Hi everyone!

We’re fresh off of 2 incredible weeks of Sr. High camp, and want to extend a HUGE thanks to everyone who attended! We’ve had a week to regroup, and today kicks off our first ever Jr. High week! We’re excited! Be in prayer that all goes well!

Every year at WorkcampNE, some funny, crazy videos are shown during the evening worship to excite the camp. These videos a lot of times relate to our theme and the campers get quite a laugh out of them. This year, we are asking you to participate in our video project by printing out the attachment. The attachment is called “Send Me Super” and is based on the beloved children’s book Flat Stanley.

The Flat Stanley Project grew out of a classic children’s book by the same name, written by Jeff Brown. In the story, Stanley, a regular boy, is squashed flat by a falling bulletin board. On the bright side, he discovers that his parents can slip him into an envelope and mail him to visit friends in faraway places. In real life, students in thousands of classrooms around the world participate in the Flat Stanley Project. Each class makes its own cardboard flat friend and creates a life story for him. Then, through e-mail or regular mail, students send their friend on vacation with classmates in other countries. When a flat visitor arrives, host children treat him as an honored guest. They take him along on outings, snap travel photos, and keep a journal of their activities and meals, giving insight into life in their part of the world.

So here’s what we need you to do: copy and paste the “Send Me Super” you’ll see below, and print him out. Cut him out, bring him around town in your local neighborhood, and make a video with him. Over the course of the next week, show us some of the sites with him or have him participate in your volunteer work. Include members from your youth group, your church, and your community.

Videos should be short segments that we can piece together through editing. Please keep video lengths between :30 and 2:00 minutes each. Send as many segments as you can. All files should be in either .avi or .wmv format. (The average digital camera records in .avi and is easiest to edit). When you’re done recording, e-mail us back at edadams146@gmail.com. Include your files, your name, your church, and which week you will be attending Workcamp. All video segments are due back to us by Wednesday, July 7th.

We hope you have as much fun with this project as we are and we are looking forward to seeing you at camp!

Can you believe we’re only 11 days away from camp again? We’re extremely excited to see old friends, meet new people, and have a blast while making a huge difference in Kennebunk! We’ve been busy getting all of our sites together, now we have to pack our tool bins, and get ready to go!

workcampNE is excited to announce that Marc and Jess Therrien have been added as full-time workcamp staff. As veterans of ministry and many camps, we look forward to their ideas and abilities to help grow camp even more! They will assume various roles as camp requires, with their “official” titles being Programming Director (Marc), and Administrative Coordinator (Jess).

In other news, Marc and Jess got into town just in time to tag along on the last few of the site assessments, bringing the total of prospective resident’s to around 35! Be in prayer that we can help as many as possible and show them we are the hands and feet of Christ.

We are lining up the schools for hosting our camps. Our Sr. High will be hosted by The Middle School of the Kennebunks and the Jr. High will be hosted by Sunapee Middle High School. We are already planning for 2011 and 2012. Lebanon High School is considering hosting our Sr. High camps next year.

We are also busy contacting Youth Leaders, inviting them to join us so that together we are impacting New England for Christ! What better way to aid communities within our local Northeastern area while growing the faith of your students. You and your students will cultivate relationships with the residents, fellow workers and other leaders from around North America. And speaking of leadership, raising leaders is a commitment of workcampNE. We have and continue to work with returning campers to help them develop from today’s go-to persons into tomorrows leaders. Working for a week that will last a lifetime, their lives and the lives of those they touch will be enriched, impacted forever. Pass the word along; join us at workcampNE and partner with us in our labor of love to live out God’s G.R.A.C.E. - – - Growing faith, Raising leaders, Aiding communities, Cultivating relationships, Enriching lives.

We met up with lots of old friends which is always a blessing, and were able to have lunch/dinner with a few and we made many more new friends also. The three conferences had a combined attendance of about 10,000 individuals with the Missionary convention being the largest. We had provided iPod Touches as give-aways if you registered at our booth – we have followed up with an email “thank you,” for stopping by to see us. A couple of our winners are pictured here, along with our good friends the Tollers. We are hopeful to have some new groups join us this summer or next based on some of our conversations.

Hello all. We are back from a whirlwind tour of Cincinnati, Hershey and Peoria – meeting new friends and catching up with old. We had a very good time and now it’s time to dig out and catch up. We’ll update this news site late this week… but what I can say for now is our God is GREAT!

Blessings, Ken

Youth Specialties – National Youth Workers Convention 2009
Cincinnati, OH
October 30 to November 2

If you are attending the convention or in the Cincinnati area and are planning to stop by for a day (or two) c’mon by and say “hello!” We will be in the exhibit hall manning BOOTH 321

Here is our schedule when we’ll be there:
Friday, 9:00 am – 1:00 pm, 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm
Saturday, 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
Sunday, 12:00 pm – 4:00pm

While your visiting, register for one of our 3 iPod Touch (8GB) give-aways!

Hope to see you there!

Aware of the importance of not only developing skilled hockey players, the MHG and Junior Pirates staff have long recognized the value in developing the whole individual, including building character and commitment. workcampNE brings like values to the partnership by providing the same reinforcement off the ice as the MHG/PJP provides on the ice. Staff, players, residents of the community all come out on top in this win-win relationship. Players build a deck or two, comradery with one another, friendships with the community. What better way to start of a new season!

Here’s how our staff contributed…

Julie graciously offered her help in any way she could…little did she know it would entail making more than 75 sandwiches, carrying them home for the night and then driving them up to Maine very early on Sunday morning where her real adventure began! Seems like two of the crew leaders (supplied by Maine Hockey Group) decided to be “no shows” which put Julie first out in the field as a crew leader and then back at camp as head chef for the day! Thank goodness Julie was there – we literally could not have pulled off Sunday’s work without her. What a good sport – thanks, Julie!

Mark Belley volunteered his truck for the weekend’s usage. Came in hugely handy in transporting ladders, etc. to and from sites and then all the gear home on Monday after camp rolled up. Thank you, Mark!

Kelly Fraser and Marcia ended up leading a crew on a site that entailed metal roofing and rebuilding a deck. Wow! When asked if they would like a picture of their deck, Marcia quickly said, “No!” Okay, it may not have been pretty, but it was sturdy, functional and a 100% better than what was there originally. Both Kelly and Marcia have new admiration for what we ask our crew leaders to do at workcampNE during the summer! No children were harmed in the making of the deck…although it came close a couple of times!

Me, you may ask? I ended up crew leading a site where lots of staining, painting and demolition took place! We demo’d two full size sheds for a gent we’d worked for when we stayed in Kennebunk a few years back. Players loved hacking, smashing (but not so much the hauling) of the two dismantled sheds. I loved being back out on a crew and although the players are a bit rougher around the edges than our usual camp kids, it was a blast working with them once again.

Then because of all the rain (which is why we added the October dates to begin with), Super/Joanna, Kevin Hodge, Kelly Fraser, Marcia and I head back up this past weekend, October 10^th one more time to finish painting a house that we could only scrape and repair a few clapboards last weekend. We were able to knock off the remaining work in a  ½ day and keep our reputation for “not leaving a job undone.” Thanks to this gang for pitching in!