I love Young Women Camp!  Here is a little re-cap of our 2016 camp.  I love sharing ideas and thought these might be helpful to someone out there!  This might be the worlds longest blog post.  I’ve tired to break up the post into categories.  Here we go!  If you want any of the documents, click HERE to go to an online folder.  These are for personal, church use only.

Theme:  CITY ON A HILL,  inspired by Matthew 5:14 “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.”

 Theme song: We Are by Kari Jobi.  These lyrics are amazing and the chorus sings “we are the light of the world, we are a city on a hill.”

From these two places stemmed all the inspiration.

Camp Leader Training

We meet together as leaders each month for 5 months.  We talk about responsibilities, ideas, inspiration, certification, and the itinerary.  It sure takes a lot of preparation to plan camp!  The YCLs also meet each moth to plan for their responsibilities.  Our YCLs are amazing and they really run camp and are the heart of everything we do.

Back to Camp Night

About 6 weeks before camp we have “Back to Camp Night” which is when all the young women gather together and get to meet their level leaders.  The YCLs lead us in songs and skits, we have fun refreshments and each level gets to meet separately and start planning.  We used yellow and gingham for the decorations.  All of the food was yellow: lemonade, lemon cake, cheese puffs, lemon taffy, vanilla Oreos, lemon sours, chips, and popcorn, etc.

Camp Preparations

Preparing for camp takes months.  Here are some of the things we do before we get to camp.

Each girl gets a lanyard, bandana, songbook, itinerary, and camp shirt.  During the week at camp they earn buttons.  So I spend months making all these fun buttons!

This is about 100 lanyards.  Each lanyard has a match, so there are two of each fabric.  When the girls choose their lanyard they don’t know it but they are also choosing their “Pine Cone Buddy.”

Pinecone Buddies are kind of like Secret Sisters, only the girls know who their buddy is and they are paired up.  During the week, they look out for their buddy, get to know their buddy, and make crafts for their buddy.  I love that this has replaced Secret Sisters.

The buttons keep coming!  We make buttons for archery, hikes, games, certification, special campfires, KP, nurse, crafts, rock climbing, and so on.

Each girl gets an itenary to clip onto her lanyard.  This is the hardest and most time consuming part of planning camp – getting this ironed out!

Also on their lanyard is a camp songbook with all the lyrics to our favorite camp songs.

Each lanyard has a name card pouch and they write their name on the tag.  They also got a little Warm Fuzzy chart and every time they did something nice for someone they got to mark it off.  Once they received 10 marks, they turned in their chart and received a fluffy pom pom to put on their lanyard.  These were a hit!!!

We have fabulous Stake Leaders and I made each of us a clipboard – everything was gingham at camp!!

Each level choose a City to represent them.  They created a cheer based on their city and decorated their cabins according to that city’s culture.  This was super fun and it each of the levels were amazing!!!

Once at camp we never sleep and run from activity to activity.  Some highlights were our Amazing Race to kick off the first day of camp, 4th year over-night hike, crafts, certification, rock climbing, camp fires and mini classes, water fights, swimming, and archery.

We asked the young women who were interested to bring an artistic representation of the temple to help us decorate our large mantle in the lodge.  I loved what they all came up with.

The first night the Stake Leaders put on a fun party – we were the city of Los Angles so we hosted “The LA County Fair.”

We had face painting….

country line dancing….

candy bar….

cotton candy & popcorn… photo booth….

and awards and prizes!!!

In the lodge we hung a photo of each young women mounted on yellow paper and throughout the week the girls wrote sweet words.  They got to take them home at the end of camp.

Not sure who is having more fun….leaders or girls!!

Camp Crafts are such a fun part of camp.  We made pom poms and yarn crafts….

wood, nail, and string art….

Embroidery projects, and lots of other fun things.

For one of our campfires, we had a service night where we could “Let our Light Shine”.  We helped make these draw-string bags for the Days For Girls.  The girls LOVED it and it was super meaningful and brought everyone joy!!!

By the end of camp there is no room left on the girls lanyards!  These are a fun keepsake for each girl to look back at through the years and remember what each button represents.

I would say the highlight of camp was seeing our challenge we issued the year before come forth.  We challenged the young women to take this past year to memorize the Living Christ.  On the last night of camp before testimony meeting, we all stood and recited it together.  It was so AMAZING!!!  It had such a huge impact on everyone and really helped to strengthen our testimony of Jesus Christ.

Well, that’s it all in a nutshell.  It’s hard to summarize a years worth of work, prayer, service, and love in one blog post, but I hope you find a little inspiration from our experience.  Thanks for reading 🙂