She’ll discover stories to tell

As an aspiring writer, Alyna Moreno says ideas for her stories just come to her as she sits down and begins to write. Case in point: She once wrote a story about a young boy who went camping in the woods for the first time in his life, even though she had never been camping herself.

This summer, Alyna, 11, will get to experience something on parallel to the character in her story and fill her imagination with new ideas as she heads to Camp Whittier.

“I’m excited and nervous,” said Alyna, who hopes to shed some of her shyness while at camp. “I’m excited to be more confident and to meet people that I never knew before.”

Alyna, who lives in Valencia with her mother, Charlene Jalal, her younger brother and two younger sisters, often helps her mom take care of her siblings. Her mother says the chance for Alyna to get away for a week will give her some time to focus on herself. “It’s cool,” Jalal said. “She’s going to learn how to be independent.”

Jalal learned about Camp Whittier from Alyna’s after-school program, Keep Youth Doing Something, which provides snacks, homework help, and sports activities for low-income children in the Los Angeles Unified School District for free.

Alyna and 34 children from Keep Youth Doing Something will join 110 campers in total, ages 6 to 13, for a week at Camp Whittier, run by the Boys and Girls Club of Santa Barbara. Located on 55 acres of the Los Padres National Forest in Santa Barbara, the camp offers activities including environmental education, arts, theater and sports.

KYDS sends both at-risk and low-income children to camp with a goal of helping them gain self-confidence, said Karina Diaz, assistant program director of KYDS.

“For one week, we can provide a perfect environment for them,” Diaz said of the camp experience. Diaz takes the KYDS participants to Camp Whittier and picks them up, and at the end of the week, she says, she sees a profound difference in temperament. “What I noticed is when I drop them off, they’re afraid yet excited -- you see them walking up as babies,” Diaz said. “When I pick them up, they are totally different kids.”

Thanks to the $1.7 million raised last year by the Los Angeles Times Summer Camp Campaign, about 8,000 children will go to camp in Southern California this summer.

The Los Angeles Times Family Fund is a fund of the McCormick Foundation, which matches all donations at 50 cents on the dollar.

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nicole.loomis@latimes.com