Kids turn off phones, tune in to nature Outdoor Advanced Leadership Academy
The first thing youngsters learn at a new Bay Area outdoors camp is to turn off their cell phones.
The surprise is that they relish the event.
“Your phone distracts you from the moment,” said Jasmine, 12, of San Francisco. “Instead of looking at your phone, trying to text, you look outside and really enjoy it.”
“It’s actually not that hard to go without a phone,” said Kaila, an 11-year-old from Fairfield. “You’re not spending all your time catching up on your texts, staying in your room. Out here you focus more on what you’re doing, not just looking at a screen. You become aware of what is around you.”
The girls were discussing the Outdoor Advanced Leadership Academy, a camp in which kids from urban environments split a week between Grizzly Ranch in the Suisun Marsh in central Solano County and Point Bonita YMCA in the Marin Headlands. Youngsters turn off their electronics, turn on the outdoors and tune into new friends.
All devices — phones, tablets, iPods, computers and video games — are banned, which forces the participants out of their personal bubbles. Instead of staring at keyboards, campers paddle kayaks, look for bugs during walks in marsh bogs, birdwatch, take water samples, participate in archery, complete rope courses and undertake exercises that can only be solved by working together.
“The ropes course was really scary,” said Alex, a 12-yearold from San Francisco. “Sometimes you go with a partner. You need to trust them to pull you up, rely on them.”
About 100 boys and girls have completed the program in the past month. They range in age from 10 to 16 — with the majority being 12 or 13 — and come from throughout the Bay Area and Sacramento Valley.
Most of the participants don’t have daily access to outdoors activities, said program administrator Lara Hitchcock.
“Many have little to no outdoor experience,” Hitchcock said. “Many have never dipped their toes in the ocean. Some have never gone for a hike, or know what a hike is or how to enjoy it. Some have never paddled a kayak.”
Hitchcock, the executive director with the YMCA in San Francisco at Point Bonita, To apply: Students, parents and teachers can learn more about this and similar programs at the websites for the California Waterfowl Association and YMCA of San Francisco: www.Calwaterfowl.org and www.YMCASF.org. runs the program with Jake Messerli, vice president of conservation programs for the California Waterfowl Association. Bill Brinton of San Francisco, a CWA member, helps finance the program in concert with the CWA and YMCA.
The two organizations have served about 40,000 youth in their programs, according to CWA President John Carlson. Participation in the camp is free, any associated costs being picked up by the CWA and YMCA.
“The YMCA’s vision is the healthiest kids in America will live in the Bay Area,” said Heidi James, chief development officer for YMCA.
Two dozen staff members oversee the camp, each with a specialty (outdoors skills, naturalist and conservation educators), as well as “some good ol’ fashion camp counselors,” Hitchcock said.
To participate, would-be campers must submit an application in which they answer questions such as, “Why do you want to be a part of this program?” “What are you hoping to learn?” and “What are your fears?”
“We tried to take all kids this year who completed the application,” said Hitchcock.
The camp goes from Saturday to Saturday and the mix of campers tends to be 60-40 girls to boys. Hitchcock said that’s possibly because the girls seem more willing to go through the application process.
“The biggest thing is no connection to the Internet, no form of technology,” Carlson said.
“We tell them they are going to get green time, not screen time,” Hitchcock added.
And it’s much more than seeing water, trees and flowers. Many of the attendees have never camped and some had never even seen flying bugs, said Molly Maupin, a CWA youth education coordinator.
“Our first week of camp, we had three girls who had never been in tents before,” Maupin said. “They’d never seen mosquitoes before. They were terrified of all of these bugs. It’s too cold in San Francisco for most bugs. These kids were used to the urban environment, no bugs.”
The girls overcame their fear the next day. With a group, they wore waders and splashed through the marsh along the tule-lined wetlands to take water samples, a first for all of them.
“They had to scoop bugs out of the water,” Maupin said. “Right then, those three girls overcame their fears. They were holding dragonfly larvae, the size of your thumb, and they actually petted it and said, ‘He’s cute.’ They would have never done that before.”
In another activity, teams of three kids were required to work together to pick up a correct color bandanna for the team. One youngster was allowed to talk, one was allowed to see, and one was allowed to move. Unless they cooperated and communicated, it was impossible to complete the task.
The next day, that lesson was put to use, Hitchcock said, when the group was kayaking in a Suisun Marsh slough.
“One tandem kayak with two kids got stuck in the tules,” Hitchcock said. “The girl in the back felt like the girl in the front wasn’t guiding their direction well, and the girl in the front felt like the girl in the back was being bossy.”
They finally extricated the kayak from the tules and paddled back to the dock, but when they went to the next event — archery — they were clearly still irritated. When one girl tried to shoot, the other started talking about her.
Hitchcock took them aside and sat them across from each other at a picnic table. Each girl then shared the kayak experience from her perspective. One of the girls realized that no matter what she said, the other girl wasn’t hearing it.
“It’s just like the blindfold game, you aren’t hearing my first instructions, so I guess I needed to change what I was saying,” she said. The other girl nodded without a word and accepted the explanation.
“They resolved their hostility and conflict,” Hitchcock said. “Five minutes later, they were shooting archery together and cheering each other on.
“As someone who is involved with the creation of the program, it’s powerful to see them apply what they’ve learned with people they otherwise might not talk to,” Hitchcock said.
“Had they been in a different environment, in school, in the neighborhood, and not the outdoors, it could have led to fighting, bullying, and nothing good would have come of it,” Carlson said. “They learn here that they are all in this new environment together.”
He said it all starts by turning their phones off.