Camp Grier
A field note on caring for people + place
I arrived at Camp Grier on a Friday evening in early 2019 feeling the particular kind of nervous that comes with meeting a room full of strangers you have been hired to guide through your signature process that will unfold over the course of days. Starting up on a Friday night, after a long week.
The board was comprised of pastors, lawyers, and community leaders from Charlotte and beyond. Good people carrying real responsibility for an organization they clearly loved. My job was to help them restore first, settle into the camp itself and remember why it mattered, and then move through reflection and into the creative work of clarifying vision, values, and the road ahead.
We ate together. We walked the property. We sat around tables and told stories about what Camp Grier had meant to people over the years, to the board members themselves, to the youth who had come through its gates. By the time we got to the visioning work the room had a different quality. People were grounded and honest and genuinely present. This is the effect of working from a solid base of restoration.
I left that weekend feeling like the organization was in good hands and heading somewhere meaningful.
Then COVID hit. Then Hurricane Helene tore through Western North Carolina in September 2024 and scarred the region in ways that are still processing. And Camp Grier did something remarkable. Within days of the storm the camp opened its gates entirely, becoming an instant disaster relief hub for the community. Hot meals, showers, a generator that restored power and water service within two days. Over sixty days they served thousands of meals and eventually raised nearly two million dollars in relief funds for families across the region.
That capacity to respond was not luck. It was the result of years of intentional governance, deepening community partnerships, and a leadership team that knew exactly who they were and what they were there to do. The seeds of that clarity were planted long before the storm.
Camp Grier has continued to grow in remarkable directions. Trail systems, year-round programming, outdoor access for all. The property has become a hub for creative approaches to community, health, and economic development in the region.
At the start of 2025 when I was invited to join the board I said yes without hesitation.
I now serve on the strategic planning committee, helping to steward the mission, vision, and values of an organization I first encountered as a contractor. The Birds Eye Atlas layers show up in that work just as they do everywhere else. Threshold, context, design, delivery, integration. The same questions in a different landscape.I feel genuinely honored to sit alongside the humble and skilled people who lead this place. It is one of those rare organizations that actually lives what it says it believes.
That is worth showing up for.