Voyages has been an extremely helpful resource for my family. I have a son with disabilities that has health issues. Since 2020, my other two kids have had to make sacrifices of living life "normally" to ensure that their brother stayed healthy. Now, that they are of the age (10 and 12) to be able to go to overnight camp and COVID has not been as deathly as it was in 2020, I desperately wanted to give them an overnight camp experience.
However, as a single parent on a limited budget, I was not able to afford overnight camp for them. I searched for scholarships and for opportunities for my kids and found Voyages. I filled out the proper paperwork and spoke with Jay and he agreed that my kids were in dire need of a camp experience. I forgot to mention on Dec 30, 2021, we lost everything to smoke damage in the Marshall Fire. My kids really needed to have something to look forward to.
So, we found Camp Blue Mountain Ranch and Voyages helped pay some of the fees for my kids to go to camp!!! Jay connected with the camp director and I wasn't even involved. With relieving some of the financial burden I was able to send them to camp for two weeks!! They were nervous and didn't know what to expect, but they went. They got to do things they would NEVER get to do at home like ride horses, archery, repelling, zip lines, they had "jobs" at camp (like waitressing lol), went on food raids, and made friends. They had so much fun and still talk about it to this day!
They are expecting to go back summer of 2023 and are looking forward to it being even better than summer 2022. Thank you Voyages for making my kids camping dreams come true! They really stretched their thinking over the summer, away at camp. They made their own adventures, friends, and decisions. They came back more confident knowing they can do things they didn't think they could do before! They are so proud of their new found independence and I am proud of them too. :-)
Summer camp was such an import part of my youth. When I became a parent I wanted more than anything to be able to give my children that same opportunity. We were not in a position financially to make this possible but I knew it had to be possible to find a way to make it happen. I knew that my experiences with camp had shaped my life in so many amazing ways and it was so important to be able to share that with our children. My oldest received a scholarship at age nine, at a time when she really needed to spread her wings a bit. She gained so much from her time at camp. Being away from home, experiencing new things and discovering her own capabilities while creating friendships that have lasted a lifetime are a gift that only summer camp could have given her. A few years later our son wanted some kind of an intense wilderness experience. As a young teen he wanted to climb mountains and live in the wilderness. Again we researched opportunities and we were very grateful to receive scholarship funds to help him. His time in the wilds of Colorado impacted his choices of activities in high school. He became passionate about the environment, he joined search and rescue and became a wilderness first responder. He speaks often about his camp experience and is the first to tell anyone that it was the experience that shaped who he has become.