So, your international staff are about to arrive — now what?

Let’s consider why your camp hired international staff in the first place (hint: to boost cultural diversity).

In addition to counting on them to do a particular job, making international staff feel welcome and valuable to the camp community is key to their success. Camps have a golden opportunity to be creative and highlight what’s unique about the various cultures represented. Find out what individual international staff bring to the table that you didn’t have before. This blog post will discuss ideas about how to tap into that cultural well and uncover the spring of cultural wealth from which everyone can learn.

Before you get started on drawing from that cultural well, creating a safe space is imperative for productive conversations with all staff:

1. Establish ground rules: Respect all opinions, one person speaks at a time, and ask for permission before touching or imitating.
2. Make it clear that all contributions are valued equally. 
3. Lead by example: As a leader or facilitator, model openness by sharing your own experiences or cultural stories first. 
4. Encourage participation without pressure: Allow individuals to choose how much or how little they want to share.

Promoting Culture in Camp Programming

A great way to infuse camp culture with national culture is the election of providing cultural activities in your camp programming.

1. Look at your current activities (such as games or sports) and consider which options can be replaced with something fresh.
2. Once you have identified where a new idea can be introduced, connect with your incoming international staff and ask if anyone would like to build their own activity such as introducing a new sport or craft tradition.
3. Provide counselors with an activity framework (how many kids to plan for, materials needed, space provided, etc.) so they have parameters within to work. Ideally, the ones who show interest in this will be responsible for the activity while at camp. If you happen to have many of the same nationality interested, this activity could be even larger if many want to participate.

This structure will show your staff you have an interest in their culture and what they know is valuable to the job and to camp. This will also allow them to build leadership skills around proposals, planning, implementation, and teamwork.

Cultural Education with Campers

Naturally the international and local staff will be curious about each other, but it’s a delight to incite curiosity with the campers. Introducing the campers to cultural diversity is a key to building empathetic citizens of the world. Which incidentally, is a major goal of the J-1 program as a whole through culture exchange. The Camp Counselor program is one of the few opportunities where that sort of exchange is organized. Here are some fun ways to engage the relationship between the international staff and your campers.

Camp Fire and Folklore

Traditional stories often embody pertinent social lessons, and what better way to share a time-honored tradition of spoken history than around the traditional campfire.

Language Lessons

Simple nouns and verbs in other languages can be easily displayed and taught in the curriculum with the campers. Have your staff demonstrate the writing of words, phonetics, and actions in their language and have the children repeat them back and use the learned words in their activities. Encourage continuity and building of learned words by stacking new words each day, week or session.

Cultural Integration in Nature Activities

Staff can share traditional outdoor skills or survival techniques used in their country. Activities can be built around this knowledge.

Cultural Integration within Camp Leadership

Earlier, connecting with your staff via program building was introduced. Here are some additional thoughts:  

Lunch-and-Learn Sessions

Staff can give brief presentations on specific cultural topics, such as cuisine, history, or significant holidays. Staff orientation might be a good time to start this!

Cultural Competency Training

Attend workshops on learning about cultural dimensions. This learning can be applied to understanding the cultural dynamics of your team. It’s ideal if camp management has a baseline knowledge of cultural dimensions. Once understood, the information can be weaved into programming, conflict resolution, training, etc.

Icebreakers

Organize activities that help staff share aspects of their own culture in a comfortable way. Cultural Bingo is a good place to start: Create a bingo card with fun cultural facts or experiences (e.g., “Speaks more than one language,” “Knows a traditional dance,” etc.). Staff mingle to find people who match the descriptions.)

Culture is fun, interactive, and amazing to share. It’s easy to overlook or be unaware of what is cultural. Being open and aware that differences exist is the first step to inviting it in. I hope these above ideas bring you some inspiration on cultural infusion.

This blog was written on behalf of ACA's Project Real Job, whose goal is to support camps in their efforts to recruit, hire, and retain staff.

Photo courtesy of Camp Ton-A-Wandah in Hendersonville, NC

Kelsy Melton has dedicated much of her life to culture exchange both personally and professionally. She has worked as a J-1 Visa sponsor in the Intern, Trainee, and Camp Counselor visa categories. She has also worked with international recruitment agents producing candidates for these categories. Her educational background is in international management, earning her MBA at Université de Rennes (France) during which she took a Cultural Competency course that strengthened her foundation of cultural exchange. She has had the pleasure of living in Turkey, France, and The Netherlands, as well as extensive travel in neighboring areas. Kelsy can be reached at [email protected].