This event is a continuation of the activities to agree on common standards for camps in YMCA Europe. Following the events organized by the YMCA of the Netherlands and the YMCA of Setubal, Portugal, the Finnish YMCA hosted a training conference for camp leaders with a focus on camp management. All these events now belong to a larger program of YMCA Europe called YMCA Camps in Europe.

The training site is a residential camp of the Finnish YMCA located on the island of Harva, a unique, picturesque place in the Finnish archipelago, not far from the city of Turku. This project was funded mostly by the grant that YMCA Finland received from the Erasmus+ program and this training event was the main activity of the project that lasted from 31 May to 29 November 2017. Partners of the projects are YMCA in Estonia, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Macedonia, Romania and the Netherlands. In addition, we had trainers and participants from Georgia, Kosovo and the YMCA from the USA. We had a total of 40 people and that is the limit related to the capacity of the place. For that reason, unfortunately, this time we could not propose the participation of more YMCA movements.

The guest from the YMCA, Mary Cambray, held a session. Our second guest from YMCA Camp Echo, Bernard Rocca is holding a session in Europe. There are many YMCA organizations with a long tradition of camping, which have an elaborate high-quality service, take a unique approach to children and young people, and their staff are trained within sophisticated systems. Most of the YMCA camps represent very high standards and are recognized as such by the communities. However, in most cases YMCA movements work separately and it is difficult to talk about common standards in organizing camps and training staff. This project is the next, very important step to join the facilities: a group of current or future camp managers will be trained in a common system, in fact they will shape this system.

The YMCA of Finland is well placed to host this project: it has several good camps, experience in training volunteers and staff. But above all, they have dedicated young leaders who want to cooperate with their colleagues from other countries. The training program included topics that are characteristic of camp management: • strategic planning, administration. marketing, staff team building. However, we had workshops that were very relevant to contemporary issues involving the YMCA. One of them is diversity, which is also a matter of camp management in our case. Since the training took place in one place, the forms of several activities took advantage of the local specifics. We built a raft (and used it), sailed around the Archipelago, cooked and ate in an old mine and those who wanted to sleep outdoors in hammocks did so.

Also, as a special Finnish contribution, from this event we will propose a form of support in a traditional Finnish way, which we want to apply in cooperation with the YMCA who are at the beginning of developing camp programs. This is called Talkoot – Support for YMCA Camps in Need.