A Collaborative Project

Greetings from Maine! I’ll be here until August 15th. The photo was taken with my iPhone Hipstamatic app. That’s the view from our front lawn looking towards Kearsage Mountain and Mount Washington in the distance. I’ve been registrar for a residential two-week summer camp here in Fryeburg, Maine since 2004.  My job is to receive registrations; assign housing; and total the number of campers and communicate those numbers to the camp director who in turn shares that information with the camp cooks.  I also assign teens an adult sponsor and compile lists for our fire marshalls. I use Google docs to create spreadsheets and upload registration forms and share them with the camp director, treasurer, assistant treasurer and anyone else on our staff who needs the relevant information. Running camp is really a collaborative effort of all of our staff.

Every year we produce a Bulletin with all of the information about that summer’s camp session including the registration form that gets mailed to our members and friends in the Spring. This year for the first time ever we produced the Bulletin collaboratively over one weekend with a total of 4 people, one of whom was working from a distance. It was a great experience because we each brought our strengths to the project. We have one person with graphic arts and design skills, 2 talented photographers, and 2 great proofers and editors. We put together a really great looking Bulletin over the course of a weekend and had fun too! What really made us a great team was that we put our egos aside and completely relied on and trusted each other to do the job that they are good at. The added bonus is that we are all volunteers and we do all this work out of love for our camp. It feels so good to work like this that I wish that my previous work situations were like this and really hope that I can find a group of co-workers in the future that can work together in this way.