Branching Out: A Campaign for Growth

This year, we’re launching our Branching Out campaign—a bold step toward expanding Saltvine’s reach and impact. For twenty years, we have built and implemented week-long curriculum for summer camp programs, but we’ve been limited to our own staff’s availability for how many of those weeks can operate in a single season.  As our library of themes grows, we want to find a way to expand beyond our physical capacity and allow for our theme curriculum to see its way into the hands of camp staff and team leaders all over the country.  It’s a big jump for us, but why shouldn’t we think big?  We believe in our BeCre program, and there’s no reason to limit it to the handful of dates and locations that we can schedule. 

 Everyone at Saltvine works a full time job, and we’ve done everything for two decades in our spare time.  The themed weeks that we have already designed and executed at previous weeks of camp have value to new audiences in new locations.  Our goal is to raise the funds needed to support a full-time curriculum designer for one year, empowering us to create eight complete, ready-to-use summer camp curriculum packages. These resources will allow camps and ministries anywhere in the country to share Saltvine’s unique approach—helping more students encounter Jesus in imaginative, life-changing ways.

The plan is to curate and polish our eight most effective and workable themes from previous years, give them printed material and  supplemental media, and have them professionally packaged.  While the themes that we’ve already done have content, that content was written informally for our own staff – and not in a format that could be “turn-key” for future camp leaders who would like to run a week of BeCre.  

In addition to the development of these 8 weeks of themes, we will still be physically running weeks this Summer! Therefore, along with the funding to produce curriculum material, we intend to use funding to hire a Summer staff member to maintain current and backlogged media production – so that recent campers see no difference in the quality of their experience. 

By “branching out,” we’re growing beyond what we can do alone—so that creativity, faith, and connection can take root in communities everywhere. We’re putting our material into a box to help teach others how to live beyond them!