I just got home from a week at Camp UKANDU, and I’m going to be honest with you – I don’t think I’ve fully integrated everything yet. Some experiences are too big to summarize in a single breath. This is one of them.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: What if the world worked the way this camp works?

What if we had hard conversations without stepping away from them? What if we showed up and belonging was just… assumed? What if we honored people exactly how they arrive – full of grief, guarded, or joyful, instead of asking them to arrive differently?

That’s UKANDU. That’s family camp.

Some families rolled in this year with open hearts, ready for anything. Others rolled in white-knuckling the steering wheel…literally. One dad told me he spent the entire drive talking himself out of turning around, terrified he’d be forced to sit in a circle and talk about his feelings. Another admitted he came skeptical, arms crossed, waiting to be unimpressed.

And then something happened. It always does.

That same skeptical dad turned to me after our first parent program and said, “This is exactly where I need to be.”

Another parent, trying to describe the week, landed on this: “It’s an empathy utopia.”

I don’t think you can manufacture that. I think you can only build the conditions for it, and then get out of the way and let people be human together. We provide the holding space and offer safety, they show up and test it, then settle in.

That’s the thing about this camp: it holds contradictions like they’re so simple. We had outrageous, ridiculous, glitter-cannon fun, then we had Memory Circle, where families named their losses out loud, together. And then? Ice cream bars. Both things, same day, both true, both sacred. Joy doesn’t cancel grief. Grief doesn’t cancel joy. Camp knows this in its bones.

If you’ve never seen a place hold that much love and that much honesty at the same time, I want you to see it.

Learn more about Camp UKANDU and how to get involved

Next week, I’ll take you behind the scenes of what our Mental Health Team known as the Rainbow Team and what we actually do during a week like this. It’s heavier, and it’s holy work. Stay tuned.

Save the Date: Join us November 4-6 for our virtual Fall Conference, where we’ll go deeper into relational health and trauma-informed care. Join the waitlist here!