2015 Kentucky Military Teen Adventure Camp

These camps will bring together military parents and their teenage children for high-adventure, teambuilding experiences. The scope of this project, then, is to provide a route for military parents and their teenage children to connect and work together as a team during the deployment of the other parent or to reconnect after an extended absence due to deployment. Focused time together as parent and child at these camps will help the youth and their parents in learning how to connect and adapt to the changes that inevitably occur during and after a deployment, thereby increasing their resilience skills. In addition to targeting the life skill of resiliency, these camps also will target the life skills of self-responsibility, decision making, cooperation, responsible citizenship and problem solving as the parent-child duos work together to achieve joint goals through the activities, programs and challenges presented through the camps. The goals of this project are: • Provide camp experiences for military parents and their teenage children together that offer opportunities for connecting, team building, and cooperative problem solving. • Increase resiliency skills related to creative coping strategies, problem solving, communication and adjusting to change with parent-child relationships by being placed in new and unusual situations while receiving the tools they need to determine constructive solutions to problems and succeed, resulting in a feeling of shared accomplishment. • Increase formal/informal support systems for military families by providing a safe and welcoming environment in which to vocalize hopes, fears, dreams, and opportunities together and with other families that have been through similar experiences. • Increase youth awareness of the importance of working with others and effective communication to accomplish tasks and “cause and effect” relationships between their actions and their consequences to increase self-responsibility and responsible citizenship. • Initiate conversations to process the experience of being a military family to improve family connections and parent-child relationships. The projected outreach for these camps is 454 participants (plus 60 additional participants in focus groups) who have experienced at least one deployment from any branch of service. The projected outputs will be 14 adventure camps; collection/analysis/aggregation of research data; and usage of participant feedback and research data collected for training and publication in 2016. One camp is specifically designed for Wounded Warrior families and 3 camps are specifically designed for Special Ops families to provide opportunities to these unique audiences as a scan by the project director and grant partners has shown that there are few to no camp options for these specific military families.