How to Plan an Adult Summer Camp

How to Plan an Adult Summer Camp

You need to plan an adult summer camp with your friends. It will be the highlight of your summer. Guarantee.

This past year, I planned an adult summer camp for a bunch of longtime friends. It was 3 and a half days of nonstop action: hide and seek, s’mores, volleyball, swimming, puzzles and more. Here’s how I made it happen. And here's how you can too.

1. Gather interest

Talk to the people you’d like to have at your summer camp and gauge whether or not they’re interested. Throw out a few dates and see what dates seems to work for the most people. Ideally, you’d start this 6 months ahead of time to ensure that it gets on folk’s calendars. I held our summer camp in August and started asking in December and that seemed to work well.

2. Find a venue

I started looking for venues while I was talking to friends and gathering interest. Once I had a decent idea of how many people would be coming, I started looking at venues. Initially, I was looking at YMCA Camps. Many of these had all the amenities I was hoping for: cabins, a private lake, fun activities, etc. The only reason I didn’t go this route is that all of the YMCA venues that I talked to, required that their staff be on site to help facilitate. This could’ve been fine, but I preferred to have our summer camp be completely private to just our group of friends. If you do go this route, it seemed like it wasn’t realistic to book during mid-summer and that your best bet would likely be very late summer after most kids have gone back to school.

 

Instead, I went to Airbnb and filtered for different categories like Farmhouse or Lake and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. Location was important for us as I didn’t want anything too far from an airport that would make getting to camp a huge pain. I wanted it to be fairly central and easy enough to get there once everyone was in town. We ultimately landed on an Airbnb outside of St. Louis, MO as that’s where many folks in the group were originally from, a few were still living and was central to the group. It was convenient and affordable.

The Airbnb was a hobby farm on 20 acres of land, a small swimming pond and a house that housed all 20 people in our group. It was perfect!

3. Make a list of activities

Okay now you’ve got your crew and your venue. Next, you’ll want to start brainstorming ideas for what to do. In my other post here, you can see our full agenda. Think about activities you did at summer camp as a kid or consider movies (The Parent Trap and Moonrise Kingdom are great options) that you’ve seen for inspiration. Talk to your friends too, they’ll have great ideas!

One recommendation would be to plan a variety of high energy activities and more chill, relaxing activities. Not everyone is going to want to do the same activities. Some campers preferred playing hours of volleyball while other campers spent hours working on a puzzle. Know your audience and plan activities that allow everyone to thrive!

4. Encourage campers to bring their own flare

When you’re talking to your group about ideas, they’ll likely have some too. One thing that I leaned into which turned out to be incredible was encouraging everyone to bring their own little something something to camp. For instance, we had a couple musicians in the group and I asked them if they’d want to lead singing campfire songs. Turns out, they had been practicing at each other’s houses and even printed off lyric sheets for the songs they were going to perform so everyone could sing along. We had another friend that’s great at yoga and she led a short yoga class for the group and it was incredible. Encourage everyone to share their interests in some form like a class or an activity. They’ll likely lean into it and it’ll be fun for everyone!

5. Plan camp meals

We were also very fortunate that one of the campers, my partner, Maddie, was an amazing cook. Maddie led the charge on planning the full camp menu for the long weekend. The food was delicious and was really a highlight of camp. Everyone went into the weekend thinking they’d be eating frozen chicken nuggets and pizzas and instead had their minds blown with delicious meals prepared by our own Head Chef. It was a lot of work for her and the folks that helped pitch in but it was a huge win for camp.

 

That being said, if you don’t want to go to that effort, you can turn to frozen and easier to prepare meals. It’s up to you and whether or not you have campers that like cooking.

6. Create a loose agenda

This is important. People want to have an idea of what to expect. An adult summer camp is a slightly abstract idea and probably looks like different things to different people. So, create an agenda so that everyone can better understand the vision and prepare themselves for camp. It also helps guide the weekend along. Activities happened fairly naturally but I found that there was a little excitement around looking at the loose agenda and seeing what was coming up next. Don’t plan anything too rigidly, it’s camp after all and it should be fun. But having a general idea of what activities you want to do and how they’ll fit into the weekend is helpful for everyone.

7. Add some pizzazz

You made it to the final step. You are so close to throwing an incredible weekend for your friends and maybe soon to be friends. It’s going to be worth it! The last step is to add some pizzazz! Does your camp have a theme? Is there a color palette? Does it have a fun camp name? Consider ways to really lean into a theme and build around it.

 

For example, our camp was Happy Worm Summer Camp and so obviously there was a huge worm theme. It helped people really get into the spirit of camp and again, bring their own razzmatazz to the weekend. We had a friend bring fake worms that he hid all around camp as pranks, that same friend thrifted this insane pair of pants with worm designs on them, we made dirt and worms for dessert the first night, we had ‘Wormlympics’, etc.

Think of a fun camp name, theme, etc and go 110% on this. It’ll help you come up with more fun ideas for activities, menu items, you can make fun merch, etc. The pizzazz is a must.

Happy Worm Summer Camp 2024 was a huge success thanks to all the incredible campers that helped make it happen and fully leaned in to the adult summer camp idea. We’ll be bringing it back next year, even bigger and better! I hope this helps you plan your own adult summer camp!

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