Re-thinking Summer Camp: A Conversation with Von Gordon

Vondaris “Von” Gordon is a native of Moorhead, MS, in Sunflower County. He joined the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation to develop and coordinate youth programs as Youth Engagement Manager.  He served as a founding board member of the Winter Institute and the only student representative at the University of Mississippi. He also serves on the board of Operation Shoestring. 

Von Gordon is a big believer in the importance of summer camp. He also believes equity needs to be at the heart of everything a community does when it comes to children. To him, our best chance to move forward is to empower the youth of our community.  These values, among others, are a big reason why Von Gordon is a  member of our board. He expresses that his work as a board member is life-affirming, and part of the “real” work that we as a community must incorporate into our lives to create an equitable future. Our Communications Director, Alexandra Melnick, sat down recently with Gordon ahead of the launch of our summer programming to get his insights on how this summer represents an opportunity for Operation Shoestring to address the deep needs in our community, and how doing so will lead to equity and moving the dial forward on educational progress in our city. 

AM: It seems that as a society, the big question of this year is what should we do about the fact that as a result of the pandemic so many students received an especially inequitable education or otherwise faced inequities that fully prevented them from accessing a quality educational experience. Children in the Shoestring community suffered disproportionately compared to other children across the city and our country. What do you envision as a solution to this issue moving forward?

VG: I would start from the inside of the child out. It’s important to have a sense of understanding of what is going in a child’s mind. Their emotional and mental state—it’s their weather, so to speak. Think of all the different ways you describe the weather. It’s a way to describe how you feel. The first thing we need to do systematically is to check in with children and see how they are feeling, what their weather is like. We need a sense of their capacity and their disposition toward picking up the pace of learning. This idea of being “further behind” isn’t constructive language to me. After we check in with them, then we can assess where they are. What that means for the young people in the city is that we need to determine what the reasonable expectations are, and then we need to as equitably as possible meet them where they are with the work and the support. 

I like that point of meeting children where they are. A mistake that can be made in education discourse is about the “they” in meeting kids where they are. They aren’t the same “they” as last year. 

None of us are. 

It’s more of a what are we now, isn’t it? What is all this going on?

I think one of the complicating factors to assessments during the pandemic is the social and emotional aspects. When you check in with a child, essentially what you are checking is their social and emotional state. On the whole, our young people are very resilient. I think that is a huge asset to us as we try to help them make progress. We can tap into that resilience. I think we can help them understand what resilience is, and how when they learn to hang in there, it’s an asset. That’s where I would start. 

Turning towards the possibility of summer camp, I think we both agree that social-emotional learning and trauma-informed education really needs to be the focus. It has been a traumatic year for Jackson’s youth especially with the water crisis. It’s traumatic to not be able to shower safely for a week–even for adults, much less kids!  What can summer camps do concretely to deal with this, and how do you envision their role in social-emotional learning and trauma healing processes? 

I think the first thing you need to do is create an affirming space. A validating space. We need to create spaces that metaphorically say to our children: “I see you.” A child needs to be seen in all their wholeness, not just as their grade or behavior.  I think we can do that. It’s just like the first week of class. That first week is critical to forming the lasting relationships a teacher has with their students. A teacher who has a student come in later in the school year has to spend a lot of time trying to recover from that, to find an opportunity to set that relationship at the same level as the other students. I think we need to take great care to start there: the creation of space where a child is seen in all their fullness. We need to engage with them like it’s a new start. 

I hear that. I feel like this summer, to a lot of children, is a new start.  It’s a new landscape now that people can be vaccinated. The end is in sight, even though I don’t know what the end is. Summer camp and summer programs can be a sort of grounding space, the middle ground between the past and the new future of dealing with this.  

As crazy it sounds, I wish we could double the amount of playtime for kids this summer. They’ve gone most of a year without being in spaces where they can just run and be kids together. Space where they can just sit and have a conversation with a peer. We need to give kids an opportunity to know the “next” thing is not coming very quickly and decrease the “next shoe about to drop” energy in their lives.  Kids can make human connections again, and it’ll pay off in everything academic that we do. 

There is such value in play and free time. Creation never happens when you keep going from one thing to the next. 

I agree. I’m excited about the summer and to give kids an affirming space. We can just really check in with them.

That’s my hope too! I think there’s a really transformational opportunity at the heart of this summer. Instead of getting back to “normal,” we can reflect on how normal wasn’t very good for our community in the first place. Operation Shoestring has the opportunity to do something really amazing for our community with that framework.

Normal was failing a lot of folks. It still is failing folks. This is the year we want to come out of the summer with every young person who participates in our programs feeling validated. They can feel like the experience was affirming.  Shoestring becomes a champion for them in their minds.  If we do those things well, it will improve the conditions we need to address the academics of our young people.

Take part in our summer programming by visiting operationshoestring.org/volunteer and  operationshoestring.org/support.