There are no meals taken together, no calling "dibs" on who sits up front in the car or cheering one another on at school sporting events. There is no excited whispering the night before Christmas or trade negotiations after Halloween trick-or-treating.
When siblings are separated by foster care, these experiences vanish.
The national nonprofit organization Camp To Belong (CTB) offers one-week camps to allow siblings in foster care to reconnect and spend time together. Last year, the organization offered five camps in Colorado, California, Maine, Massachusetts and Kentucky.
This summer, it plans to bring on board two more, one for foster children in Oregon and one for youngsters who live in Las Vegas.
There's a lot of work to be done to prepare for the camp. Even though Child Focus recently donated $10,000 to help bring CTB to Nevada, more funding is needed. It takes about $125,000 to hold a camp for about 100 children.
The organization also is looking for volunteer counselors to oversee children at camp. About 50 volunteers are necessary for the eight-day commitment.
It took months just to locate a place to hold the camp and negotiate the terms. The group decided to sign with Pathfinder Ranch, owned by the Boys & Girls Clubs of Palm Springs. The Las Vegas-based camp is planned there in July.
"One of the misconceptions is that we're just a summer camp," said local resident Cristine Lindholm, camp steering committee chairwoman. "But it's really more than that, almost like a sibling advocacy organization."
The national group's Web site, www.camptobelong.org, further cements that observation. It states CTB is not about finding a brother or sister. It is about reuniting siblings who may live in the same town, maybe even go to the same school, but live in separate homes.
James English, 15, is in foster care. His two sisters, now 10 and 14, were adopted two years ago by a family that lives across town.
"It was a little weird," he said of his siblings' separation. "It was hard to get used to. The hardest part was thinking we might not ever see each other again ... It would be like your husband or your wife had died and you would never see them again. That's what it feels like every day."
Luckily, two months after being separated, the three siblings attended their first Camp To Belong session in Colorado.
James said the best part was the river rafting activity where he and the others playfully rocked the raft, trying to knock each other off. This year, he and his sisters plan to attend the Las Vegas Camp To Belong session.
Between 80 and 100 Southern Nevada foster care siblings ages 8 to 18 are expected to attend the Las Vegas camp. Same-sex cabins will allow some siblings to bunk in the same room. Opposite-sex siblings are booked into another cabin, but in close proximity.
The camps include typical activities like archery, rock climbing and campfire sing-a-longs, but they also have programs that promote a sense of belonging and connecting. Arts and crafts at all camps, for example, have the children making pillows. Each pillow is decorated and personalized, to be given away to a brother or sister.
"That's a big part of all this," Lindholm said. "They create gifts for one another and we have a pillow presentation ceremony. It's sweet, very touching."
The youngsters also are given disposable cameras. The resulting pictures, developed at a one-hour photo shop, are used in a scrapbooking class. CTB also celebrates everyone's birthday with one giant party.
CTB was founded by Lynn Price back when she lived in Las Vegas. She set up a local program using the UNLV campus for the initial camp in 1995 for 15 children. The next year 54 children attend.
In 1997, she took the concept with her when she moved to Colorado.
"I said to Stuart Fredlund, who was the director of children and family services at the time, 'Do you want elevators, dorm rooms and cement, or do you want the Colorado mountains?' " she said.
Price knows what it's like to be separated from a sibling. Her split occurred when she was too young to remember it. She was 8 before she learned she had an older sister, Andi Andree.
Though they live in different states, they both reconnect by volunteering at the camps.
"Siblings are your longest relationships for life," Price said.
Her goal is to have 25 camps on board within the next 10 years.
Lynn Minard, a travel agent with Desert Travel, 1000 S. Rampart Blvd., met the CTB founder through a friend and now acts as the group's travel agent. She coordinates air travel for about 80 to 125 CTB youngsters from across the country, including Canada and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Usually she has to book groups of at least 10 for flights. This includes chaperones to travel with the children and the camp counselors who will spend the week with them. Sometimes, those counselors have familiar names.
"Foster kids are generally out of the system when they turn 18 so what a lot of them will do -- and I think this is neat -- they'll sign up to work as counselors at the camp," Minard said. "That way, they get to see their brothers and sisters again."
CTB and Price have received numerous accolades, including the Points of Light President's Service Award presented by President Bill Clinton, the CBS Morning Show American Hero award, the L'eggs Hosiery Women Who Shape Our World honor, Oprah Winfrey's Angel Network Use Your Life Award and Redbook Magazine's Mother and Shaker of the Year honor.
There are over 580,000 youngsters in foster care across the United States. Three out of four of them are separated from at least one sibling. Of that number, 30 percent have four siblings or more.
In Southern Nevada, there are nearly 3,000 children living in foster care.
The aspect of the nonprofit that strikes Minard most is "just the fact that you don't always realize the way the system works," she said. "It's not a normal upbringing. This camp, it gives them a sense of normalcy."
That, and a personalized pillow to hug.
For more information, call the Camp to Belong headquarters in Highlands Ranch, Colo., at (888) 723-5664.
Archived Editions| Advertising | Contact The Staff
