Nonprofit has run 33 disaster camps in 10 states since 2021
One week after wildfires forced the evacuation of 60,000 people from the Spokane, Washington area, Mareesha Backman handed her youngest son over to a stranger — a volunteer at a free day camp organized by Spokane Public Schools — and took what she described as her first deep breath of relief. The wildfires, which began in early August, destroyed an estimated 920 structures and left 169 students and 38 staff members in Spokane Public Schools homeless, according to the district.
The figure rose once the much smaller Nine Mile Falls school district, in a semi-rural wooded area northwest of the city, reported that 20 additional students had lost their homes. Nine Mile Falls Superintendent Jeff Baerwald, whose own district was affected, said every child there had been touched by the fire in some way.
Within a day of the fire, Spokane Public Schools had begun collaborating with national nonprofits, local churches, and small businesses to offer free day camps to any affected family. The district opened one of its high schools as a resource center providing donated food, toiletries, and help filing insurance claims, while school staff supervised children in the auditorium and gym and the district’s summer lunch program supplied meals.
Laurie Morrison, Spokane Public Schools’ chief academic officer, said the response was rooted in professional obligation. “As an educator, I feel it’s our moral imperative,” she said. “When our students and their families are facing unimaginable devastation, we stand in the gap to offer even the slightest ease to their burden and to support their wellbeing. It’s an easy answer to, ‘If not you, then who?’”
Within a few days, Spokane Public Schools was joined by Project:Camp, a national nonprofit whose entire mission is setting up free day camps in the wake of disasters. Cofounder Mikey Latner said the organization has mounted 33 post-disaster camps in 10 states since 2021, hopscotching from Hurricane Ian in Florida to the Maui and Los Angeles wildfires to tornadoes in Kentucky.
Baerwald said Project:Camp reached out to him surprisingly quickly. “I very jokingly, positively call them ambulance chasers for the good,” he said. In Spokane, the group served hundreds of children at two locations over three weeks before packing up so school buildings could be readied for the start of the semester.
On a hot, dry Monday morning two weeks after the fire, more than 100 children checked in for the day at Lake Spokane Elementary, Project:Camp’s second location. While older children played outside, the younger kids sat cross-legged in the gym watching a puppet show featuring Abby Cadabby, the pink-haired fairy from Sesame Street, performed by Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, who had flown out from New York City. The schedule also included laser tag, petting therapy dogs, and feeding live buffalo.
For the Backman family — a family of seven who spent nine days evacuated, first on a Christmas tree farm in Idaho in a travel trailer with no working refrigerator, running water, or toilet — the camp became a turning point. Backman described the trailer as “just living in a hot box. And out in the smoke and the heat most of the day.” The children regressed, she said, clinging, fighting, and waking with night terrors.
It was at a Project:Camp gratitude circle, Backman said, that her 7-year-old son Bennett — slight, flaxen blond, and medically fragile with a feeding tube — first voiced what had happened to him. “Well, we just did this thankfulness circle, and I told them I was just glad I didn’t die in the fires,” she recalled him saying. Her response was immediate: “My brain went, ‘Oh my gosh, my children are traumatized.’”
Backman said the camp’s trauma-informed approach helped her family begin processing what they had been through. “Going to camp meant they were surrounded by adults who a) love kids and b) brought in this kind of trauma-informed practice,” she said. Latner said the camp is not designed as therapy in the clinical sense — staff refer children to local clinicians when appropriate — but draws on the science of adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, with one principle being “returning kids to a sense of safety and normalcy and routine, reestablishing relationships.”
Sarah Dryden-Peterson, who researches refugee education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, framed the underlying practice as “education in emergencies” — a discipline with origins in international humanitarian aid that is increasingly relevant in the United States as climate change drives more destructive weather.
The model’s effectiveness depends on pairing national resources with local knowledge. Project:Camp can fly in and set up a camp with no more than two plastic totes of basic supplies, with the rest coming from community donations. Latner said getting parents to trust them with their children requires collaboration with familiar institutions: schools, churches, World Central Kitchen, the Red Cross, the YMCA, and the Boys & Girls Clubs. Baerwald said the rural community’s acceptance of outside help hinged on teaming up with local churches, noting that “outsiders aren’t always going to be embraced.”
By Day 18 after the fire, Project:Camp’s team was packing up and considering its next stop — possibly a tropical storm in Hawaii or a flood in Indiana. In Spokane, local organizations were turning to the longer-term question of how to support children through recovery. Looking at the burn scar he passes each day, Baerwald said he hoped the community would regenerate alongside the landscape. “We’ll start seeing new growth come back,” he said, “but that will take some time. That will also be part of the healing process.”
The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, produced the original reporting on which this article is based.