Camp Ketchum 2013 got underway on Wednesday. 83 campers from around Ketchum’s global network congregated in Mont Tremblant, Canada for an intensive off-site training experience.
The campers dove right in to the five-day program with a community service project. The town of La Conception experienced a gas leakage a few years ago that contaminated their water supply and monopolized all of their tax dollars, making it impossible for them to construct a much-needed recreational area. Ketchum campers divided into teams and helped to build a park from scratch, each team focusing on a different task such as constructing a jungle gym and picnic tables, laying grass and mulch and planting flowers and trees. Residents of the town as well as the town mayor gathered to watch as the Ketchum employees pitch in to transform a plot of land into a long-awaited park space.
This activity underscores Ketchum’s philosophy of improving the communities we visit through social responsibility, as evidenced by our 90 creative brainstorms in 90 days for nonprofits around the world, our ongoing drive to send 90 girls in India and Tanzanian to secondary school in honor of our 90th anniversary and our role in launching the Creative for Good program at Cannes.
The experience was also meant to be a team building one for the campers who will be collaborating with these same teams of ten or eleven members for the client challenge portion of Camp Ketchum. The exercise of working together to build the park allowed the campers to get a better sense of themselves in a team setting as well as evaluate how cohesively their team functioned to complete its task. After building the park, the campers participated in a team effectiveness workshop to debrief their performance and reflect on what skills each member of the team brings to the table. An understanding of their team dynamic will come in handy in the upcoming client challenge which requires the camper teams to come to a consensus and divide and conquer to produce a campaign-winning idea.
See below for Day One of Camp Ketchum in pictures.
Campers gather upon arrival to Mont Tremblant, Canada for this year’s Camp Ketchum.
Campers gather outside the buses to head to their community service project in the town of La Conception.
Parc Ketchum before the campers’ built it.
Ketchum CEO, Rob Flaherty, works on building the park.
Campers tackle the difficult task of laying the mulch.
One of the teams shows some spirit fingers during the construction of the park.
This camper team gets energized while working to lay gravel.
Rob Flaherty, Ketchum CEO, and David Gallagher, CEO of Ketchum Europe, with the mayor of La Conception in front of the plaque to Parc Ketchum.
The final product. The park construction is complete!
