A way to help youths reach new peaks

For kids growing up in fractured families and tenuous economic circumstances, a week out in the mountains constitutes one of the few times they are able to step outside of their daily lives and look at the natural world from a different perspective -- one that isn’t paved over and glimpsed through the L.A. Basin’s acrid summer air.

The summer camp experience exposes them to alternative approaches to how they can live their lives.

“It’s a great way to learn you can have fun without getting high or having sex,” says Charles Rich, executive director of the David and Margaret Home, a children’s services agency in La Verne. “There are other ways of having fun without regretting it in the morning. In camp, we try to organize the experience where kids work together to build teamwork and social interaction in a positive light.

“Lots of these kids have never had that experience -- particularly girls.”

Girls like Margarita Villasana, 15, who lives with her parents and 11-year-old brother at the edge of downtown Los Angeles.

Margarita’s father works nights in a fabric warehouse, and her mother recently stopped working in a school cafeteria, Margarita said. The teen, who gets mostly A’s and Bs as a freshman at Belmont High School, recently started working as a tutor two days a week at Placentia Elementary in Echo Park to help out with the finances at home.

Concerns over the number of homeless people and gang members in the neighborhood at night -- their building has had several burglaries -- led Margarita’s parents to bar her from going out at night.

As difficult as the neighborhood is to live in, the family is now concerned they might be forced to move. With the development underway around Staples Center, the building owner has warned tenants that he might sell the building to redevelopers.

Margarita has gone to camp twice before, the first time when she was 10 years old.

“I liked the swimming in the night” at the camp’s lighted pool, she said. “That was really fun.... I liked the hiking with my friends. I’m used to just walking in the city. With camping, you’re free from all the buildings.”

Margarita is hoping to go again this summer, if she can get off work from tutoring for the week. Some day she might wind up working at a camp. Though she loves acting and wants to try to build a career in front of a camera -- she’s acted in the YMCA’s Red Shield program -- she also loves kids and teaching.

The younger, the better.

“I would like to try to be a pre-K teacher,” Margarita said. “I like working with little kids. I like to teach them things they don’t already know.”

Sixty-six campership programs around Southern California will divvy up the nearly $1.6 million raised last year through reader donations and matching funds to the Los Angeles Times Summer Camp Campaign, which began in 1954 and offers help for economically disadvantaged youths from 7 to 17. Since 1954, more than $30 million has been raised to send more than 400,000 kids to summer camp.

In 2000, after a change in the Times’ corporate ownership, the McCormick Tribune Foundation began matching most donations at a rate of 50 cents per dollar. This year, the foundation will match for the first $1.1 million raised. All money raised this year goes toward sending kids to camp next year.

The largest single grant this year, $184,000, will help the Salvation Army of Southern California send some 2,000 kids to its 600-acre camp in the Santa Monica Mountains, which is open for eight weeks beginning June 28, said camping services director Mark Lewis.

The Salvation Army runs three separate programs at the camp, divided by age group, with each focusing on character building. Specific programs include rock climbing, a high-ropes course, swimming, basketball and soccer. And the kids are given chores, such as helping with meals.

More important, the kids learn about personal values and responsibility, Lewis said.

At the end of each summer’s program Lewis calls the parents of 50 kids at random for a debriefing on what impact the parents noticed.

“It’s very compelling,” said Lewis, who has run the Salvation Army’s camping program for nine years. “They’re a little nicer to their siblings. They help a little more around the house. They’re learning to be a little more responsible and to be a better, caring person.”

With a large proportion of the kids coming from single-parent homes, the added sense of personal responsibility echoes through the families.

Three other programs received grants exceeding $100,000, including YMCA-Metropolitan Los Angeles ($127,000), the UCLA UniCamp ($118,000) and YMCA-San Gabriel Valley ($109,000). In fact, eight YMCA organizations received a combined $364,000 in grants.

Yet many of the grants go to smaller programs, such as the Woodcraft Rangers ($46,000) and the Five Acres -- the Boys and Girls Aid Society of Los Angeles, a home for abused children ($6,000).

The camps, Lewis pointed out, embrace a wide range of ethnicities, helping campers get to know kids growing up in neighborhoods different from their own.

“They’re getting to be with other kids and seeing other races and how they can all get along,” Lewis said. “It really helps them.”

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