Camp takes teen’s confidence to next level

Confidence is always at a high for Danica Taylor when she returns home from a week at Circle Square Ranch.

The 15 year old, who is finishing up Grade 9, has been attending the sleepaway camp south of Austin for five years, a tradition she looks forward to every summer.

“By the time we go pick her up at the end of the week, she’s just so excited,” said her mother, Laura Taylor. “She’s like, ‘And then this happened,’ saying, ‘It was great. I did this, and I was showing people how to do this.’”

This year, however, Laura wasn’t sure Danica would be able to attend.

“Due to my circumstances, I was like, I can’t afford to send her to camp this year, because I’ve been the one paying for it every year,” she said.

But with help from Free Press readers and the Sunshine Fund, Danica will return to Circle Square Ranch in July.

The Sunshine Fund, now in its 46th summer, works with 31 accredited camps across Manitoba and northwestern Ontario and helped send 681 children to camp last year.

Laura first learned about the Circle Square Ranch camp years ago through friends whose children attended and couldn’t stop talking about their experiences.

“I never went to a camp growing up, so I wanted my kid to have that opportunity,” she said. “I talked to a couple of my friends, and all of their kids had gone to Circle Square Ranch.

“I had even talked to their kids, and they were like, “Oh, it was like really great, I had so much fun.’ One of them even became a camp counsellor there, and had nothing but great things to say, so I was like, OK, well, we’ll give this one a whirl.”

The result — a more confident teenager prepared to lead.

“She is a fairly confident person, but when it comes to going into a group of new people and just knowing that mom isn’t going to be there at the end of the day to kind of talk it out if we need to, she’s still a little uneasy,” Laura said. “Just because things can go south real quick.”

But that changes over the course of the week.

“She likes being the leader and the person people look to, to show how to do things and navigate things,” Laura said. “Once she gets into that role — which has happened every year out there — she comes back super confident and ready to take on new challenges.”

Danica said her favourite activities are the camp’s “wide games,” where campers in each age group come together for large group activities like manhunt or water tag.

She also enjoys the smaller parts of camp — getting to know her cabin mates, building friendships, and settling into the inside jokes and camaraderie that come with a week in close quarters.

“She keeps wanting to go back,” Laura said.

zoe.pierce@freepress.mb.ca