Start your own summer camp!

Step 7 Staffing

For staffing in your first year, I advocate working with people you can communicate well with. Namely -- your friends. So much will be changing on the fly in your first summer (especially during your first week!) that you'll want people to work with people that you feel comfortable spending a ton of time with and problem-solving with during and after camp.

Hackerspaces.org talks about the 2+2 design pattern for starting a hackerspace, and I think it applies to summer camp as well.  2 people who have initial enthusiasm for the project can go out and find 2 more, and from there things can really start getting done easily.

Making camp work can take all of your waking hours when you're just starting out.  Our first year that we had a sizable group of campers three of us spent essentially all of our time together, working at camp, cleaning up, planning activities, and talking about what went wrong and what went right.  The closer-knit the initial group is, the less work you will find falling on your shoulders by default.  It's really important for the initial "leader" not to overwork him or her self.

I am a big advocate of worker's co-operatives, and having people share power and profit equally. I believe that the closer our camp runs to this model (we're not there yet), the smoother things run for the adults, the less they worry about whether they're allowed to do or buy something and instead just do what they think is right, and ultimately the better everyone can think about how to make camp amazing.

Here's the legal things you have to do for staffing a summer camp:

Background Checks -- In MA, you need to file CORIs (criminal checks) and SORIs (sex offender checks) for each person you hire. SORIs are free and have a quick turn-around (within 2 weeks.)

CORIs can take quite a while. You first need to become certified to access CORIs . I think it's safe to allot 4 - 6 weeks for this (this tends towards 6 weeks when it's near summertime and the board gets lots and lots of requests.) Once authorized, you can then fill out individual CORI requests for anyone you want to hire (this has a 2 week turnaround by mail.) CORIs can now be processed online, which are easier to file.

You will also need basic medical information for your staff too (basic physical info and immunization history, or a written personal exemption from immunizations.)

Finallly, you need to pay them and report this payment to the IRS somehow. The easiest way to do this is to hire people as subcontractors, and give them 1099s. Someone recommended efileforbusiness.com to me, which lets you file 1099s for $3.50 each. It's supposed to be easy; I'm going to try it this summer.

I have yet to figure out what the tax-minimizing option is of how to hire people, but subontracting has the benefit that instead of the employer withholding taxes, the employee receives everything and then pays taxes at the end of the year, which is a lot simpler for the business.