About Us
Effective Child Development Through Outdoor Play
Camp Kawnipi is dedicated to offering programs that allow children to play, socialize and learn in a safe and encouraging environment. Our founder, Sherry O’Keefe, a retired educator spent 35 years in public education. She has a rich history of working with children, inside and outside of the traditional classroom, having served as residential camp staff/wilderness guide, elementary special education teacher and junior high school counselor. Connecting, developing relationships, supporting and listening have been the driving force in her professional and personal life. Sherry believes that every child has limitless potential.
Sherry managed to earn a PhD, but, believes to her core, that learning begins through experience, and is grown through trial and error. Children, our most precious resource, by their very nature, are experiential learners, craving activity and interaction with their environment. It is important and valuable to attain educational goals inside a classroom; however, the place where these skills begin, blossom, grow and bloom is in our first world - the natural world. Come explore outside with us!
Humble Beginnings
The trees growing up the hillside at Camp Kawnipi were planted by design. Thirty-five years ago, a newly married couple purchased 10 acres of land that had been a small horse farm, there was a hay field and round pen in the front, and the back consisted of pasture for the horses, with little other than dirt for ground cover. Mike, had a vision, a vision of a forest that came up to the top of the hillside, a forest that he would eventually be able to see from the windows in his house, and a forest that he knew should be grown. Mike planted several hundred bare-root saplings, and the result is the forest on the hillside known as Camp Kawnipi. While Sherry and Mike own the property that is Camp Kawnipi, they cannot own the earth and the spirit that lies within. It is their wish to share their little piece of the earth with the larger community, allowing all who gather here opportunity to connect and be fulfilled.
Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.
Henry Beston
Giving Kids What Was Lost
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected children in ways that we cannot accurately assess. Children need to socialize, interact, explore and imagine. Outside, in a natural environment, is a perfect place for kids to be kids. It is safe, it is healthy, it is what is needed for children today.