My Nonprofit Reviews

I arrived at The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in the summer of 1994 as a volunteer counselor. As with so many other people who came to know this camp, it changed my life entirely. The organization has given me far more than I’ve been able to offer it in my years of work there. The Camp defies easy description. Volunteers return year after year because the place offers you the chance to work long, intense hours around an intelligent, funny, big-hearted staff, and children who are often far wiser than anyone around them. Volunteers and staff members pour their hearts into the task: giving campers a packed week of play and fellowship, free of the social and physical constraints they face back home. As cabin counselors, we would routinely stay up past midnight to plan the next day’s activities and strategize about how to maximize the experience; how to make this one day as great as it could possibly be for our campers. At daybreak we’d lock arms with them and venture into those activities, building deep friendships in whispers as we waited for a fish to bite, or in songs shouted in the dining hall, or in silence around a candle at the close of the day. At the end of the week, those children are members of Camp’s family – a status that guarantees a lifetime of support from anyone affiliated with the place. The support extends to siblings and parents as well. They rely often on that support, and we are the better for it. For many who’ve stood in a joyful swarm of Hole in the Wall campers, we have been transformed into people who more fully understand what it means to love those around us, while serving a purpose that is far greater than whatever material goals we might have. Paul Newman somehow knew there would be magic in such a place. It’s difficult to believe that even he knew just how much magic there would be.

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