San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Risky teen leadership camps under fire
Suspension of retreats urged; operators ponder changes
A prominent judge and social justice activist has called for the suspension of Bay Area youth leadership retreats that employ reckless methods in the name of empathy-building, a reaction to The Chronicle’s recent exposé of programs that have been attended by thousands of local high school students for decades.
The call comes amid conversations among retreat leaders nationwide about how suspect, even unethical practices became so embedded in
the so-called Camp Anytown movement, an effort initially designed to foster awareness of prejudice and create change.
“After reading the article, I became concerned that this program is doing more harm than good,” said LaDoris Cordell, a former Superior Court judge and former board member of Silicon Valley Faces, the San Jose nonprofit that has run Anytown-style retreats for decades. “I want follow-up studies. I need to know what the impact has been on young people who have gone through the program — and I would suspend this program until such time that that study is done and an intelligent decision is made about how, if at all, to proceed.”
Until then, Cordell said,
“I’m concerned about the liability for an organization that does this.”
Tuyen Fiack, Silicon Valley Faces’ executive director, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But in an emailed response to Cordell, she defended the programs she runs, now called Camp Everytown, while simultaneously raising the possibility of some changes.
“We do listen to our students and school clients and always strive to make our programs better based on feedback we receive,” Fiack wrote. She said the agency will ask high schools that send students to her camps to better screen participants, and may improve mental health care for those who need emotional support during the four-day retreat, held several times a year in a remote location in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Last week, The Chronicle published an investigation into what experts described as ethically challenged and risky programming at Anytown-style retreats, which have operated in dozens of states, and in some places little changed, since the 1950s. Tens of thousands of teenagers nationwide have attended.
While the retreats’ goals of overcoming discrimination are well intentioned, some exercises they employ can push unsuspecting teenagers into extreme emotional states, while generally lacking mental health care and followup.
There are ethical concerns about the camp programs as well. In many parts of the country, including Northern California, students are put through immersive activities that re-enact segregation and discrimination, with teachers and counselors ordering black and Latino students to clean up after whites, or “arresting” them and placing them in mock jails. Gender nights and stereotyping exercises subject students to a barrage of slurs, then ask the young people to share how the exercises affected them.
There has been little study of the retreats’ safety or effectiveness, parents often know little about what they are agreeing to, and in some parts of the country, students are asked to keep the camps’ activities a secret. Dozens of experts who reviewed the program found it to be outside the realm of acceptable teaching methods and borderline abusive.
Richard Valenzuela, the lead facilitator for 18 years at the Silicon Valley Faces camps before being let go, long played the role of “antagonizer.” Before recently deciding to retire, he spent years striking blindfolded teens on the back of the head and calling them “retards,” taunting Jewish students wearing yellow stars about the Holocaust, and calling biracial kids “halfbreeds” and “mistakes.”
Publicity about Valenzuela, 72, and questionable exercises at Anytown retreats was addressed in communication last week among members of the National Federation of Just Communities. The network of nonprofits runs retreats that deploy similar exercises but do not involve Valenzuela. Member Jarrod Schwartz, who has suspended his camp in the Santa Barbara area this summer because of “unprecedented” fear and anxiety among LGBT youth, immigrants and students of color, said that to date, the federation has focused on visions and mission statements — but has not discussed methods.
He has called for an end to that practice. Schwartz said that if Silicon Valley Faces sought to join the national network today, he “would not feel comfortable being affiliated with them. We need to be asking more, not only about what they believe in, but about how they go about it.”
Schwartz also said that although he learned of Valenzuela’s specific methods from The Chronicle, he was aware when he first became involved with Anytown camps in 1992 in St. Louis that the national federation had rejected Valenzuela’s general approach.
Nonetheless, as other camp directors turned away from Valenzuela, Silicon Valley Faces and its parent nonprofit hired him over two decades to run camps for students at high schools from Palo Alto to Piedmont, flying him from his Phoenix home to staff as many as two dozen camps a year. Community leaders, including former mayors, police chiefs and judges, have served on the Faces board. School districts, parents and philanthropic groups have shared the $500-per-camper cost, with some high schools spending up to $20,000 per camp. A leading philanthropic group, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, gave Faces a total of $65,000 in two grants in 2010 and 2016.
Cordell, who has worked on jail and police reforms since leaving the bench, served on the Faces board in the 1980s and 1990s when the group was known by the name of its parent organization, the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Like others familiar with the Anytown camps by reputation only, she said she knew only of their important-sounding mission of bringing students of different backgrounds together.
In its recent report, The Chronicle described the deep affection for the Anytown experience that some campers carry with them for a lifetime. But despite the debriefing sessions and bonding the camps attempt to foster after the painful “experiential learning” exercises, the newspaper also found deep discomfort among some students and school staff.
Camp directors in some states say they have altered their programming to dial back exercises that may be “triggering” or overly traumatic. And they say they are making efforts to have staff or volunteers on hand who have a mental health background. But few could point to meaningful outcome reports.
Responding to former Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Cordell’s concerns, camp Director Fiack rebutted claims that her program has no evidence base, citing “Gordon W. Allport’s well-established and highly researched “Contact Theory of the 1950s” as a basis for its programming.
Still, Fiack stated that some changes are under way. “We have been looking at ways to provide some further support for our students prior to the beginning of this article and have asked schools that participate to send their school counselors if they are available,” she wrote to Cordell. “In the future, we will also advise schools to screen students better.”
Currently, Fiack said schools are asked to send students to camp who are “emotionally mature enough to handle the topics of racism, prejudice, gender, ability status and privilege. Students that are unable to handle these topics may not be the right candidates for Camp Everytown,” she said, adding “in light of this article we will also be looking at curriculum on coping skills that we can include for next camp season.”
Fiack also stated that her group is “in negotiations with another organization that may provide us with an on-site mental health professional,” and that a doctoral student will be doing research and writing a thesis on the effectiveness of the camp program.
One former camper, Mary Bettini Blank of Burlingame, a retired high school teacher who attended an Anytown camp in Phoenix in 1967, said she is still haunted by the experience. She said she believes her students are innately nurturing and kindhearted and they don’t have to be goaded through painful exercises to act humanely toward one another.
“My gut instinct is it feels exploitive,” Blank said. “There’s a human being in there. How can you do that to them, and who is benefiting? What is this costing this human being, and will this wound ever really heal?”