Honoring Talya Kalender, Director of Camper Care

In honor of Talya Kalender (TK), here is the tribute I gave at first session staff appreciation this summer:

So many of you have grown up with Talya as your Director of Camper Care and now have gone on to work with her.

What she has created here is trailblazing and changed Jewish camping.

The word “campercare” was not known when TK started here. There was just then the beginning of an idea here in New England. There certainly wasn’t a director of camper care position anywhere. Talya was the first. When I talked about camper care at recruiting events parents would look at me with a blank stare. They didn’t know what it was.

Campercare came about because we often didn’t know what kind of experience a camper was having until we heard about not so good things from parents after the summer. That was both frustrating and scary.

Camper care was first done to be able to understand a camper’s experience while it was happening and try to help in real time.

That was only the beginning – camper care became a way of training, a way of creating pathways to success for potential campers in the off-season and ways to support kids in crisis throughout the summer.

Talya took on all these challenges, developed systems and developed her staff. She grew the program so we could support so many more campers and help them be successful.

I am blessed to be surrounded by a senior staff that works endlessly and tirelessly all summer. Talya never stops until everything is done. In the years she has been here she has gotten upset fewer than a handful of times.

I can’t tell you all the really hard cases we have dealt with – kids who were struggling with mental health, kids who were bullied, kids who had problems at home. We would be in one meeting about a camper who might need to go home because they were considering self-harm and we would walk out my door and she would somehow be able to say a cheery hello to the Kochavim camper walking down the road who looked sad and check on him.

Talya cares about and tries to help everyone and has to communicate with parents who are stressed about bunking or how their camper is doing.

A few years after she started (and we reported on this position at Ramah directors’ meetings) I started to see other camps advertising for camper care specialists and soon almost every camp was hiring a director of camper care. I can proudly say that our camp supports more kids successfully than any other camp I know. We all know it takes the camper care team – and we all know that Talya created that team.

In addition to the tribute video that was playing before that we will give to you, we are giving you a framed picture of the view from your porch. We know this is a happy place that you would sit on and hang out with people especially on Shabbat.

I will deeply miss working with you and am forever grateful for what you did to help so many and personally for your help, the way you challenged me, the way you spoke truth to me, the way you got me to do things that were hard and that I did not want to do, how you supported me and how you have always been so loyal to me and to what we do. Todah Rabbah.