How do you keep a kid's fantasy camp afloat?

Vox

11 hours ago

is awho's been writing about money for over a decade. Her work has appeared in Bankrate, Lifehacker, Morning Brew, and Dwell. She answers reader questions for
Welcome to Money Talks, a series in which we interview people about their relationship with money, their relationship with each other, and how those relationships inform one another.
Eric Love, 47, is an artist and educator in Haverhill, Massachusetts. After spending the first half of his career working as an educator and consultant, he became the founder of LARP Adventure Program (LAP), an after-school and summer camp program. LAP's curriculum focuses on building community and teaching creative problem-solving through live-action role-playing — a type of structured, interactive game in which players, often rooted in the worlds of science fiction or fantasy, work together to overcome a specific challenge.
Elle Dunne, 22, is a recent graduate of Wellesley College who began working for LAP as a counselor and is now the marketing coordinator. LAP currently serves over 100 youth, adults, and their families with programs including classes, weekend events, and residential overnight camps up to four weeks.
The following conversation is lightly condensed and edited.
ERIC: I'm Eric Love, and I founded LARP Adventure Program. It came into being as an LLC in 2012, but the idea existed far before that. The earliest rendition of what it is today was from about 2000 — but I wasn't exposed to live-action role-playing as a medium yet.
I was using Dungeons and Dragons as a platform for education, and frustrated about trying to bring it to life. Two of my students were like, 'This already exists! It's called LARPing! You should come to an event!' I was like, 'Oh, this is great!' I didn't even go to another LARP; I just went to the drawing board and executed the curriculum design.
It's been a committed journey, for sure. I have a fine arts background, a fine and performing arts BA, and a masters of education from Lesley. When I went to Lesley University, I had the LARP program already in mind and I used the masters program to polish it and make it what it is today.
'Everyone still had this idea that if kids pretend any type of combat, that they will become harmful people. That's not how this works, right?'
ELLE: I came on board last June. I ambitiously googled 'LARP camp Massachusetts jobs near me,' because I wanted to work at a LARP camp!
I joined as a counselor, and they didn't have anybody doing marketing, and I went up to them and said, 'I could do marketing for you guys!' And they're like, 'We don't know if we want that.' And I went, 'No, I'm going to do marketing for you guys.'
ERIC: We're the longest-running LARP in Massachusetts and possibly the Northeast, it's hard to tell.
I was like, 'I'm going to drop everything else I'm doing and figure out how to do this.' And it was too soon, right? [When I was developing the idea] everyone still had this idea that if kids pretend any type of combat, that they will become harmful people. That's not how this works, right? That's not how that happens. But people were scared. People were scared of optics. What do parents think? What do other schools think? What are the psychological implications of children playing pretend and socializing with each other? And the answer is — they become healthier humans that want to contribute to society.
ELLE: I love our kids. I'm going to just take a moment to brag about them. Every day, I wake up and think, 'We have the best kids in the world.' I'm so proud of them.
We have a very large population of LGBT and neurodivergent kids that we are very passionate about both protecting and creating a safe space for. LARP has always attracted a specific type of community — it's always been the people who are on the margins and the outskirts and they're using LARP to empower themselves, create something with other people, or figure out who they are. Eric has done something really amazing where he's created an environment where that can happen for kids.
'It's always been the people who are on the margins and the outskirts and they're using LARP to empower themselves, create something with other people, or figure out who they are.'
At the beginning of every day camp, we get a bunch of kids and all they want to do is hit each other with swords. All they want to do is whale on each other and they want to be the hero. And one of the missions of LAP, which I loved — and one of the reasons I chose LAP as opposed to the three other LARP camps in New England — is that this community mind is so important. The kids have a rallying cry: 'Fight together, die alone.'
So at the beginning of every day camp Eric and I come in — or whoever the teacher is — and we sit the kids down and we say, 'LARP is not for kids, it's for adults. We're trusting you guys to do this adult thing because we think you deserve it and you have the capacity for it. But if you guys do shenanigans, if you are cruel to each other, if you try to be the hero at somebody else's expense, no more. We're sending you to robotics camp or Minecraft camp where it's not as fun.'
Sometimes the kids come in and they're ungovernable monsters, but through this curriculum of radical empathy and community-building and martial arts and self-mastery, they grow into these people with really strong bonds for each other. They discover who they are and they discover what it means to be a leader and they grow up and they give that back.
ERIC: Affordability is a problem across the board. We could change the quality of what we're doing, but it's because of the high quality — there's not just showing up to LARP. You could be a [counselor-in-training], you could help run logistics, you could help be a part of the production team or the writing team. It has all these factors so that everyone has a place, and when the LARP comes together, everyone has something to do depending on what their skill set is and a place to shine. That takes a lot of hours. There's at least 20,000 volunteer hours a year — just unpaid, people showing up week after week. So it's not just money. The burnout is very real.
'One of the kids that I love dearly came up to me and he's like, 'I can't afford to go to res camp this year,' and that just broke my heart!'
ELLE: We have our upcoming residential camp at the end of August. Kids are clamoring for that, but we had to hike the price from last year and shorten the length. We also have this problem where we don't have a home, so we're finding issues finding locations to host camps. One of the kids that I love dearly came up to me and he's like, 'I can't afford to go to res camp this year,' and that just broke my heart!
You want all the kids to be able to come to camp. You want them to be able to have this magical fantasy experience soaked in SEL [social-emotional learning] education that you know will make them better humans. But you also know that you can't afford land, and you don't own land, so you need to hike up the price. There seems to be a push and pull between, 'What do we owe to our community?' and what we need to keep this business surviving.
ERIC: We did as much as can happen for cutbacks. I'm in my mother's house at 47. It's like, 'Go get another job.' Well, then who's going to do all of the work that I'm doing? It would be like a house of cards.
We could just keep jacking up the price, but that's going to change the clients. The people that we care about and love are already telling us they can't afford it. We're already seeing people fall off.
When I started this business, my dad was like, 'I'm going to give you the money I would give you at whatever retirement. Here's $10,000. And I'm going to give you two bits of advice: 'You can focus on marketing and selling a product, or you can focus on having a good product. You cannot do both.''
'If I need to pay my bills and buy groceries, what am I going to cut out first? It's the after-school program that my kid goes to.'
We know we have a really good service. We know it's very special. We know it creates a safe place for people to explore who they are and create self-confidence — but we are just not a machine set up to do heavy marketing and pull people in and convince them to come in.
The reality is small businesses have been dying off rapidly in the last two years. I do arts — alternative education — that gets cut out first. If I need to pay my bills and buy groceries, what am I going to cut out first? It's the after-school program that my kid goes to.
ELLE: One of our kids told me, 'I wish I could do LARP, but my parents said I'm going to a different camp.'
ERIC: There's camps where lots of kids are being given laptops, and iPads, and other electronic devices. Our thing has always been, even before the pandemic, 'Get off of the computer!' It's okay, we're all gamers, we love it, but socialize with each other and get out in nature! I think that the generations that are coming up, or even the parents, don't identify with the value of what we're bringing forth. Maybe they pitch it to the kid, and they're like, 'Yeah, but the Minecraft camp, I get to be on a laptop.'
The only reason why I'm still in it is because I know that this is my self-actualization. And the other part of it, besides that, which is self-fulfilling, is that everyone that I'm around is amazing. My staff are the best people I've ever met. The people who are volunteering are the most exceptional humans I've ever met. That's a very special, sacred thing, and what do you say — do you leave that for money?