Experience Camps

Experience Camps is a nonprofit that transforms the lives of grieving children through summer camp programs and innovative, year-round initiatives. Through compassion, connection, and play, we allow grieving children to embody a life full of hope and possibility. By amplifying their voices, we are creating a more grief-sensitive culture.

We transform the lives of grieving children through three pillars: 1) Camp: We provide young people with a week-long, no-cost overnight camp that is clinically-informed. Our camps provide a space where children can experience the joy of childhood while learning to navigate their feelings with others who have experienced grief firsthand. 2) Community: We meet children where they are - in their schools and communities, and on YouTube, TikTok, Minecraft, and other platforms - to offer innovative content and experiences that normalize their grief and build new pathways to grief support. 3) Culture: Every one of us will experience grief. We’re helping to build a more grief-sensitive society by amplifying the voices and insights of the young people we serve.

Since our founding in 2009, we have served thousands of grieving children and have spent more than 500,000 in-person hours helping them navigate their grief and develop the coping skills needed to live happy, healthy and productive lives.

Our clinically-informed program with a distinctive peer-to-peer model is designed to help kids rediscover childhood, develop coping skills, and establish bonds with others who understand what it’s like to lose someone so important to them. We interweave camp programming with deep expertise and clinical content. Over the past decade, we have honed programs grounded in modern grief theories such as the Dual Process Model and Continuing Bonds. Those models show that kids grieve by oscillating between confronting and avoiding loss, and our programs balance process and play.

Our program utilizes more than 40 masters-level clinicians, along with 500 carefully vetted, well-trained volunteers who support our campers with compassion and immeasurable amounts of fun.

We have expanded exponentially since our inception in 2009, with camper numbers growing from 27 to 1,200 and new programs continually being developed to reach campers beyond the weeks of camp.

90% of our campers report higher feelings of self-esteem and less loneliness in their grief after attending camp. Our data also shows an increase in self-esteem, coping skills and quality of relationships with each additional year a child attends camp. This is one of the key reasons why we offer children the opportunity to return to camp every year, and more than 85% of campers choose to do so, contributing to the depth of relationships, progression through developmental phases of grief, and leadership growth as campers move into their teen years.

Moving forward, Experience Camps will continue its strong commitment to camp while continuing to grow “beyond the bunk” and creating innovative, scalable virtual initiatives (like current investments in Minecraft and Roblox) with the potential to reach more of the millions of American children grieving the death of a close family member.