How a self-governing summer program in Alabama helps teens realize their power
A Q&A with Daniel Marshall, Co-Founder of Lamplight Summer Camp
Daniel Marshall is the Co-Founder of Lamplight Summer Camp. It’s a free three-week summer program — hosted in both Guntersville and Birmingham, AL — where teens practice leadership and service by running the camp themselves and doing projects for their community. Inspired by the Highlander Folk School, Lamplight applies the principles of self-governance and action civics to build a program that is helping young people realize their power in two of the most disinvested parts of Alabama.
Lamplight is an example of what’s possible when we relinquish control and invite people — both teens and adults alike — to be agents of their own destinies. And it’s an example of what’s possible when we show up — and keep showing up — for the long haul. As Daniel put it: “… if you take a really long time with something, you actually get really good at it by the time it matters.”
I walked away from this interview with a smile on my face and having learned a ton. My guess is you will too.
- Sam
PS - If you want to learn more about Lamplight’s work, visit their website and follow them on social (Facebook and Instagram). And you are welcome to reach out directly if you want to get involved with Lamplight’s work (lamplightsummer@gmail.com).
PPS - From Daniel: “If you really want to learn about the Lamplight Camp, you should come visit us and talk to the campers and the staff. This interview reflects my own experience of the program, and I don’t speak for Lamplight as an institution.”
Can you share a bit of your origin story? How does a Southern CA native and NYC social studies teacher become a leader of a cooperatively run camp in Birmingham and Guntersville, AL?
My family was full of storytellers who made sure that even though I grew up in Southern California, I knew about my Alabama roots. And there were many secrets in the Alabama family that I slowly learned about as I got older. One of them was that there was this property that Poppa (D.C. Waid, my grandfather) built in the 1950s — a concrete cabin right on Lake Guntersville.
Around the time I learned about this, I was at Teachers College in New York City getting my teaching credential. One of my mentors, Steve Lazar, gave me this book, The Long Haul, which was the story of Myles Horton and Highlander Folk School. He said, “If you ever doubt that education can do something and really make a difference, you should read this book.”
That summer, I was reading this autobiography, hanging with a bunch of teachers who I had taken on a road trip of the south to meet my family, and just learning that my Poppa has this abandoned cabin on Lake Guntersville. We had summers off, and we had a group of teachers who were interested in experimenting in forms of education we couldn't do inside the classroom and melding it seamlessly into a movement tradition of empowering local communities through cooperative self-determination. I was like, “What would you do?”
That was how we got the idea to try our Lamplight summer program the first year. Our goal was to just learn as much as we could and not traumatize any children. When it worked well, we were surprised — like, wow, there’s something here. And we’ve spent the next five years trying to refine it and figure it out.
How did you originally arrive at the model for Lamplight?
There were a few traditions that influenced us early on. One of them was Highlander and the tradition of popular education, which posits that ordinary people are experts when it comes to problems that affect their everyday lives and are capable of coming up with and implementing solutions to those problems. In this model, education can be a path to self-discovery and self-development.
The more proximate influence was my involvement in the Telluride Association, which runs summer programs and a house at Cornell that I lived in for three and a half years. The Telluride model is based on “Nunnian education,” which has several foundational pillars: labor and hands-on skills, self-governance and the idea that these institutions should be democratically run by the students, along with community living and service.
The last influence was the idea of “social inquiry” or “action civics.” Instead of having the entire curriculum developed before the camp starts, you start with a compelling question, and that compelling question leads you on this adventure. You can’t anticipate at the beginning where this adventure will lead you, and within the tradition of action civics, you end up in a place of community-oriented action.
How did you apply these principles during that first year?
We started with the problem statement: “What are the most important problems facing teenagers in Marshall County, AL?” Then, we launched a competition where we split campers into groups, and we created a point system for how much in-person interviews versus phone interviews versus text message interviews were worth. The winning team got to cut my hair however they wanted. And then the kids spent a day interviewing people at Walmarts and Piggly Wigglies and parks in Guntersville.
The kids came up with over 100 responses after a day of canvassing. We wrote them all out on a chart and spent a couple of days looking at it. We weren’t asking: “What do people say is the most important thing?” We were asking: “What's the root cause underneath all of those things?” The surface-level issues were the things the kids had experienced in their own lives — addiction, mental health issues, bullying, and the like. But underneath all of those, was the problem of isolation.
In rural areas, if the parents are working during the summer, the kids have absolutely nothing to do, so usually they're hanging out with older kids who have access to cars. They don't have any structured programming during the summer. They don't have anything that they really care about that's happening. So they just end up bored and get into trouble.
What the campers felt was most important for the culmination of camp was to throw a big event for all of their friends. It would have arts and crafts and a movie, and they wanted it to be democratically run like the rest of camp. When choosing the movie, they were like, “We're going have three different movies that they can watch, and just like at camp, we're going to vote on which one we want to watch.” But they really wanted to watch Perks of Being a Wallflower. So they set up the voting with two extremely boring nature documentaries as options, and then the third option was Perks of Being a Wallflower. And I was like, “Oh, man, we really did teach you guys about democracy and power.”
How does Lamplight actually work today? Can you walk us through a day in the life at the camp?
Let’s take the example of a random Friday at camp. If you're a camper, you show up by 9:30AM. You've probably gotten a ride from one of the staff members because you live in a rural area and you may not have been able to go to camp if you didn't have a ride. At 10AM, we do labor. We go to the cabin, which is situated right on the edge of Guntersville Lake, and you join your labor group. Maybe you're making benches, maybe you're making a mural, maybe you're making a dance floor. But, whatever it is, you have some kind of project to transform the property.
After that, you come back, have lunch, and have what we call a “pack meeting” — that is, our self-governance meeting. It was named by our campers when they were 12. We asked the campers, “What do you want to call this?” And they were like, “Let's call it a pack meeting.” And they would howl at the end. At the pack meeting, you might be presenting a draft proposal for your labor project, where you have a line-item budget, where you have quotes on costs from different stores, and then the rest of the campers get to vote on whether your project is good enough to allocate funds from the labor budget that campers control.
Later in the day, we have dinner. Everyone does chores together and listens to playlists with songs that all the campers put on it. And, at the end of the day, we have something called “closing circle,” where we all get together around the lamp and share shout-outs for things that we appreciate that other people did well. Sometimes we'll do roasts, where people volunteer themselves to get made fun of by everyone, which is actually really fun and a huge hit.
Occasionally, there will be pranks.
What have been the biggest difficulties — either expected or unexpected — in getting Lamplight off the ground and growing the model?
We work with kids who are not already identified as leaders — they’re not already seen as promising, college-bound superstars — and we start at a young age with them. These are kids who might not be going to a summer camp otherwise, and so their lives involve dealing with real challenges that would be difficult for most adults. And their lives are really unstable in many cases, which can make it hard for them to attend camp regularly.
We become very close to the kids, and then after four or five years, we want to provide them with opportunities. Most of our campers who have graduated have not gone to college — and we see that as okay. The trajectory for most of the kids often involves staying in their area, working at a local restaurant or at Walmart, and slowly trying to build a life for themselves, but without much stability and job security.
We’re not a perfect cure for this, but we're trying to help connect them to people outside of the area, bring them on field trips, and help them build social capital that extends outside the place where they grew up. We’re providing some of them part-time work as grant writers to further develop their skills and hope as they get older to help them start their own cooperative businesses. We see our commitment to them as extending beyond the camp and are there to help them whenever they need us, both in finding a livelihood and in times of personal difficulty.
That seems like it could also be really hard on you and the staff.
Yes, it’s challenging on the staff end. It's only three weeks, but it's all day. It's an intensely meaningful experience, but it's deeply exhausting — particularly when you're also trying to support a lot of kids who, themselves, are navigating really difficult experiences. It can be emotionally intense. One of the reasons people grow so much from it and have become so attached to the camp is that it forces you to grow a lot and it's really challenging. I think that Lamplight is a reproducible model, but one of the things I've struggled with is just how much it asks of everyone involved. But I see us getting better every year and figuring out ways to ease the workload of staff.
I get the sense that you don’t shy away from difficulty. The things that ask the most of people can also be the most generative, right?
It’s true: the experiences that ask a lot of people are often the most generative. We have a lot of educational approaches that are premised on shielding kids from difficulty and challenge, on keeping them safe and comfortable. But kids and adults alike have a deep yearning to engage with the difficulty that they know exists around them. And doing that can also help them make meaning out of the difficulties in their own lives.
For example, when the kids want to do something and we don't have the money to do it, we will show them the budget. We’ll even show them how much the staff gets paid. And then we say, “Okay, here's all the money we have. Here are some opportunities. What are we going to do about it?” And, sometimes the kids will look at that and be like, “Ah, never mind.” And that's fine. But sometimes they're going to be like, “What if we did a fundraiser where we went to Walmart and we had one of the campers play air guitar and do Christmas carols?” And they go out, they make $300, and then they have the money to do what they want. But the important thing was not that field trip they got to do. It’s the dignity and the transformative potential and ownership that's conveyed by the difficulty.
Have there been any unexpected ripple effects of the camp, whether for the campers or the broader community?
You'll notice that, in that answer about difficulties, I didn't say “money.” We got really lucky. The mother of one of our campers the first year — this incredible powerhouse of a person named Felicia Jones — was working at a thrift store in a town that ended up moving. She was basically like, “If these idiots can start a nonprofit, how hard could it be?” So we offered her our fiscal sponsorship, and Felicia and her husband started a new thrift store, called Caring Heart, in the vacated property.
That thrift store now funds three nonprofits in the area, including Lamplight. They have a teen pantry that feeds up to hundreds of local kids a week. They have all kinds of hygiene products. They just acquired their own separate community center that they're starting. Starting this pilot project allowed us to bump into Felicia. She’s an incredible person, but there are a lot of incredible people out there. Sometimes all they need is an example and encouragement and people who are going to stand by them and care about them.
Why is this idea of cooperative decision-making and ownership so important, especially given Alabama’s history?
Alabama is a place that is obsessed with neighborliness. People in rural Alabama have a real sense of duty and service — if there's someone who needs help in the community, you should help. I think that there's a misinterpretation that happens when people look at the South in the way that they think about the welfare state or philanthropy. People often say things like, “They don't have strong social programs. They don't care about poor people.” Here, the idea of having the government do your charity work for you is alienating your fundamental right to help your neighbor. Here, if you're part of a church, if you're part of a community organization, or if you're just a person and someone needs help, you're expected to help your neighbor in a way that in cities on the coast, you wouldn't be.
As an illustrative example, we had this meeting with a bunch of Guntersville town elders early on where we pitched the program and did a pretty bad job. After, they just stared at us blankly and asked, “Who are you?” And I was like, “Oh, I'm related to so and so. We’ve had a family plot here since the 1950s.” And they responded, “Oh, that family. Why didn’t you say so? How can we help? Our friend has a tractor he can bring. We'd love to come work with the kids anytime you need.” There's a lot of distrust of outsiders, but there are very strong kinship networks. We've been helped so much by the generosity of regular people in Guntersville in a way that I’m not sure would have happened everywhere else.
Do you have a broader vision for how your work in Alabama can evolve from here?
One of the points of college is that you meet a bunch of friends, you stay in touch with them afterward, and you give each other opportunities. Somehow that process of bringing people from different places to the same place, and then having them track each other as they go throughout the world, helps the world become more connected and helps make things possible that wouldn't have been possible before. Lamplight is a direct example of how this happens. It's a college friend group, a grad school friend group, and various people's high school friend groups all coming together.
This is also what excites me about Lamplight’s potential. When you think about Lamplight in Guntersville and Birmingham from an absurdly long timeline, you essentially have like two parts of the state that have experienced intense disinvestment in the last 40 years and are both dealing with almost the exact same set of problems — addiction, mental health, bullying, violence, and isolation. What happens if you have a bunch of kids who actually get to know each other from the time they're teenagers, realize that they have these shared problems together, and, over time, are trained in the skills of action civics, self-governance, and organizing? What are the types of things that they do together when they're older? Alabama is such a small place that the connections we already have throughout the state will allow for a truly homegrown initiative. I can't even predict what it will look like because they're going to figure it out together. I'm just so excited to see what it looks like when I'm old. If we can keep it alive for that long, what these kids decide to do together could change the state.
This is not the type of program where a bunch of kids who are already going to go to super-elite programs are then fast-tracked into the upper echelons of the government. Most of our kids are going to stay where they are and raise a family. They're going to be embedded in their communities and help run these institutions for the long haul. The magic happens when those people are still in touch with each other, and you can connect the local — especially the hyper-local — and the scaled in an authentic way. The good news is if you take a really long time with something, you actually get really good at it by the time it matters.
Really beautiful! What a nice camp!