It certainly has been an interesting summer- especially since life gets back to ‘somewhat-normal’ as friends and families take local vacations to escape what has been essentially a local-lock-in for the last 6 months.
Usually, this time of year (for the last 10+ years) I’ve revisited my roots in Hayward, Wisconsin, where I was a camp counselor and then Village Camp Director from ’91-’99, prior to completely switching careers and started exclusively helping nonprofits.
Camp North Star (yes, the same camp in the classic Bill Murray movie “Meatballs”, and for true fans, here’s an inside scoop of what really happened during filming.), was able to hold a summer camp this season, and as far as I could tell, pulled it off without any infections, which was great!
What was not great, was that the family camp portion where I have brought my sons for so many years (and typically starts a few minutes after the last camper leaves, lol), was canceled this year. The first time since 1945.
As they say, it-is-what-is-due-to-COVID. And life moves on.
So we made lemonade out of lemons and I took my sons to something closer and safer- Lake Bantam in Connecticut at the last minute. And, we actually found a camp called “Camp David” that was available with 5 days notice, and we’re wrapping up several days of fishing and just enjoying the water and natural beauty of the lake.
Meanwhile, ESPN published our effort to get youth baseball back safely in our community. It’s about 10 slides in, and like most major media projects I’ve been involved with over the years, they took hours of video/comments and distilled it into 30 seconds.
As they say, it-is-what-it-is, and I’m thrilled that ESPN noticed our 14,000 family community effort to re-start baseball and softball in Southeastern Pennsylvania.
As for The Biedermann Group, all I have to say is that I am really proud of our partners and expert advisory board who believe in what we are doing. There’s a lot of work ahead, but I’m confident that we’re going to affect real change and ultimately help improve philanthropy to be MUCH greater than just 2% of GDP.
I hope that all my readers of the blog have been able to experience some kind of normal as well, and that everyone is safe and healthy.
-Jon
