CYAP Update - Moving Away From Rock Camp

Happy new year to our loving supporters!

We hold immense love and gratitude for everyone who has believed in youth power and creating space for young people to be their fullest and most authentic selves. 

To move into deeper alignment with our mission, vision, values, and theory of change, our core team has decided to no longer host Rock Camp during the summer. Instead, we will be expanding our Youth Leader Institute (YLI) to a 4-week organizing training that can offer more time and space for young people to develop the necessary skills and understandings to move our campaign strategy forward. We acknowledge that Rock Camp is a deeply beloved project that created space for folks to build community at the intersection of art and political education. We believe that we’ll be able to better honor and build upon that legacy by focusing exclusively on our Youth Leader Institute in 2020 and beyond.

CYAP has been hosting Rock Camp since the summer of 2011. We were determined to celebrate our 2019 Rock Camp by restructuring it to feel more aligned with the rest of our work. Core team members shifted our outreach and recruitment tactics, redesigned the camp team model, crafted a new training curriculum for leads and volunteers, developed workshop tracks that centered each of our six core values, and created pod groups to bridge the gap between our campers and youth leaders. Since that time, core team members have been reflecting on the impact of those changes and whether or not Rock Camp was still an effort to which we wanted to continue dedicating ourselves.

Though Rock Camp served as a fun and powerful entry point for a number of our youth leaders and volunteers, we often found it difficult to sustain their engagement throughout the rest of the year. When our core team envisioned what our constellation of youth leadership opportunities could look like in the future, it became increasingly clear that Rock Camp’s once very bright presence in the CYAP universe had started and would continue to fade.

Towards the end of last year, current and former core team members came together to discuss the factors that led to Rock Camp becoming an outlier within our organization’s larger scope of work. A few of those factors include concerns related to our shift to longer term youth initiatives, current core team members’ skills, experience, and capacity, tensions surrounding our increasingly abolitionist politic, and a commitment to prioritizing Black and Brown girls, trans youth, and gender nonconforming youth in the tri-county area. 

Our core team is excited to see what this decision will make possible for our youth leaders and community members. Much of what folks loved about camp will still exist within our expanded Youth Leader Institute: political education will be an integral component, popular education principles will guide each of our sessions, young people will be able to participate in (and lead) creative resistance workshops, and volunteers will be able to be trained up to support young people’s political growth and development. And of course, it will still be a space for love, joy, learning, and building power together.

We envision a South Carolina transformed by the radical organizing of girls, trans youth, and gender nonconforming youth. Our core team believes this decision to streamline our work will allow us to move closer towards that vision.  

Please reach out with any questions you might have. Our core team is committed to being as transparent and supportive as possible during this daunting but exciting time for our organization. 

In community,

The CYAP Core Team