A resource hub to help camp leaders design sustainable, inclusive, and meaningful year-round staff engagement models.

✍️ Intro to Year-Round Development

Too often, camp staff are viewed as temporary labor—seasonal hires brought in to execute someone else’s vision. But what if we saw them as partners in creating that vision? What if we treated their time, insight, and creativity as long-term investments?

Year-round staff development builds:

• 🧭 Consistency – returning staff create a thread of culture, language, and tradition across summers.
• 🔄 Continuity – when summer ends, momentum doesn’t have to.
• ❤️ Loyalty – by extending purpose into the offseason, we turn jobs into journeys.

Whether you’re aiming to increase staff return rates, improve mid-level leadership, or simply carry the magic of camp further into the calendar, this approach can be a game-changer.

📖 Case Study: The Camelot Roundtable

At TIC Summer Camp, the Camelot Roundtable was born out of a simple realization: the people with the best ideas for improving camp were often the ones who had already lived it.

The Roundtable was:

• 🧠 A cohort of returning staff invited to participate in weekly winter/spring meetings
• 🛠 Tasked with real projects (restructuring schedules, rethinking curriculum, improving marketing)
• 💸 Paid per project or by stipend
• 🎖️ Given visibility and ownership over summer plans

🧠 Why Staff as Co-Designers Works

“We are moving from traditional feedback to collaborative design.”

— Camelot Roundtable Agenda