As a summer camp you may have or are considering hiring international camp counselors. That’s very exciting for both you as a camp and your campers. If you feel this is something very new to you or are interested in finding additional support from experts, Roam Consulting is for you. We live in a highly globalized environment. With out cultural understanding, conflicts and misunderstandings may arise. Roam Consulting can help you devise comprehensive understanding for your summer team. Understanding cultural context, world-views, and work culture is a key to success for any international teams. Roam creates comprehensive content that can be referenced.
Roam Consulting is able to support you on three key levels:
- Culture Work-Up – Roam will create a comprehensive “workup” of cultures you’ve hired each summer. In the work up document, Roam will base insights off the research of the three below anthropologic researchers. Cultural aspects such as Context, Power Distance, and Indulgence for each nationality will be outlined and the degree of which these cultures relate to these aspects will be laid out clearly so you can interpret the variety of people you’ll be hosting at camp. This is a useful tool if you have taken our Cultural Competency Seminar (please see services page for more details)
- Culture Coordinator – Roam will act on the behalf of your camp to arrange and manage digital discussion spaces for J1 camp counselors hired by camps to digitally meet their international peers prior to beginning their job and a space to for them to ask questions related to their J1 experience. These spaces will allow them to engage with each other, ask questions, and prepare for their summer job. The spaces will be managed by Roam Consulting on the behalf of the camp. Roam will use their experience as J 1 Program Sponsor, former camp management, and extensive travel history to assess and attend to each individual’s needs. The goal is to help alleviate the burden of the J1 program from summer camp who may lack extensive knowledge in any of the above mentioned aspects.
- Cultural Competency Seminar – Roam can provide workshops to camp leaders and staff on cultural competency. These workshops will cover cultural dimensions that are relevant to camp. Staff will be able to understand how cultural differences can impact a staff’s experience at their camp.
Roam pulls from the expertise of Fons Trompennar, Edward, T Hall, and Geert Hofestede. Each of these experts and researchers identified various blocks and categories of culture; what makes up a person, region, nation, etc.
The idea is to break down perspectives in a way that can be understood and respected by others.
If you would like to amp up your counselor experience at your camp, you will want to ensure you are cultural aware and sensitive.