Blog
The Camping & Education Foundation Expands Its Impact
The Camping & Education Foundation received its first grant from NRF in 2018. At that time, the Foundation had been in operation for almost 100 years offering immersive summer camp experiences to generations of kids in northern Minnesota and Canada. The staff at the Camping & Education Foundation were also a few years into offering a new program, the Urban Wilderness Program, focused on helping kids living in Cincinnati connect with hands on learning opportunities and outdoor experiences. The Urban Wilderness Program partners with schools to teach students how to build boats, paddle them, and camp safely and responsibly. While boatbuilding, paddling, and camping are all valuable skills in and of themselves, students in the Urban Wilderness Program are also learning so much more. When students learn to build a canoe by hand, they’re also learning to set goals, stay committed to a long-term project, work with their hands, and execute complex tasks using STEM concepts. When students paddle a canoe and go camping, they’re learning to work together, manage risk, and navigate new environments.
Since the Camping & Education Foundation and NRF started working together in 2018, the Urban Wilderness Program has grown significantly. In 2020 when schools shut down, NRF funded a mobile makerspace that allowed staff to bring a boatbuilding shop on wheels to outdoor spaces where students could still learn and work safely. While the mobile space was born out of necessity due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become a core part of the program’s operations. This space on wheels allowed the Urban Wilderness Program to expand to new schools that don’t have shop facilities and even to host programming in other cities like Chicago. This growth has led the Camping & Education Foundation to open a second hub for the Urban Wilderness Program in Minneapolis. Despite this expansion, staff remain deeply committed to the Cincinnati communities they’ve been serving since the program’s inception. In fact, the Camping & Education Foundation just broke ground on a brand-new center based at a Cincinnati high school in February 2026. The center will house shop space for boatbuilding and classrooms for afterschool programming. If everything goes according to plan, the center will be operational and hosting students by the start of the 2026-2027 school year.
Even as the Urban Wilderness Program gets a beautiful new home in Cincinnati and finds its footing in Minneapolis, the staff always stay rooted in what they know best – building relationships with kids and helping young people have fun while trying new things. The mobile makerspace, the hub in Minneapolis, and the new facility in Cincinnati all allow the Foundation to reach more people. Ultimately though, staff know that the most important measure of impact is the quality of the programming rather than the quantity of kids that come through the door. NRF is proud to have partnered with the Camping & Education Foundation as it deepened its roots and expanded its impact. We’re grateful to have been part of what made this intentional and thoughtful growth possible.