Part of the Hilliard Free Lunch Summer Camp for Kids 4th of July Parade Float
12 nationalities represented at just one of our three camp sites!

It’s official.  Summer Camp is in full swing.  With this comes a lot of driving.  Driving between the three Summer Lunch sites, the SON Ministries office, our partnering churches and various businesses throughout Hilliard has brought me to appreciate my old, green pickup truck in a way that would make any country music artist proud.  I even had the opportunity to take my truck for a cruise around Hilliard in this year’s 4th of July Parade.

I spent the week prior to the parade working with the kids to make decorations for my  truck, coordinating with the city to sign up for the parade, collecting 55 pounds of candy and printing over 1,000 fantastically colorful flyers.  It was my first time really getting a chance to experience the larger community of Hilliard and I thought I was pretty prepared for it.

The community turned out in force.

Two miles of side streets absolutely packed with people.  1,000 flyers and enough candy to feed a small army later… we were almost to the end of the parade.

The festivities on the fourth shortened one of the precious nine weeks we have to spend with our kids, so when we came back the following Monday, we hit the ground running.

The phone calls and emails I’d been making, along with support from the rest of our staff, started to pay off in the form of Special Guest visits.  Last week we had a police officer from the K-9 unit and his dog visit all three of our sites!

Officer Rogers and his dog, Lucky, showing off for the kids.

This week holds more even more guests.  KidSMILES will be making an appearance for a hygiene presentation on Friday, in addition to an ICU doctor!

Today, we packed up 100+ of our closest friends (between the grades of kindergarten and sixth grade) and took a field trip to the Franklin County Fairgrounds for their “Fun & Learn” program.  We made robots out of toothbrushes, met Pedro the Donkey and toured the 4-H booths and the Historical Village.

Stayin’ cool in some shades at the Franklin County Fairgrounds

New soccer goals requested, designed and constructed by some of our kids!

On top of the special guests and field trips and parades, we have some projects in the works also.  Thanks to Home Depot and their donation of more PVC pipe than any one person should ever need, our kids designed and constructed new, improved soccer goals!  This week we’re working on painting the goals and attaching the nets all in preparation for…

Family Night!

Our two larger sites are inviting friends and family of the kids in our camp, as well as our volunteers and staff, to visit our camp “after hours”.  The majority of our kids are picked up and dropped off every day by bus and we rarely get to interact with any of their families.  This is an opportunity to change that.

We’ve been working over the past few weeks to include exhibition soccer and dodgeball games, a halftime show headlined by our dance team, refreshments provided by our baking team, an art gallery and a talent show!  Are you ready for my favorite part?  All of these aspects of our family night are completely child run.  We’ll provide some food and opportunities for the families to get connected to local resources, but the kids do all the rest.

Oh yeah, we also run four hours of programming at three different sites and provide a free and nutritious breakfast and lunch to 200 kids five-days a week.  It’s sometimes easy to get caught up in the day to day details and miss the bigger picture of what I get to be a part of here.  When you step back, it’s pretty amazing.