Survival Rockport is a highly popular, small summer day camp. It takes place on public wild lands in the Rockport forest and on a public beach. We travel everywhere by foot, carrying all our supplies. Our 20 campers per week form a community and immerse weekly in a different story of survival. Sometimes we are stranded mariners or treasure hunters, sometimes we are field biologists camping out to study rare species. Campers forge connections with each other and the natural world, establish a home base camp, and then hone their survival skills.
There are 8 core skills with five levels each. Campers decide which ones to focus on, and they demonstrate their skills when they're ready to move up. The skills include firecraft, shelter architect, naturalist, navigator, and rope wrangler, among others. Our instructors are adults who are skilled in naturalist and/or wilderness travel and survival. Our campers are given trust, self direction, and hours per day for unfettered exploration, construction of shelters, drawing of wildlife, and solving of mysteries. Though the stories we create each week are fictional, the camp is authentic in that experiences are based on the surrounding wildlife and plants and spontaneous events in nature.
Campers finish this camp ready to guide their own families on adventures, and we often hear back that they are entrusted with the fires or other aspects of family camping trips.
Kestrel believes strongly that no one should be kept from having a high quality summer adventure due to lack of funds. We keep the camp fees reasonable and lower than other private camps. We also offer a simple application for fee waivers and reductions, and we've never turned anyone away for inability to pay. We believe anyone who tells us they need help, and so far, to our knowledge, our trust has been well spent.
However, we no longer have a financial aid bank. We want to establish one, and have families who can chip in a little extra replenish it each year.