Give to YMCA Camp Immokalee
George wasn’t sure he wanted to spend a week away from home.
He made it through the first night, and then another. Somewhere along the way, camp started to feel a little less like the place his parents had left him and a little more like his place. By the end of the week, he’d won two camp awards and was beaming when he told his family about them.
Then it was time to go home.
George hid in a closet.
We can’t promise every kid will make us search the cabin at pickup, but we do know what can happen in a week here. Kids get a chance to do things without their parents standing beside them, find people they didn’t know six days ago, and discover they’re capable of a little more than they thought.
We also know there are kids who won’t get that week because their family can’t afford it.
That’s the part we can do something about.
Some families need help getting here.
In 2027, YMCA Camp Immokalee expects to provide approximately $80,000 in financial assistance across overnight camp, day camp, and our year-round programs.
We hear what that means from families themselves.
One family sent three kids to camp last summer. One of their daughters had been scared to leave home, then became the first one asking to go back. The family wanted to send their kids for another week and tried to make it work, but they couldn’t.
They told us they hoped to keep coming to weekend camps and weeklong sessions “as finances allow.” The interest wasn’t the problem. The kids wanted to come back, and their parents wanted to send them.
They needed camp to be within reach.
That’s what our Annual Campaign helps us do. Gifts allow YMCA Camp Immokalee to provide financial assistance based on what a family can afford while still giving every camper the full camp experience.
A week costs about $900. Your gift doesn’t have to.
About $900 represents the full cost of one week of overnight camp.
That number helps explain the size of the need, but it isn’t the price of admission for being a donor.
Give $25 because you love this place. Give $100 because your kid came home different. Give $900 because you can. The point isn’t attaching a particular outcome to a particular dollar amount. Your gift becomes part of our ability to say yes when a family tells us they need help.
You can make a one-time gift, or you can make camp something you support throughout the year.
What happens once they’re here?
A lot of it looks exactly like you’d expect. Kids swim in the lake, shoot archery, zipline, sing loudly, make friends, lose things, find things, and come home with stories.
Then there are the things we never could have planned.
Eva was 14 when her counselor, Mari, started tucking the girls in each night. When Eva came home, she started asking her mom to tuck her in again because she’d loved it so much at camp.
There was real drama in Adelle’s cabin. Her counselors brought the girls together, not to lecture them into getting along, but to give them room to talk and listen to each other. They didn’t all become best friends. Her mom said they came away respecting and valuing each other anyway.
Victoria arrived at camp struggling to make meaningful friendships and nervous about what was ahead. She tried the zipline, got up in front of people for a dance skit, and made friends. Then she came back for another week and did it again. Her mom saw a kid becoming calmer, more comfortable with herself, and more willing to believe she could do things that scared her.
None of those things appear on our activity schedule, but they’re some of the best things that happen here.
Stick around.
We’re especially excited about building a community of people who give monthly to Camp Immokalee.
Monthly giving makes support more dependable for camp and easier to build into a family’s budget. Twenty-five dollars a month becomes $300 over a year. Seventy-five dollars a month becomes about the cost of a week of overnight camp.
But we don’t want monthly giving to mean your credit card gets charged twelve times and you hear from us when we’re ready to ask again.
We want to keep you close to camp.
We’ll share stories, photos, and pieces of what’s happening here throughout the year. You’ll get to see some of the kids, counselors, ridiculous moments, and ordinary days your support helps make possible.
More kids should get a week at camp.
We can’t tell you what they’ll take home from it.
Maybe they’ll do something they didn’t think they could do. Maybe they’ll find a friend they didn’t know they needed. Maybe a counselor will do something tiny that matters more than anyone realizes at the time.
Or maybe their family will arrive on Saturday and discover that sometime during the previous six days, the kid who wasn’t sure about staying has decided they’re not leaving.
And we’ll have to check the closets.
Let’s get them here.