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The origins of Camp Tenetke date back to my first years working with inner city kids on Montgomery’s westside. In 2006, I founded Common Ground Montgomery, a non-profit youth and community organization, and moved my family into a distressed and under resourced neighborhood in Montgomery, Alabama. The years to follow would prove to be highly challenging but rewarding.

Three types of isolation:

I witnessed firsthand the hopelessness, loneliness, and group-think that happens in the neighborhood when kids are isolated in communities of poverty and violence, especially apart from positive male role models. Youth murders, generational poverty, chronic under-employment, teenage pregnancy, and lack of access to quality education is intensified in this type of isolation. I have attended too many funerals of teenagers that had once, while they were younger, played basketball in my backyard or spent the night as friends of my own childen. Over the years, an alarming percentages of kids have revealed traumatic sexual abuse and violence in their earliest years of memory. We watched as light and adventure disappeared from their eyes as they hit middle school age and the distant emotionless demeanors set in as they suppressed trauma and hopelessness knowing that many kids won’t see the age of 21 in neighborhoods like ours.

I also noticed a second, negative isolation. In the heart of this civil rights defining city, kids were now being raised segregated all over again. Schools, neighborhoods, churches, sports teams and leagues all were disproportionately separated by race and income. Growing up in this type of isolation eats away at the necessary love, respect, and empathy that healthy communities and individuals need. White kids with more economic means were growing up never really knowing black kids in a city where more than half the population is African American. Many of those kids with economic and social network privilege were also growing up with deep pain and high degrees of destructive secrets of their own as the relationships in their lives were unhealthy as well. Both of these types of isolation are destructive, but also create a poverty, or lack, for everyone involved. Kids are at a tremendous deficit by missing out on the healthy respect, connection, and education that come from being together with kids from different experiences and backgrounds.

I believe that the future of our families and community are at stake.

I also noticed a third type of isolation. Kids were growing up in the streets and had no real concept of enjoying the outdoors. The neighborhood was riddled with litter and vandalized property, which was symptomatic of the lack of ownership and respect showing little or no respect of nature or stewardship over their own community. Chaos, blight, and disrespect went hand in hand with isolation and community and personal trauma.

In 2007, We took 20 boys to North Carolina for a week long outdoor adventure camp. It was shocking to learn that most of the boys had never been out of the neighborhood much less out in nature. The boys struggled with home sickness and anxiety at first, but it was overcome as they experienced the wonders of nature and camaraderie with other boys not from their neighborhood in a beautiful and challenging week at camp.

Over a decade later, these now men still talk about that summer as a life-changing event. One of the young men, Aaron, is now an avid fisherman and hiker, and takes youth from his neighborhood on outdoor trips to help give them a glimpse of life outside and away from their troubles at home. Now in his early twenties and four years into a successfully caree

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