Amal was already out the door when she suddenly turned around and ran back inside.
Her mom had arrived to pick her up from summer camp, but she wasn’t quite ready to leave.
Amal was one of more than half of this summer’s campers who returned after attending last year. On our first day back, the room filled with hugs, huge smiles and “I missed you!”
But this isn’t an ordinary summer camp.
A picture of me ready to welcome campers. Photo courtesy of Olive Community Services
Here, the camp counselors are over 65, and the campers are children and teens.
The Intergenerational Summer Camp, a collaboration between my club, Golden Connections, and the nonprofit Olive Community Services, brings older and younger generations together twice a week throughout July in Fullerton, California. Older adults lead activities and share skills like cooking, sewing, gardening and even ironing, while teen volunteers from Golden Connections help coordinate the camp and work alongside the younger campers.
In media coverage, the program has affectionately been dubbed “Grandma Summer Camp.” But after spending two summers helping run it, I’ve found that what happens here goes far beyond grandparents teaching kids traditional skills.
As the founder of Golden Connections, I help coordinate our older adult camp leaders and support them as they teach. I also help welcome campers, hand out their badges and organize activities with our teen volunteers before each day’s lesson begins.
Soon into the first year I started noticing that the actual lessons weren’t always the most interesting part.
By the second week, kids weren’t only approaching the older adults when they needed help sewing or cooking. They were staying afterward to talk.
Narmeen Ramjan teaching campers how to fry safely. Photo Courtesy of Olive Community Services
They shared funny stories about things happening at home. They talked about school getting harder. One older adult advised a camper who was overwhelmed with schoolwork to do the hardest assignments first, then reward herself with the easier ones.
Sometimes a friend would call another camper over, and instead of immediately leaving, the camper would say, “No, wait,” because she didn’t finish her conversation with the older camp counselor.
One day, a student asked me, “Is Ms. Shameem here today?”
Ms. Shameem is one of the “grandmas” of Grandma Summer Camp. By that point, she wasn’t just an adult who happened to be leading an activity. The kids knew her by name and noticed when she wasn’t there.
For 15-year-old volunteer Rahaf Abdalla, that feeling is part of what makes the camp different.
“It’s so welcoming,” she said. “You don’t feel there’s an age difference. It feels like being with friends.”
Another teen volunteer, Anoud Mezher, 15, had an even simpler review: “I love this camp. If I could volunteer here every day, I would!”
Anoud Mezher learning how to cut a mango for the first time. Photo Courtesy of Olive Community Services
The older adults feel that energy, too.
“The kids have so much energy, it’s infectious,” said Narmeen Ramjan, one of the camp’s older adult leaders. “It gives you positivity just being around them.”
I think that’s also where some of our assumptions about age start to fall apart.
We tend to think older adults are the ones with something to teach and younger people are there to learn. There is definitely a lot of teaching at Grandma Summer Camp. I watched older adults show kids how to sew, cook and work with their hands. But I also watched the relationship move in both directions. The kids brought energy, questions and stories of their own, and the older adults genuinely wanted to hear them.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t differences between generations. We learned that pretty quickly from a puzzle.
Our teen volunteers brought one out for the kids to work on while the older adults prepared for an activity. We thought it would be an easy way to keep everyone occupied.
We were wrong.
The kids lost interest almost immediately.
Instead of getting rid of it, we saved the puzzle for the older adults. One woman laughed and told us that if she started it, she wouldn’t be able to stop because she gets obsessed with finishing puzzles.
It became a funny reminder that intergenerational connection doesn’t mean pretending age differences don’t exist. Sometimes the challenge is figuring out which differences don’t matter and where there is enough in common to meet in the middle.
And there turned out to be plenty.
There were tote bags to make, recipes to cook, plants to pot and stories to tell. But by the end of camp, those activities often seemed more like the reason to sit down together than the point of being together.
Parents noticed it, too. At pickup on the last day, a parent stopped to tell us how much her daughter loved the camp and how excited she was to come each week. Before leaving, she had one question: Could she already put her daughter on the waitlist for next summer?
The campers weren’t ready for it to end. And truthfully, neither were we.
