Have You Ever Heard of Camp To Belong?

With almost 600,000 children in foster care in the United States, they often find themselves living from home to home, sometimes as many as 10 in one year. Add in the 200,000 in kinship care (foster care with a relative) and the roughly 20,099 children that were adopted through domestic infant adoptions in the USA, there are roughly 766,099 children in care in the US alone. Of these children, 65% - 85% have at least one sibling. Thirty percent have four siblings or more! And 75%, or 3 out of every 4, are separated from at least one sibling when placed in care.

As children continue to slip into the foster care system they are separated from the siblings who understand their needs, can nurture their frustrations, shared their memories. . .as social workers, mental health providers, lawmakers and parents continue to inadvertently devalue this relationship, one local organization strives to desperately change these broken connections!

Camp To Belong (CTB) is a non-profit 501c(3) organization reuniting brothers and sisters placed in separate foster, adoptive or kinship homes for events that encourage emotional empowerment, social maturation, positive outlook, and fun and sibling connections. Camp To Belong believes that maintaining the sibling bonds of brothers and sisters will inspire them to rise above their circumstances through the healing comfort of these relationships.

The CTB flagship events are summer camps during which brothers and sisters are reunited in a safe, neutral, week-long camp environment to create childhood memories together that they would not have otherwise due to living in separate homes. However, CTB is not “just a camp.”

Yes the camp follows a traditional overnight camp, but what makes this camp special is the focus on the campers and the reunification with their siblings. Some of these siblings have not seen each other in months, sometimes even years.

Camp to Belong was founded in Las Vegas in 1995 by Lynn Price, who was 8 years old and in foster care when she discovered she had a sister living on the other side of town. “We missed out on so many childhood memories, you know, all the social interactions, celebrating birthdays, telling each other secrets, sharing holidays, and things like that,” she says. Because of these lost memories, Price’s passion has been solely focused on creating these memories for children in foster care. Thirteen years later, Camp To Belong has reunited over 2500 siblings through week long camps throughout the country. They currently have afilliate camps in Maine, Massachusetts, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, DC and coming summer 2008, Georgia!