Where Safe Helps
After Al approved a supply budget, a six-person team cooked three meals daily for 50 campers over 14-hour days, serving 1,478 plates and saving costs at Camp Can Do (A Children’s Burn Camp in SC)
Camp Can Do and Safe Industries
A little backstory
I have served with the South Carolina Burn Children's Fund and Camp Can Do since 2010. I've served in multiple roles. I currently serve as the chair of the state Burn Children's Fund board of directors. And then in the past I've served as logistics director for Camp Can Do, and then this year I got to serve as the food services director.
As I approached Al with the conversation about Camp Can Do, and really the largest expense camp was food services every year, and then as ERT has grown into one of the capacities that we provide for ERT as food service, I saw an opportunity for training for some of the team members. So I reached out to Al and just asked him, said, "Hey, is there any chance that you would be willing to donate money for supply and some team members to go assist at Burn Camp?" And he committed to do that. He gave us a robust budget to purchase supply with. It was myself, Ryan Eubanks, Dewayne May, Heather May, Todd Milam, and Peyton Griggers.
Heather and I worked the closest together, and then Todd towards the end of the project. We created a menu, worked with Performance Food Group to order our supply and to schedule our deliveries. We had some extensive work with logistics to help get our initial food deliveries there because it was a Sunday when camp started.
During the week, the story was that basically with Safe Industries' donation, Camp Can Do and the South Carolina Burn Children's Fund was able to save money on camp expenses, and that way we can pass that savings on along to families in their biggest needs. So, during that week we were asked to prepare meals from Monday morning at breakfast until Friday morning at breakfast. So, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday we prepared three meals a day, and then on Friday we prepared a breakfast meal. We did that, and we were able to prep, cook, and clean the kitchen on cycle. We mostly worked 14 hour days, from about 5:30 in the morning to 8:30 pm on the full days, and then we worked till about noon on that Friday. Across the time we were able to serve 1,478 plates to the camp.
A snapshot about the camp
Camp Can Do was started in 1996. The first camp was held in 1997.
In this year's camp we had around 50 campers, with an equal balance of staff and support personnel and counselors to support the camp.
We host our camp at Camp Cole, which is in Eastover, South Carolina, and we try to provide an opportunity for campers to connect with other children that have experienced burn injury, to try to help them on their path to healing. We provided some really good meals, everybody seemed happy, had a few old timers tell me that it was the best meals that they ever had, and we were approached to do it again maybe next year. I already had that conversation with Al.
You can find information for the South Carolina Burn Children's Fund at SCBCF.org. The South Carolina Burn Children's Fund is a non-profit fund located under the South Carolina Firefighters Foundation, which sits under the umbrella of the South Carolina State Firefighters Association. Thank you.
