Hindu Summer Camps

[Pavan Outlaw]

Hinducommunities organize summer camps, which are part of the wider youth culture of the United States. Summer camps allow youth to learn about their Hindu backgrounds in engaging ways: performing pujas, practicing yoga, dance and music, doing sports, plays, and performances. Led by swamis, question and answer sessions are one of the central camp events. The Q&As provide opportunities for campers to ask questions and discuss stereotypes about their faith that they encounter among their non-Hindu peers.

Summer camps are part of the experience of youth culture in America. There are camps for tennis, for computer skills, for learning about Jewish heritage, and now for learning about Hinduism as well. In the summer of 1993, there were more than eighty Hindu summer camps in America. Some were sponsored by particular Hindu temples, such as the week-long camp of the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Pittsburgh that took place at Slippery Rock State College. The Hanuman Temple in Hempstead, Long Island hosted a Vedic Heritage camp. There were weekend camps such as the one sponsored by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in a state-park outside Houston or the family camp of the Chinmaya Mission at Endicott College outside Boston. There were both youth and family camps at Arsha Vidya Gurukulam in rural Pennsylvania, a retreat center located in a former Jewish camp in the Poconos and now a year-round facility for Hindu learning. And for college students, there were camps such as the one sponsored by the Hindu Students Council at Camp America in Ohio.

Registration for our 2024 summer camps is underway. We want to make sure you are aware that you can take advantage of our payment plans that make it easier to pay for camp by spreading the payments across several months. Space is already filling up so register today!

For a specifically Pagan camping experience, a family could attend a Pagan or Heathen camping festival. These can last from a weekend to a week or longer. Festivals vary in the programs offered specifically to children. Some are increasing their offerings as more families with children attend.

Another challenge is the cost: the cost to buy or renting land with the facilities for a summer camp; the high cost of insurance for taking care of minors without their parents on site; the cost of employees and volunteers to staff the camp and the cost to parents.

Cara Schulz is a journalist and author living in Minnesota with her husband and cat. She has previously written for PAGAN+politics, PNC-Minnesota, and Patheos. Her work has appeared in several books by Bibliotheca Alexandrina and she's the author of Martinis & Marshmallows: A Field Guide to Luxury Tent Camping and (Almost) Foolproof Mead Making. She loves red wine, camping, and has no tattoos.

Actually, the Reclaiming community here in Northern California has two, week-long summer camps that are family based. Not exactly a summer camp exclusively for kids, but pretty close. We also have a program called Teen Earth Magic which is exclusively for teens in our community. My children have attended both and I can tell you it is a a wonderful thing for a community to have available.

Summer camp was formative in my development as a Unitarian Universalist and held the roots of both my earlier Humanism and current Paganism, the common thread being in-your-face engagement with nature as it is.

We have a fantastic evening planned for the annual fundraiser on Saturday, September 30th, 2023. In addition to the beautiful and skilled Bharat Natyam dance rendition, it explores the subtle emotions between individuals who do not yet know each other. Sharing of snacks with other like minded people from Greater Boston area will provide an apt finally to the evening. See the poster above. Please help the youth publicize the event who are organizing it for an altruistic cause.

The Support-A-Child (SAC) program was started by VHPA in 1985. It provides education (up to high school), boarding, lodging, medical care and Samskara (values) to underprivileged children in India. Under this program, we have supported more than 1000 boys and girls all over India. To find out more and support a child, please visit www.supportachildusa.org.

Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), or World Hindu Council of America, is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and nourishing Hindu culture in America. We have several regional and national projects, including:

It has been a day of celebration of our ancient Hindu heritage, traditions, arts, culture, and food. With an average attendance of over 2500, this is a place where Hindu American families come together with their American counterparts to meet and enjoy authentic Indian music, songs, dances, and skits. Families enjoy sumptuous Indian food, including professionally-prepared traditional chai. Parents can get information about Bal-Vihars, summer-camps, yoga centers, conversational Sanskrit teaching programs and other events taking place around the Boston area. There are activities for children including mehndi, kite flying, and face painting. There are booths which sell Indian comic books, spiritual books, jewelry, clothes, CDs of bhajans/meditational practices, and decorative items not easily available elsewhere.

Swami Vivekananda Family Camp will be held August 11-August 18, 2024 at Camp Wa-Klo, Dublin, NH 03444 this year. This week-long residential Family Camp was held for almost three decades in Tolland, MA where families learnt about their Hindu culture, spend quality time together, and have fun with friends. For more information and to register, visit vhpafamilycamp.com.

Bal Vihar provides an opportunity for our children to discover their cultural bond with India and develop pride in their Hindu identity. It is a weekly (or bi-weekly) 2-3 hr program open to children 4 years and above. A sample agenda includes opening prayer, Surya Namaskar, yoga, games, geet/bhajans, Hindi class, storytelling, and closing prayer. We currently have 3 Massachusetts locations: Newton, Lexington, and Southborough. For more information, please contact:

Summer camps are no longer confined to options such as music, dance, yoga, fine arts, performing arts, swimming, sports, languages and theatre. Children [and parents] are spoilt for choice as organisers of summer camps come up with innovative, offbeat sessions. Educational institutions, individuals, coaching centres, cultural centres and the like have curated numerous activities for children in different age groups.

Hobby classes have been the mainstay of summer camps for years. Every year, new categories of activities are added to appeal to parents and children. Pottery has a lot of takers, so too do crochet and mural painting. Premier Office Equipment has cashed in on this interest and is holding Artventure 2024, a series of art and craft sessions, featuring eight artists and 18 art forms, which started on April 6 and ends on May 8.

The two-month programme has activities ranging from yoga, martial arts and cooking to theatre, puppetry, folk arts, travel, dance, music, literature and media production. At the end of the camp, full-fledged productions will be staged.

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Dr. Falcone, a Philadelphia native, began her love affair with anthropology as an undergraduate at New College of Florida (the state's tiny, eclectic Honors college). While working towards her MA in Development Anthropology from George Washington University, Jessica Falcone spent a year in India doing fieldwork on "engaged Buddhist" charitable works, and taking anthropology courses at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Subsequently, Dr. Falcone worked as a full-time researcher with the Pew Charitable Trust's "Religion and the New Immigrants" project to explore Hindu and Sikh American religious and civic life through sustained participant observation work.

In 2010, Jessica Falcone graduated with a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University. Her dissertation project, "Waiting for Maitreya: Of Gifting Statues, Hopeful Presents and the Future Tense in FPMT's Transnational Tibetan Buddhism," was a cultural biography of a 500-foot statue of the Future Buddha that is currently being planned as a gift to India by an international community of primarily non-heritage Tibetan Buddhists. During the course of her PhD program, Jessica Falcone earned many awards and fellowships, including a fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies to support her doctoral research, and an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology for ethnographic fiction. Dr. Falcone received a book prize for her draft manuscript of "Battling the Buddha of Love: A Cultural Biography of the Greatest Statue Never Built" (the 2014 Edward C. Dimock Prize in the Indian Humanities). The book was published as a monograph in 2018 by Cornell University Press.

In cultivating expertise in South Asian studies through anthropological fieldwork, Dr.Falcone has tacked back and forth between different perspectives that both trace and erase the well-worn paths of "home" and "away": grassroots activism in India; transnational Tibetan Buddhist discourse regarding holy objects and prophecy in India's pilgrimage places; notions of cultural citizenship in the Tibetan diaspora in India; collegiate Gujarati-American dance competitions; extremist Hindu-American summer camps; and finally, Sikh-American activism post-9/11. Her areas of thematic specialization include the anthropology of diaspora, transnationalism, futurity/temporality, globalization, material culture and gift exchange, as well as religious studies. Her future research projects will continue to examine the border crossings, fluidity, and the transformation inherent in the study of Asian religious cultures today. She is currently engaged in an ethnographic research project on Zen Buddhist practice and community in Kona, Hawai'i.

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