Podcast Episode - The Good Life Camp Part 2, with Andy Bachmann
There are times, both professionally and personally, when you just find yourself in the right place at the right time.
Quite a few years ago, our teammate Joe Mamlin was in a band with a teacher named Jim, who spent his summers working at a camp in Wisconsin called for Camp Highlands for Boys. When Grays Peak started planning the camp for the Lac Courte Oreilles (LCO) Child Support Services’ Good Life Vision project, Joe mentioned Jim might be able to give us tips for running a camp, and after a few steps we ended up on a call with Andy Bachmann, the Director of Camp Highlands.
Our podcast interview with Andy is the second of a series on the Good Life Camp. We hope this series will provide a thorough understanding of the complexity and importance of the camp and its impact on LCO youth, both those receiving child support services and those who are not.
YOU CAN FIND THE PODCAST ON:
SPOTIFY, APPLE PODCASTS, GOOGLE PODCASTS, IHEART RADIO, AND ANCHOR.
The First Call
Our first call felt like a right-place-at-the-right-time moment for our whole team. Andy talked about the legacy and history of the camp. He had this peaceful presence and seemed so genuinely excited about our project. He very quickly grasped the goals of the project of connecting youth to their culture in the hopes of giving them confidence and self-confidence to see options for their future and living out the Good Life.
Right from the start Andy was willing to help us—not just with planning the camp but even letting us use the camp’s facilities and even bring on some of his highly experienced and wonderfully passionate staff. Having those in place made everything we did with the camp immeasurably simpler.
In that very first call Andy acknowledged that Camp Highlands is on lands that Native Americans had taken care of for centuries, even millennia, as shown by the bent birch trees on Camp Highlands’ portage trails that marked trading routes.
Andy loves working with kids and it shows. He has a natural calmness when it comes to dealing with them. When asked about discipline at the camp, Andy said we come from a place of love and forgiveness. Love is one of the Seven Teachings—one of the many cultural themes incorporated into the camp’s curriculum.
The Good Life Camp
As we mentioned in Part 1, last month LCO Child Support Services launched its first-ever cultural camp for youth as part of the Good Life Vision project, which seeks to preserve, strengthen, and renew Ojibwe values in the LCO youth by providing opportunities to learn about the culture’s history, values, and practices to support Good Life parenting and reduce the negative effects of generations of cultural trauma.
The Good Life Camp is one of the programs in the works this year to develop culturally relevant and -sustainable curricula and other tools for middle school, high school, and college students and young parents.
Grays Peak Strategies is proud to partner with the LCO Child Support Services in bringing to life many aspects of this very important project, starting with the camp, which was an exciting challenge and a huge success.