Empowering Young Girls to Be Leaders One Seed at a Time

This month, The Saturday Club partnered with Camp Sojourner, Girls’ Leadership Camp — an organization we discovered through the Movement Alliance Project. Camp Sojourner is a non-profit program dedicated to offering young girls an opportunity to learn and grow as leaders in their own lives and become ‘agents of change’ in their communities. This mission aligns so well with The Saturday Club’s, which has dedicated itself to empowering women to lift one another, while providing aid to our local community, for the last 135 years.

While planning for an interactive way to support the girls in this program, The Saturday Club had the opportunity to connect with the Camp founder and director, Alisha Berry, who has been working tirelessly with her team to create year-round opportunities for the ‘campers’ to engage with one another, their board of directors, teen advisory council and the camp program coordinators and counselors. Alisha shared that they have been working on mini projects to keep the girls connected and engaged with one another throughout the pandemic.

With this in mind, The Saturday Club prepared a small collection drive to gather supplies to create interactive take-home kits for the Camp Sojourner girls to work on together via video calls over the next month. The first one is individually packaged make-at-home s’mores kits and the second is mini herb gardening kits.

While The Saturday Club member volunteers gathered to assemble these fun kits for the Camp Sojourner girls, we had the opportunity to hear from Alisha about how she came up with the concept of Camp Sojourner through a life-long passion for education, women empowerment and creating an authentic summer camp experience for girls from the city of Philadelphia.

Alisha shared how their program has taken flight over the last few years, evolving this past year especially, to adapt to the changing climate that has limited their ability to host the traditional summer camp. In a traditional year the Camp Sojourner experience features a bus ride to a rustic summer camp in the woods, bunk beds, camp fires, canoeing, archery and crafts. Camp is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Camp Sojourner and the impact that the one week summer camp experience affords the 8 to 21 year old girls in their program.

Listening to Alisha Berry speak, we loved learning about the program’s year-round efforts (outside of the one week summer camp) to engage the Camp Sojourner girls from gardening projects at Bartram’s Garden to female peer mentorship through their college leadership team and other great on-going efforts within the program.

We can’t wait to hear how the girls liked our s’mores and gardening kits and to see the creative planning that the Camp Sojourner team comes up with for their 2021 camp experience!

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