoor sports camps.” This year, OS and SA will offer nine different Shoestring Saints Mini-Camps: Goggle Strings, Brain Health, Music, Girl Power, Girls’ Basketball, Tennis, Fine Arts, Boys’ Basketball, and Soccer.

All but Goggle Strings are located on the actual St. Andrew’s campus, thus exposing our campers to what a high school building is like far before they attend it. “Our counselors do most of the planning and the activities for each camp. We do have an adult “director” for each camp, but we try to give the counselors the responsibility for running the camp themselves,” noted Irons. She also remarked that once one of her students runs a camp, they tend to come back every year. Some of them even do multiple camps each summer! “Our counselors love the activities of camps, but they love even more than one on one communication. Just getting to know the kids.  We usually have a counselor per camper.” 

This ratio is always a blessing, but it seems especially important this year. It empowers children to express themselves to adults and to peers in different activities and helps foster social-emotional learning that teaches children to be more resilient and to better be able to self-regulate stress. This resilience then translates to increased educational opportunities, which then creates better job opportunities, and then translates into individuals and families rising out of poverty. Through this partnership, children from all over our city are able to get to know each other, laugh together, and learn what it means to live together. At the end of the summer, campers and counselors alike can agree on one thing: we all rise together.