Reaching Higher vs Reaching Higher Capital Campaign

You've heard us talking a lot about Reaching Higher lately.  Sometimes we talk about reaching higher as a camp by adding a grease trap, a week of camp or with new coffee mugs.  Sometimes we talk about Reaching Higher our Capital Campaign with the current focus being our two new staff homes.  While there is a difference, both are equally important.  Let me try to explain.

Our vision here at Evergreen is to see lives transformed by the power of Jesus.  We accomplish that through two main ways, our guest group ministry and our summer camp ministry.  Both ministries are equally important and we want to reach higher in everything we do to become more effective.

We reach higher at Evergreen with big things like adding another week of summer camp which allows us to impact more youth and children.  We reach higher with smaller things like new coffee mugs because drinking coffee at camp is a good way to build relationships.

As a camp we don't want to stagnate, we want to continue to improve in how we interact with our guests, our campers and our staff. We want to reach higher in everything we do.

Camp Evergreen is currently experiencing a challenge of not enough room.  If all our summer campers, all our summer staff and volunteers wanted to sit down in the dining hall at the same time, there wouldn't be enough room.

Our summer camps are filling faster every year and the reality is that before we hit this summer we will be turning many campers away.

Guest groups continue to grow and we are turning guest group after guest group away simply because we do not have the room.

This is where our Reaching Higher Capital Campaign comes in.  The current focus is on phase one - our two staff homes - that we need in order to keep up with our growing staff.  We also need a new lodge which includes a kitchen, dining hall, lodge rooms, meeting rooms and an Activity Centre.  By building a lodge we can increase both our guest group ministry and summer camp ministry.

Our desire and need is very simple.  We need more room so that more children and youth can have the opportunity to have their lives transformed by the power of Jesus every summer.  It can't get any simpler than that.  And that is the vision we are asking you to join.

What about the sea cans?  Those sea cans were full of donated showers and tubs that we can use for our new staff homes and the new lodge.  A big shout out to Paul who connected us with this opportunity.  Things got a little dicey as the truck was trying to turn around, but thankfully all is well and as a staff we were able to unload and organize the contents this morning.

A big thanks to Brian, Dustin, Kevin and Jesse (our fourth father/son volunteers) for joining us this week.  We had more plumber action, the electrician made his first appearance with his black sharpie (that three on the stud actually means a two way switch), the HVAC (furnace) is being installed and Scott and Brian had a bit of a ballet with the trusses as they moved them to the house from the parking lot.

Thanks again for your continued support.

Bob "Ranger" Kroeker
Executive Director