Theme Camps are groups of SOAK participants who come together to provide a service, education, entertainment, art, or other creative planned or spontaneous interactive experience for everyone at SOAK.
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A Theme Camp is an interactive camp. Theme Camps are groups of SOAK participants who come together to provide a service, education, entertainment, art, or other creative planned or spontaneous interactive experience for everyone at SOAK. This interactivity can be truly anything, as long as it happens within your camp!
Theme Camps are home to groups of anywhere from 3 to 60+ people.
Theme Camp Criteria:
Camps should be visually stimulating, having an inviting frontage, and welcoming camp layout.
Camps must be interactive. They should include activities, happenings or offerings within their camps and they must be available to the SOAK community. The amount of interactive offerings in a camp varies by size — the bigger the camp, the more your camp should offer.
Camps are encouraged to include interactivity that is different or unique. This can include putting your camp’s creative spin on a commonly found offering to make it more interesting or providing something that can only be experienced at SOAK.
Camps are encouraged to think outside the box. Interactivity may be scheduled/planned or spontaneous. Informal and spontaneous happenings that encourage immediacy, personal interactions, and community connections, especially around your neighbors, should be mentioned in your application.
Camps are encouraged to remember that bigger/more is not always better. Doing something well is much preferred rather than adding something just to add more to your application.
Camps are encouraged to make sure that every camper contributes to their interactive offerings. This ensures that a camp’s offerings increase proportionally as its population does, which is key to receiving placement.
Camps are encouraged to create interactive experiences that clearly welcome other participants to join in the experience.
Active interactivity — interactivity that requires some or all of the camp’s population to take an active role in its execution — is weighed heavier than passive interactivity — interactivity that requires no one in the camp to be present for a participant to interact with it. This doesn’t mean toss out your passive interactivity. Unique and creative passive interactivity is fully welcome and appreciated and adds to SOAK!
As we said in the beginning, this isn’t black and white, so this list is not exhaustive. However, this will give you as a camp leader a good idea of what it takes to remain in good standing. The vast majority of SOAK camps are in good standing after the event each year. Keep showing up and being interactive, culturally aligned, neighborly, responsive, amazing citizens of SOAK who leave no trace! Thank you to everyone who has been and continues to do it oh-so right.
Thank you for creating a Theme Camp for SOAK!
You can find the Camp Placement Application on the SOAK Forms page here!