Experience with Organizations

I have been involved with many organizations throughout my life. One of the most recent ones was this summer. I was a day camp counselor at a park in my park district for about two months. Because the day camp was through the park district it was pretty large. It consisted of four parks in the district. Each camp had two site directors and around ten counselors. The park district also had some people they hired as substitutes they could call if there were too many counselors who were unable to come in if the one counselor per every ten kids ratio was off. They also worked with the Northwest Special Recreation Association to provide the kids with special needs aids that had further training for that than we did. Another thing is that there were also options for parents to sign the kids up for swimming lessons or tennis lessons that were just for the kids in the camp along with having before camp and after camp for the parents that had to work earlier and later hours.

How the camp worked was that there were four two-week sessions that parents would sign their kids up for. Our camp ended up being over staffed just due to them looking at the number of kids they had last year and there were about half that number for the last two sessions. Because of this we were always called if another camp in the park district had low staff and unable to get a sub since they didn’t hire too many. At one point I had to go to different camp for a day because of that and while it was a very similar to my camp there were a lot of differences. For example, we had both a craft and a game going on at the same time so kids could choose while at the other camp kids weren’t offered a choice like that. This is probably because the locations were so different. My camp had limited indoor space and a very large outside area that was away from any streets while the camp I was moved to for the day had a large indoor space but not much space outside and the space that was outside was right next to a street.

How the camp worked was that there were two groups the counselors were in. You were either with the older kids or the younger kids. Every Wednesday was a field trip to a waterpark, a game, or bowling, and Fridays they brought food from local restaurants for the kids. There were four possible shifts we could be assigned to and in the beginning of summer the people that were assigned a certain shift planned all the games for the day. What I found interesting was that we changed it about halfway through the camp to the people with the later shift would plan for the next day instead because there was too much time wasted on setting up the games and explaining what the plan was to the other counselors.

One thing I learned from this organization is that even if you’re suppose to be doing the same thing as another group there are still going to be differences in how things are done just due to materials and location. Another thing I learned from this organization is that even if you think it’s a small operation it’s most likely part of another operation that is quite large. There is still so much time spent planning these things even before you’re hired and even before the parents signed up. Also someone had to organize all four of the camps for these field trips and food, and these locations could and most likely were planning with other day camps, so the fact that anything got done it really amazing when you think about it.