The City of Oakland’s flagship Town Camp opens on June 29 and this summer promises to be like none before. On the eve of opening, we sat down with Director of Oakland Parks, Recreation and Youth Development Nicholas Williams for an interview about how his team is balancing safety, fun and community connection this year.
Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, demonstrations for social justice and economic upheaval, Nicholas is focused on helping Oakland’s children find the space and support at Town Camp to feel joyful, valued and hopeful. He shared how Town Camp will adjust its offerings in light of public health restrictions, his hopes for program participants and his belief in the essential role parks can play for all Oaklanders. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
1. This has been a season of change in so many ways. To start, how is your team doing? What makes you proud of the way they’ve responded to these challenging times?
My team is doing well. I have to remind us that we’re all human and so everything that Oakland, California, the nation and the world is experiencing affects us as well. I’m extremely proud of my team for understanding and responding. I really believe that COVID-19 and the other events right now like protests against racial injustice made us step up and realize how essential we are to Oakland and, specifically, to the communities we serve.
Even in trying to figure out how we host summer camp, we all came to the realization that the community and our kids need us a lot. Kids haven’t had normal social interactions since late February. We realize how important it is to get kids out in the parks, give them the ability to run, play, grow, learn, read and expand their minds. I’m proud of how we have responded. We have really shown ourselves and the city how essential parks, recreation and youth development really is.
2. Town Camp is Oakland’s flagship summer program, growing bigger and better each year. How will camp be different this summer in light of COVID-19?
One of the goals of the Town Camp model is to bring kids together from all walks of life, from all parts of the city. We do that through cultural experiences and field trips, which have included up to 1,100 kids at once. Obviously, this year’s Town Camp has been pared down to a smaller offering. We will have two sessions, each 3 weeks, where normally Town Camp is 8 weeks culminating with a week at Feather River Camp.
This year we’ve created Neighborhood Town Camp. It’s basically pods, where we keep the kids in groups of 10 with counselors that stay with the same group for 3 weeks. That was the original suggestion for running camp from Alameda County and the CDC health guidelines. Since then, those restrictions have been reduced a bit, but we thought it was most prudent for us to stick to those original guidelines.
I have to give a shout out to my team of supervisors and recreation center directors for coming up with this plan. Town Camp was my brainchild, but what we’ve done is allowed an entire organization to find its piece of it and find a way to make the program successful for this year. Town Camp will be different, but we really feel like it will be successful.
We have the ability to see 500 kids in each session. Today, we have slightly over 300 registered for Session 1 and slightly under 300 for Session 2 – even in this season of COVID-19, that’s good for us. Typically, our parents tend not to register until the first day of camp and we’ve always had a policy not to turn anyone away. From a financial standpoint, we still hold true to that policy, but just from a numbers and capacity standpoint, parents should know that we can only house as many kids as we can serve safely in each recreation center.
3. Quality programming is the cornerstone of Town Camp. Even with public health restrictions in place, where do you hope campers will find joy this summer?
Well, the first way kids are going to find joy is by getting away from their parents, getting away from their brothers and sisters, and getting in their groove. What I hope is that within each pod of 10, these kids are going to become real familiar with each other. They’ll probably find a new best friend or a new distant cousin, someone to connect with. So, it’s about that. It’s about telling them they are valuable and instilling in them some hope.
These times have been dismal for adults, so they’ve probably been double or triple dismal for kids who don’t necessarily process or don’t have the same coping mechanisms that adults have. It’s about just being able to get out and get some fresh air. This is going to be a very physical, activity-filled Town Camp because we’re trying to keep the kids out in the fresh air as much as possible, not enclosed in classrooms.
The quality is still there. We’re still bringing in the best teachers, the best program providers to interact with the groups outside. We still did two weeks of training with our staff. We’re really excited about the opportunity to present Town Camp, even in this smaller model. I’m excited to see what the outcomes will be, to see some of our projects and what the groups put together themselves when they are at camp.
4. How has COVID-19 affected how you think about the role parks play in Oakland life and the need they fulfill for Oaklanders?
COVID season has created budget issues for the city, somewhere to the tune of $100 million. Obviously, there has been a lot of rhetoric around defunding the police and moving more monies into programming. That’s what we do as a profession – program and provide quality opportunities for everyone in Oakland, from tiny tots through our seniors.
A lot of what we do is program broadly around being social and being with other people. I think, at some point, restrictions will ease and people will begin to feel more comfortable around each other. We just want them to know that the parks are open and are a wonderful place to begin that process.
We’re also working on a lot of intergenerational programming right now, trying to create that bond between our senior citizens and our younger citizens. The wisdom of the seniors helps calm the little ones and the liveliness of the little ones helps the seniors.
Overall, we provide one of the most basic health opportunities, and that’s just to be outside. Get some fresh air, walk in the park, run, play, shoot some hoops, hit a baseball, kick a soccer ball. All of these things are absolutely at the top of what it takes to be a healthy individual. We want to provide vibrant opportunities for Oaklanders to be healthy and recreate.
5. Looking to the future, accreditation from the National Recreation and Park Association is on your radar. Why is accreditation important as you continue to build the department?
Accreditation is just a major validator of the work we do for two reasons. The first piece is making sure that we have our policies and procedures in place for anything that can happen within the system. This demonstrates that there is a way to do everything without allowing for so much subjectivity in the way that we respond. The second piece is that it demonstrates that the organization has gone through a rigorous review and that the way we present our programs, our facilities and our services is top notch.
All of this helps us with funding, both from private donors and from the city council. It helps us articulate that we continue to take these rigorous steps to prove that we are a professional organization abiding by national standards. And because of this, we shouldn’t be considered as “on the table” when budget issues come up. We should be deemed as essential as police or fire services or public works, because parks and recreation is a major service provider to Oakland citizens.
It’s also really important for us to get some national understanding and recognition for the work we’ve been doing in Oakland. I understand that Oakland, for a long time, was considered one of the top parks systems in the country for programming and the number of kids we served. Through budget cuts and other social issues that happened, Oakland has diminished, but we are trying to rise to the top again.
I must be honest that there’s a bit of competition in there, as well! We want to be the best at what we do. We’re Oakland, we’re proud of what we offer and we want the world to know that we have a high-class, high-quality parks system.
Thank you, Nicholas.