QUAPAW, Okla. –
A free summer camp serving kids across Green Country wrapped up this week. The Lissa James Summer Camp is exclusively for children who are clients of Grand Mental Health.
The camp is in Quapaw, about an hour and a half from Tulsa. It is designed to support childrens’ emotional and behavioral health needs, all while having fun.
Like most summer camps, this one is all about getting time outside and being active. But alongside activities like swimming, ziplining and painting, skills like communication, teamwork and leadership are being taught too.
“Well, ziplining is probably my favorite. It’s pretty fun,” 14-year-old Keagan Corbett from Salina, said.
This year marked his second year at camp.
“The first part is you got to walk across this bridge. There’s like three challenges. The first one is the bridge. It’s very wobbly. They hook you up to this, zipline thing, and then you walk across it and you hike up a mountain. Then you climb an outpost thing. Then you just zipline down,” he said.
“Seeing a kid that at the beginning of camp is isolated and alone, not happy, and by the end of the week, they have friends, and they’re really contributing to the group — that just does it for me,” Lissa James said.
James worked for GRAND Mental Health for 45 years and now works as a consultant. She helped start the camp in the 90s after seeing a need. Now it’s named after her. She recalls the success story of a young girl years ago.
“She came for four years to camp. And then she came for two years as a junior staff,” James remembered. “And then she went to college, got a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and we begged her to come to work for us, that her heart was DHS so she went to work for DHS.”
And as Keagan Corbett shared, camp is still having a positive impact on kids’ lives today. He said the week gave him a newfound sense of confidence.
“Well, it gives you this feeling in your chest like how you can do anything you want basically,” he said.
About 60 kids participated in the camp in Quapaw this week, located at Sky Ranch. The camp serves children from seven counties in our area, including Delaware, Mayes, Ottawa, Rogers, Tulsa and Washington counties. GRAND also offers the same camp in Ponca City, serving children living in counties surrounding that area.
If people would like to support the camp, they can donate directly to GRAND by clicking here or make a purchase from the camp’s Amazon wish list here.