So I hear you need volunteer leaders? Committee members? Financial Partners? This may surprise you, but in the Area Director II job description there’s one little sentence that speaks explicitly to cultivating a volunteer pipeline:
“Provide quality summer staff, work crew, and adult guests for summer camps.”
I’d like to focus on that last part, because it honestly gets very little attention or love – adult guests for summer camp. Interestingly, it’s the only time the word “adult” is used in the entire job description, although there are other more familiar words that allude to these kids with wrinkles (volunteer leaders, team leaders, committee, partners, etc).
Let’s level here for a minute on something you and I both know – adult guest asks are the first ones to get dropped in a yearlong camping strategy. It feels different than asking a kid to join you at camp, although one might argue that the barriers look eerily similar (busyness/time, cost, misconceptions). But getting potential adult guests to say yes feels impossible. Why??
What if you, the local staff person, aren’t the right person to invite the adult guest? You’re probably 15 years younger than them. You haven’t had significant conversation beyond their kid’s involvement with YL. You spend an awful lot of time with their kid, and they still haven’t fully grasped how or why. You are an enigma to them, and your invitation for them to join you as an adult guest at a camp they’ve never heard of that their kid is also invited to is exceedingly confusing.
So maybe you shouldn’t be the person making the invitation. Maybe your job is the find the right person who should!
Enter the Adult Guest Host. The area MVP who will do your job for you!
The Adult Guest Host is the MVP on our adult recruitment team, in the same way that the volunteer leader is the MVP of the local area. Hosts should be people who are pursuing relational ministry opportunities with adults in the community, for the sake of pointing them to Jesus and encouraging personal growth and mission involvement. They should have a year-long camping strategy for their peers with the expectation that it will impact their local area in significant ways through people resources (time, talent, treasure).
We’ve put together an Adult Guest Program Toolbox resource for your area that speaks to:
The role of the Adult Guest Host
An area prayer strategy for pursuing and establishing an adult guest tradition
How to pursue adult guests
A Two-year adult guest camping strategy for your area
Download it, start praying and asking around about who your Adult Guest Host should be, then treat them like a volunteer leader filling a cabin. A cabin that happens to be for adults.
Written by: Kristy Clifford