“I didn’t like camp at first because I was homesick a little bit and also just coming off of a bone marrow transplant,” McKenna Crews remembered. “It was all just kind of new.”
Her story with Camp Joy began in 2009, when she and her sister attended Camp N’Joy It All, a specialty camp for children impacted by hematology and oncology diagnoses. McKenna was adjusting to life after a bone marrow transplant, and her first experience at camp was not immediately easy.
Her parents encouraged her to keep coming back. Slowly, something changed.
McKenna began making friends, including Gracie, a fellow camper who remains one of her best friends today. Camp became a place where she could connect with other children who understood parts of her experience. Then she met a counselor named Callie Talbot.
Callie had once attended the same specialty camp and had experienced cancer herself. For McKenna, seeing an adult who understood what she had been through opened a new idea of what her own future could look like.
“Being able to connect with an adult who just shared the same values and experiences that I did really shifted what camp does for people,” McKenna said.
As she describes it, Camp Joy went from being fun to being “transformational.”
From Camper to Leader
That transformation didn’t stop when her week of camp ended.
As a teenager, one of McKenna’s counselors noticed something in her. She told McKenna that she had leadership skills and encouraged her to apply for Camp Joy’s Counselor in Training program.
McKenna took that encouragement seriously.
A Facebook memory she recently shared captures just how much the opportunity meant to her. She remembered saving the expected application date on her calendar and counting down the days until she could apply.
She eventually became a Counselor in Training, learning not only how to lead activities, but how to shift her perspective from being the camper receiving the experience to the person responsible for creating it for someone else.
In 2016, McKenna returned as a junior counselor. She later became a senior counselor and then a unit leader. During her final summer, she led the Counselor in Training program herself, passing along the lessons that had helped shape her own path.
Along the way, Camp Joy was teaching her something bigger about leadership.
McKenna remembers being asked to set goals before activities and reflect afterward. How did it feel to reach your goal? What happened if you didn’t? What could you try differently next time?
Those conversations showed her that an experience could be fun while also being intentionally designed to help someone grow.
“I’m not just coming and making goop to make goop,” she explained. “I’m making goop to learn a skill.”
Those lessons followed her beyond Camp Joy. McKenna says she has incorporated the same intentional approach into her professional practice, thinking carefully about how experiences begin, how they end and, most importantly, what participants can take home with them.
Building a Career Around Camp
For McKenna, the path that started at Camp Joy eventually became a career.
She studied education, became a teacher and later returned to her alma mater, Ball State University, where she managed a Lilly Endowment-funded program that gave students from low-income backgrounds an opportunity to experience college life.
That work led her deeper into the camp profession and eventually to the American Camp Association. Today, McKenna works as a Grants and Special Projects Manager, connecting with camp professionals across Indiana and throughout the country to help them think about program quality, structure and how to create stronger experiences for young people.
Yet even as her reach has expanded, McKenna sees a direct line back to the place where it started.
“The experiences that I had at Camp Joy shaped me and formed me into not only the human being that I am today, but the professional that I am today,” she said.
Coming Back
When McKenna had volunteer days available through her job, deciding where to spend them was easy.
She came back to Camp Joy.
Years after her last summer on staff, McKenna returned to Camp Joy this summer as a volunteer. Her last visit had been in March 2020, but walking back onto camp years later felt familiar almost immediately.
During her volunteer days, McKenna spent time with a cabin of nine-year-old boys. Within an hour, she said, she knew their names and was building relationships with them.
“It’s where I belong,” she said. “It was like coming home.”
The timing made her return even more meaningful. Camp N’Joy It All was happening while she was there, bringing her story full circle.
One camper in particular was struggling with homesickness. McKenna sat with him and asked what he missed about home. Then they looked at what was still ahead at camp, including a trip to the pool he was excited about.
McKenna told him that she missed her own two-year-old son while she was away, too. Together, they decided they could help each other make it through the rest of the week until they both returned home to the people they loved.
It was a small interaction, but it reflected the same kind of care McKenna remembers receiving when she was a camper: acknowledging what a child is feeling while helping them see what might be possible if they keep going.
More than a decade earlier, someone at Camp Joy had looked at McKenna and seen a leader before she fully knew what that could mean for her life.
This summer, she returned with the opportunity to be that person for someone else.
Her career may have taken her beyond Camp Joy’s 317 acres, but the lessons she learned here continue to show up in the way she works, leads and connects with young people.
After years spent helping camps create meaningful experiences for children across the country, McKenna can sum up what she believes in with just a few words:
“Every kid deserves camp.”
For McKenna, that’s more than a belief. It’s a story she has lived herself.
