The past year and a half have proven to be challenging in many ways. 

For the retreat and camp industry, like many restaurants and other hospitality services, it has been perilous. 

Many organizations in the hospitality industry were stretched thin, and some were closed altogether due to loss of business. 

At United Camps, Conferences & Retreats (UCCR) we have had the great fortune to keep all nine of the facilities we manage open. Through it all there has been an enormous learning curve about surviving in this profession over prolonged times of adversity. We have learned, we have stretched, and we have insights and lessons that we are taking with us as we move forward. 

We want to share with you, our valuable customers, a healthy dose of gratitude, as we have meandered and learned together during these times.

Lessons from UCCR 

We asked ourselves, “How will we adapt to a changing social network and modify practical expectations about people gathering together?” We met with our staff bi-weekly, and shared our challenges and lessons learned. Our west coast facilities shared solutions to the challenges with our midwestern and east coast facilities and vice versa. We came together as an organization and did the best that we could to keep this conversation alive. The unity helped us to get where we are today.  Here is what we learned. 

Lesson 1: 
Self-Contained Lodging 

One of the first things we learned is that self-contained lodging options prove to be a practical solution for many types of people and became a successful solution during these trying times. We have found that when our guests are prohibited from gathering or are limited to gathering in smaller groups of people than they typically do, having cottages or stand-alone lodging worked well. We quickly re-organized around this concept, to make our self-contained lodging ready for groups that would normally stay in our larger community lodging buildings. 

Lesson 2: 
Leveraging What Works 

When a small group or family can rent a self-contained cottage or lodge that has a kitchen to make all their own meals, the need for a larger on-site staff is reduced. We discovered that maintaining a full food service program requires more staff and without running a kitchen, we were able to reduce our staffing needs temporarily. Some of our nine camp and retreat centers have cottages and lodges with kitchens which were utilized by small groups or families. These facilities fared better during the pandemic than those that didn’t have smaller sized self-contained buildings with kitchens for guests to prepare their own meals. 

Lesson 3: 
Outsourcing Resources

Another tough aspect of the pandemic has been the lack of willing workers. This challenge has been felt in the service and retail industry across America. Finding seasonal or regular employees at some of our facilities has posed a new kind of challenge. Lifeguards, cooks, and retreat workers were among the most difficult positions to fill. Though this has been challenging, we at UCCR embrace challenges with a spirit of collaboration. Here is what we did: 

One of the advantages of the cooperative nature of UCCR’s non-profit organizational structure is that we have been able to share staff amongst all the facilities we manage. We send staff from California to Kansas to roll up their sleeves and help. This did help in some cases, yet a few of our camp and retreat centers were not able to provide the same quality of service that we had pre-pandemic though we did everything we could to reach toward normalcy. 

As with the majority of organizations in the hospitality industry, the unprecedented degree of the nation-wide staffing challenge caught us by surprise. 

Though we had been advertising summer jobs since winter of 2020, if we had truly realized by April that we would not be able to staff the sites as usual, we may have been able to come up with other strategies to account for the lack of staff. Instead, our dedicated existing staff worked above and beyond a typical busy summer to meet the needs of groups eager to be together at camp. During our busy summer season, our staff often goes weeks without a day off, but this year they worked longer days with double or triple the responsibilities. Though we are grateful for our amazing staff, we acknowledge that we were stretched thin, and in some cases, our guests felt that. 

Lesson 4 
Working with Program Leader Volunteers

We have seen the prized value of our guests' program volunteers. Most of our guests that come to our facilities to bring their programs are run by volunteers. This summer, many program volunteers were asked to go the extra mile to ensure participants were gathering in safe ways utilizing masks and social distancing. It was a lot to manage in addition to running group activities. We were there, we saw, and we appreciate all the effort volunteers made to go the extra mile. 

As we move forward, knowing that we will need to continue to practice some safety measures, we see that our guests groups leaders may need to continue to bring additional volunteers to continue to help manage these exceptional circumstances. 

At one of our facilities our on-site staff coordinated with the group leader and their volunteers to create a chain of responsibilities. Program participants would let their volunteers know if they needed something, who in turn let the group leader know. The group leader collected information from the volunteers then met with our staff each morning at 9:30am to go over the needs for the day. We found this to be valuable and will likely keep this new system in place. 

Lesson 5 
Partnering for New Safety Standards 

Though there may have been some initial anxiety about gathering this summer, our on-site staff and our guests group leaders took the safety precautions earnestly to ensure safety for all. We also found ourselves partnering with our guests to have valuable communication about new ways to work together. 

We learned that those treasured guests who return every year needed to work closely with us to make sure new safety measures and other concerns were addressed. We also needed to have conversations about dining, recreation and lodging as some of our regular practices were changed. We learned the importance of pausing, listening, reflecting, and communicating when something that has been the same for years was different this particular year. 

Lesson 6 
Adaptability and Flexibility Key Component 

The essential part of communication we learned is to maintain adaptability and flexibility. During these extraordinary times, our needs for adaptability and flexibility became as much a psychological necessity as a physical one. We found ourselves working with group leaders to adjust program schedules, mealtimes, and responding to requests for program leaders or volunteers more than usual.  

We hope and trust that as we work in partnership with our guests, group leaders and volunteers, that everyone is keeping the idea of adaptability and flexibility at heart as we work though this time together. 

We learn so much from arduous experiences.

We are reminded that changing times can hinder us.

We learned something else too, challenging times are an opportunity that with compassion and care we can come together and make it work. 

Challenging times can encourage us to be creative seekers of solutions that are practical and healthy for all involved. Increased communication, flexibility, and building stronger partnerships will serve all of us well as we strive toward collaboration.

May we move from surviving to thriving, together.

One thing is for certain, our motivation, our mission, and our passion has not wavered as we continue to provide beautiful places where lives are changed for the better.