Brown Bag Lady StonesThrow Foster Sibling Summer Camp

Support for foster and systems-impacted youth

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

The issue we address through camp is building emotional and mental health resilience in foster youth, by re-connecting siblings in a place of calm and safety, while they are dealing with the traumatic experience of family separation. Studies have shown that maintaining sibling connections contributes to higher levels of resilience, and that youth with secure sibling attachments are better able to cope with the stresses and challenges of foster care, and are more likely to experience stable placements and fewer disruptions. The May 2024 Child Welfare Services Fact Sheet indicates that over 14,000 children are currently being served by the foster system in LA County. This problem must be addressed so that issues related to a lack of stability and sense of safety in a child’s life, and the mental health challenges this lack can present, are manageable and less acute later in their lives. Ages 5-13 is the largest group served by DCFS in LA County. Our camp targets those aged 9-12yrs.

The program that this grant will support is the StonesThrow annual sibling summer camp that serves 65% Latino and 35% Black children, mostly from South LA, who are involved in the LA foster care system. Camp takes place for 1 week during July at a state park in Big Bear. The kids participate in hiking, canoeing, daily swim lessons and tests (as many of the kids don’t know how to swim when they arrive at camp), rope climbing, volleyball, archery, woodworking, lake boating, nightly movie nights, and a Hawaiian themed luau on the last night. Campers attend at a no-cost to them or to their foster families. The program is unique because it is one of the only sibling reunification experiences in LA that almost exclusively focuses on children who live, or are fostered, in South LA. It also serves as one of the few times that the children are given the opportunity to visit a natural green space, outside the concrete, always loud, light and air polluted experience of the city. Often camp serves as a significant confidence building experience merely due to the daily swim tests. In past years lifeguards noticed that many campers come without any life saving swimming skills, so they decided to offer daily swimming “tests”, which serve as lessons, so that more kids can enjoy the water safely. Brown Bag Lady CEO Jaqueline Norvell says “the confidence they gain from the swimming alone builds resilience, and that’s priceless for what they deal with everyday.”

From October 2024 to October 2025, we hope to be able to expand the program to be able to serve more children from South LA. Currently, the YMCA is able to provide us with a total of 50 beds for the entire camp experience, which includes staff and counselors. Due to this limited capacity, we are only able to serve about 37 kids each year. With more funding, we could afford more beds, allowing us to serve more foster youth. Our short term goal would be to serve at least 50 youth in 2025. The long term intended impact of this camp experience is to offer hope for a better future- instilling an understanding within the children that the foster experience is temporary, and that there are still family and friends in their lives who love and care for them. In LA County, DCFS now reports that 1 in 5 foster youth become homeless within 18 months of exiting the foster system. Our long term aim is to reduce this statistic by building strong bonds of care among foster involved siblings.

Because this is only the 3rd year of StonesThrow, we haven’t yet implemented impact measurement as an established part of camp. However, we have plans for ways we would like to track impact, even as soon as camp next month. We intend to measure self-reported confidence levels, particularly related to swimming skills and overall activities; tracking of physical activity engagement; a survey on changes in attitude toward nature and outdoor activity; foster parent/case manager observations of behavioral and emotional changes post-camp; as well a pre and post-camp surveys assessing the quality of the sibling relationship. We think there may also be some potential impact in school engagement/GPA, especially within the first 9 weeks of the academic school year, soon after camp ends.