Spring Break at Lubbock Impact = high energy games, new experiences, lots of crafts, fun recipes and begging for the next camp! As cliché as it sounds, the Spring Break Kid’s Camp hosted in March was so much more than that for the kids who got to attend.
How can a week of building Legos, making s’mores and cooking together be so important? Lubbock Impact’s mission is to empower the working poor by providing enrichment programs and resources to meet physical, spiritual and emotional needs, providing hope and tools to break generational poverty and build a stronger future. This cycle of poverty that we are striving to break starts in childhood.
Program Director, Haley McBrayer, says that opportunities like this “bridge the gap of experience”. In contrast to children that live in a median to high income household, low-income children don’t often have the opportunity to explore and find different passions. Knowing what you like and don’t like only happens when you’ve been able to experience it. We want to use our resources to enable these young children to be able to have some of the same experiences that other kids their age get to experience.
Do the kids actively notice the cycles of poverty being chipped away at? Probably not, but as the excitement builds with each activity and they get to create, build, and play free from the pressures of school, home, friends and other stressors, they are able to find their sense of self.
During the week of spring break there were smiles, laughter and intense focus from playing volleyball, painting and potting flowers, making their own pizzas, running many games of sharks and minnows, building Legos, tie-dying shirts and many more activities. Intertwined in each of these was also a building of a community, confidence and excitement for the future.
As with everything we do at Lubbock Impact, we could not have done any of this without the crew of volunteers that poured into the kids for so many hours during the week of Spring Break. Their kindness, patience and high energy brought a wind beneath the kids’ wings to soar.