MICHELLE'S PORTFOLIO
Assistant Director of VBS
FROM CAMPER TO ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
From the summer of Grade 7, I became a camper at the Living Waterloo Summer Camp. This camp was what started my leadership journey and shortly after the first week, I was promoted to a helper. Throughout Grades 8 to 10, I was one of the summer camp counsellors to a group of around 30 kids. After accumulating over 200 hours worth of experience, I become the Assistant Director in the summer going into Grade 11. As Assitant Director, my role included creating a day by day, hour by hour schedule for the two week of camp, coordinating all activities including games, songs, lessons, and field trip planning.
As a leader, I found my job challenging because the counselors I had to train were very young, most of them just going into high school. They did not have much leadership experience prior to this role. Given this reason, I tried my best to prepare them and give them the opportunities they need to grow and improve as a leader. Before the official weeks of camp, I held training workshops to allow them to develop essential skills such as public speaking, working with children, teamwork, and leading activities. I had each leader analyse their own strengths and weaknesses, to see how we could help each other improve. I did this by leading team-building activities such as playing games and cooking together. Through this process, the counselors were able to become confident in their actions and developed mutual trust for each other. While directing these counselors, I learned about patience, and the importance of looking at each leader's individual strengths. Through knowing their strengths, I was able to learn about delegating tasks effectively. I learned to trust others and not take on all the roles by myself. In fact, this process really allowed the camp to run smoothly, and gave the counselors a chance to grow as a leader as well. In the end, these counselors that I trained were able to take on bigger roles the following year, with our students from last year coming back to enjoy our camp for another summer.