#Yearof50. Entry 9. Arts Adventure

In 1997, the Arts & Science Undergraduate Society (ASUS) at Queen’s posted a call for someone to create, build, and launch a new arts day camp for youth. They kindly picked yours truly (during my misguided Tilley hat years) as the inaugural director, and I strove to quickly build a team.

How lucky was I to find the brilliant Louise Lannan as assistant director, and amazing and passionate counsellors David Stewart and Hilary Sirman Allalemdjian. Louise led the design of our curriculum (with assist from David and Hilary), and I focused on fundraising, marketing, and outreach. Our home base was the ASUS house, but we spent a lot of hours at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, and other spots on campus.

We called the day camp “Arts Adventure”, and we built a social sciences stream week and a fine arts/drama stream week, featuring a field trip to select cultural sites in Ottawa each Wednesday. We gratefully managed to secure seed funding from the Faculty of Arts and Science and the Queen's University Alumni Association but resources remained tight, even factoring in the projected camp registration fees. I recall telling the team to keep sending resumes out just to protect their best interests.

Thankfully, in the end, we were saved by a grant from a family foundation who believed in what we were trying to accomplish. We ended up being incredibly successful, engaging hundreds of youth from across the greater Kingston region. We were committed to access, and we used our resources to provide bursaries so no camp applicant was refused the opportunity to enrol. I recall one camper who came to both streams and loved it so much, he redid a stream, spending 3 weeks with us!

Another strong memory is a mom who told me our camp gave her child the chance to imagine a different future. I met some of our campers years later and it was so fulfilling to hear about their journeys from our days on a school bus on Highway 416, singing Spice Girls songs, and creating art, plays, and indelible memories. I’m proud to see that Arts Adventure continued for many years and evolved into a non-profit called ASUS Camps.