⛺ A Look Back at Summer Camp
5 Communications and Community Building Articles for Year Long Inspiration
This week, I’m wrapping up The Switchboard’s Summer Camp with a look back at the activities, conversations and lessons learned about the ways we communicate and connect at work. Together, we explored storytelling, nature, play, sports and art as enrichment experiences to hopefully sharpen skills, spark ideas and inspire your professional path.
This summer, I hope you were able to sit back, relax, read, discuss, and engage along with a side of s’mores. Consider bringing this camp spirit with you all year long. I’d love to know what resonated most — or least — reply to this edition with your thoughts or comment below.
A Look Back At Summer Camp
🏕️ 1. Campfire Stories
6 Ways to Share Employee Stories & Build Community
Begin by empowering and training your colleagues to tell powerful stories. Once you’ve created an internal guide for storytelling support, start gathering your work community for creative storytelling experiences inspired by the campfire. Below are six program ideas for recreating that campfire feeling:
🦋 The Moth: Themed Stories
🍫 Tiny Fireside Chats
🧪 Failure Stories
🧸 Show and Tell Sessions
🎤 TEDx Talks
㊗️ PechaKucha Presentations
From the Article:
Show and Tell Sessions: The idea comes from a kindergarten tradition of sharing a meaningful object or photograph but can be expanded in creative directions to show making chocolate as a hobby, publishing a small local community newspaper, teaching gardening as a hobby, creating sculpture art for inspiration and more employee passions.
🌸 2. Nature At Work
5 ways to bring Summer Camp's outdoor spirit to work culture
Summer camp started because of the transformational power of the outdoors for children living in cities. Scientific research has confirmed there’s a positive impact of nature on health for all ages. In Fast Company, Dr. Srini Pillay wrote about “How to use the benefit of nature to reduce anxiety at work.” Here are 5 ways to bring that outdoor camp feeling to work culture:
🌤️ Count Clouds
🌌 Look at the Stars
🌳 Take Nature Walks
🐦 Go Bird Watching
🪨 🌱 Plant a (Rock) Garden
From the Article:
The sounds of birds singing can spark feelings of cheerfulness or serenity. For more than a decade, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has made it simpler for anyone to become a birder without binoculars. At the touch of a button, a field guide is at your fingertips with the Merlin Bird app which identifies birds by their photographs and songs.
🪀 3. A Summer Camp Conversation
Michelle Lee: Partner & Managing Director, Play Lab at IDEO
🧸 What We Can Learn from Kids and Toys to Transform Work
🪢 The Power of Creating Rituals with our Colleagues
🚌 Why We Should Foster Cultures of Learning
From the Interview:
Play is the overlap of psychological safety, agency and joy. Psychological safety opens the door and enables you to feel comfortable in a state of play, agency gives you a role to play and joy keeps you engaged and inspired over time.
To create psychological safety, it’s important to create an environment where we're really listening and paying attention to each other — listening to what’s said and not said, demonstrating real empathy and vulnerability at all levels and treating people with respect. If we can do that, we have the ability to level the playing field, enabling people to show up in a shared space where everyone feels at ease.
⚾ 4. Go The Extra Mile with Sports Lessons
8 Inspirational Stories for Communications and Culture
Sports are popular summer camp activities. Wherever they are played, these classic games can teach about communicating and connecting at work and beyond. Here are eight sports lessons learned on and off the field, court and lane:
🏀 Be Kind
🏈 Own The Reaction
🎳 Be Yourself
⚾ Go The Extra Mile
🏎️ Focus on the Details
⏱️ Manage The Clock
⚾ Foster Magical Moments
🏀 Communicate and Trust your Teammates
From the Article:
This is a lesson in sportsmanship that’s relevant on and off the court. The story starts with a Texas high school basketball team in 2013. Student Team Manager, Mitchell Marcus, was devoted to the sport and the team. At the last game of the season, Coach Morales asked Mitchell to put on a jersey and surprised him — sending him onto the court for his game debut.
While his teammates passed the ball to him multiple times, Mitchell wasn’t able to make a basket. But, in the final seconds of the game, a player from the opposing team, Jonathon Montanez, passed Mitchell the ball, and Mitchell finally scored!
5.🎨 Create an Arts and Crafts Ritual at Work
Five Activities for Building Community Through Creativity
There’s more to a paintbrush than the strokes it creates on a canvas — art teaches children decision-making, supports innovation and correlates with improved performance, according to a report by PBS Kids. Here are a few activities to consider:
🌌 Create Dreamcatchers
🧘 Meditate with Watercolors
🧩 Design a Puzzle
🪨 Draw Cave Paintings
🖍️ Color in a Coloring Book
From the Article:
A Native American tradition, this hoop symbolizing the sun has traditionally been made from a willow tree. It’s adorned with feathers and beads to warn off evil spirits when you sleep and let good dreams through. This artifact originated with the Ojibwe people but was adopted by other nations. Learn how to create a dreamcatcher. While crafting your dreamcatcher, consider connecting this art project to a conversation about the power of sleep. There are many articles, books and talks to spark the discussion, including Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
Here’s to that happy camp feeling all year long. I’ll see you in September! Next week, I’m taking a publishing vacation. Thank you for reading The Switchboard. ☎️ Every edition is personally written by me — Julia Levy. Learn more about why I write. Review the Index of past posts.
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