Camp Loyaltown 50th Anniversary Video | AHRC Nassau

Providing 50 Years of Camp for Children & Adults With Special Needs

Client: AHRC
Industry: Nonprofit
Video Type: Brand Awareness
Messaging Type: Interview-Style

About This Video Project

As part of a series of videos produced to be played at an AHRC gala, we produced this 50th Anniversary Video for Camp Loyaltown, a camp for children and adults with special needs located in Hunter, New York.

This interview style brand awareness video delves into the history of the camp highlights their mission and how they provide a unique and special outdoor experience.

With our testimonials from the organization’s members and the families they benefit we used client submitted photos as the visuals the help showcase the past 50 years.

Transcription

Camp Loyal Town is a camp. It’s based in Hunter, New York, and it’s for children & adults with special needs. It is completely designed so that developmentally disabled children and adults can have an outdoor camp experience. The recreational opportunities, horseback riding, the swimming, the cooking, & the relationships that are formed between the counselors and the campers is unique and special, and those bonds last for a lifetime. The number of smiles, grins, and giggles you hear as you walk through camp is almost startling. At a regular summer camp, you wouldn’t hear that much joy. It is like no other place that I’ve ever seen. We had a parent who came up to camp, and then we saw her crying at the end. She goes, You take such good care of my son. I never thought that this would ever be possible in this world. I thought I would be the only one. People come to camp when they’re six, seven years old, and they’re staying there until they’re 60, 70 years old. It’s their special place. Camp Loyaltown was a pre-existing summer camp. During the 1970s, the Camp Loyaltown Board, there was a connection made with Helen Kaplan of AHRC Nassau, and so they offered to enter into a partnership. My developmentally disabled sister, Tracy, was one of the first campers, and my parents helped form the Camp Loyaltown Committee. And what this group of people did, they were caregivers, they were parents, brothers and sisters. What they would do to raise money for camp has led to stories of legend. The Abramson family originally ran Camp Loyaltown with the Camp Loyaltown Board, and over the years, the capital structure there has evolved through fundraising and support from AHRC Foundation, the Camp Loyaltown Board, and the Raff family continued to work to improve and keep camp going, and over 50 years that has continued. The first year that Camp Loyaltown had equine therapy, they sent us pictures home of my sister up on a horse, and she was so happy, everybody in that picture is smiling. And I swear, I don’t know what a horse looks like when they’re smiling, but I think the horse was actually smiling too. When you give to something, you want to know that it’s made a difference. When you give to Camp Loyaltown, you are changing people’s lives. Camp has brought out sides of these children and adults that they didn’t even know they had. They go away to camp, and they realize that they can shine in a whole new way, and they can do all these different things that they never tried to do before. The fact that Camp has been bringing out all these new dimensions in these children and adults for 50 years, here’s to doing it for 500 more. Thinking about Camp Loyaltown’s reach over the last 50 years, & the number of people it has touched, that sense of comfort that the caregivers and the families get, 50 years of that almost is an unmeasurable benefit. A big part of AHRC’s vision is to educate the entire community in the fact that developmentally disabled people are not beneath society, to embrace these people & make them part of society at large. That’s what AHRC has been about, that’s what our movement has been about, and that’s what Camp has been about, & everybody in society should be able to embrace that. 

To learn more: https://www.ahrc.org