Back in March RHI staff toured a space in Waynesboro, knowing that we'd outgrown the space at Charlottesville Waldorf School. The staff at Westminster made us feel welcome and they would genuinely love to host us. However, our biggest factor for the change in location is financial. Other unique benefits to Westminster are a full kitchen where we plan to do cooking/baking with campers, a cafeteria where campers across classrooms/age ranges can eat lunch together, and a space that is specifically designed for teens.

We recognize Waynesboro is significantly farther away for some families and that transportation may be a barrier. In an effort to continue to try to make our programming equitable, we are working to obtain transportation for Charlottesville families who need Camp Hope, but would otherwise be unable to transport their camper to Waynesboro. Transportation will be at an additional cost. We are working hard to coordinate with various organizations to finalize the details which will be published here. If transportation is necessary for your child to attend, please indicate so on the application.

At our Staff Retreat in January, we voted to pilot a tiered priority application model for 2025. We consulted with a number of specialized camps across the country that use this model to create an application that will rank your camper's level of support needs to help us decide more objectively which children are most in need of Camp Hope. When we review the applications as a team, they will initially appear anonymously to us.

No! A few years ago, we moved to grouping camp into three two-week sessions. We will pause this model for 2025, as we have received numerous points of feedback from families that some would only like their camper to attend one week, three weeks instead of four, etc. This will allow for more spots. New campers still can only attend a maximum of two weeks and they must be consecutive.

We are constantly revising and improving the programming of Camp Hope based on parent/staff feedback. Here are a few things we will be doing this year:

• Parent Communication- We heard your feedback that you'd like additional communication while your camper is with us. We are still workshopping practical ways for our staff to do so without taking away too much time. We will likely be piloting a new app, but stay tuned for more information about this in the future.

• Staffing- We will begin to offer one half-day per week off for our full-time Senior Counselors! We simply could not do Camp Hope without all of our counselors and recognize that a huge factor in increasing staff retention is frontloading ways to mitigate caregiver burnout and compassion fatigue. We currently have an average of 60% staff retention over the past five years and hope to increase this number to 65% in 2025.

• We received feedback from parents that some of our older campers would like more opportunities to spend intentional time with our younger campers and are planning to pilot this in 2025.