LAST SUMMER I SENT MYSELF TO CAMP.
(I'm Karen...Karen Ward...Chief Curiosity Officer at Curiosity Inc. + Curiosity Global. Pleasure to meet you!)
In July of 2019, after an intense six months of client work, I decided to take the month of August off.
This felt like a delicious plan until the end of July approached and I started to worry about slipping into a go-nowhere-do-nothing-all-Netflix-all-the-time coma never to be heard from again.
At the same time, many of my friends had kids coming home from or heading off to summer camp and I thought, “hey, I wanna go to summer camp!”
(I never went to camp as a kid. I spent my early childhood living on a farm and during the summer we prowled around the fields, swung from trees and built forts in the barn.)
I wasn't too keen on the kind of summer camp that requires sleeping in bunk beds, sharing bathrooms and eating cafeteria food.
I was more interested in the kind of summer camp I could enjoy while sleeping in my own bed, showering in my own bathroom and eating whatever I wanted.
#becausegrownasswoman
I was going to design my own summer camp.
I started pouring through event and experience listings on various web platforms, combed through meet-ups in Montreal and Toronto and signed up for everything I’d always been curious about, wanted to learn how to do, or just looked weird and worth exploring.
By the end of the month I had learned how to make Montreal-style bagels, authentic chai and concrete planters. I’d gone to see Michael Buble, P!nk and Bryan Adams in concert. I'd screen-printed and hand-stitched my own notebooks, thrown axes, and learned how to embroider. I went on a ghost walk in Old Montreal and took a food tour of Chinatown. I went forest bathing on Mont-Royal and kayaking on the St. Lawrence river. And I spent a lot of time wandering around neighbourhoods I didn’t know very well, just for the pleasure of it.
It was one of the best summer months of my adult life.
By the end of the month I was inspired, energized, brimming with confidence (I made Montreal-style bagels, from scratch, by myself, more than once!) and bursting with creative energy.
While I was summer camping around, I shared pictures from my adventures on social media and the response was overwhelming.
People wanted to know what I was doing, if could they sign up, and would I be organizing Curiosity Summer Camp for other grown-ups?!?
I hadn’t planned to organize anything beyond my own summer camp experience.
But it's hard to ignore a response like that so I posted a short survey asking my community why they were so interested in my self-designed Curiosity Summer Camp.
And this is what they said: