Contributor
COREY FITZGERALD
Summer Writing Assistant
At Camp Fire First Texas, our mission is to invest in the community by providing out-of-school time and outdoor learning programs for children and youth while also providing workforce development programs for the educators who care for them.
But HOW does the team attain this – by integrating our six main values into the work we do every day.
These values being: Inclusion, Data-Informed, Growth-Mindset, Collaboration, Hands-On learning, and Whole Child approach. We strive not merely to state our values but to put them in action by embodying and encompassing what they represent.
But what does it look like for a team to live these values and put them into action? A little like what Sara Mitchell recently demonstrated.
Sara has been an employee of Camp Fire since 2007, but her roots extend far past that as she was a camper herself at El Tesoro!
Recently, Sara had the massively important role of overhauling the point-of-sale system for the summer camp store. Through hard work and research, she transformed it from a clunky and bare-bones system to a more streamlined and efficient experience for customers and employees. As the brand manager, Sara focuses on innovation by improving Camp Fire’s online appearance. This improvement helps many facets of the Camp Fire team, from the store and inventory to tracking sales for our finance team. Even parents are benefiting as it is easier and simpler to deposit funds for their kids at camp.
To accomplish this lofty feat, Sara employed a slew of our values into the project. Collaboration was used at length as she had to work with many people, such as Lisa Cook, CTO, camp staff, registrars, the Camp Fire finance team and many more. The improved system also allows Camp Fire to work more effectively with parents as it is now much simpler for them to deposit funds into their child’s camp account. This project was also data-informed. Sara and the team had to take existing data, compartmentalize it, and then apply said data towards improving the upgraded point-of-sale system. Finally, she exemplified a phenomenal growth mindset approaching this project; she had to learn the ins and outs of a new website tool integration and dive deep into subjects she was not currently familiar. Despite this learning curve, Sara took this opportunity to learn more about web design and discovered much during the process while encouraging others who were hesitant to embrace the spirit of a growth mindset.
Sara is just one wonderful example of how we put our values in action. With a team full of hard-working and capable people like Sara, the sky is the limit for the great things Camp Fire will achieve.
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