In 2014, B’nai Brith Camp – popularly known as BB Camp – purchased its longtime campsite on Town Island, near Kenora Ont., in the Lake of the Woods area.
On Nov. 14, BB Camp’s leadership announced the launch of an $8-million fundraising campaign, the largest such endeavour in the popular camp’s 62-year history.
“In all the years that we have been here, we have never undertaken a major overhaul of our camp facilities,” says Brenda Tessler-Donen, the camp’s executive director for the past 26 years. “Because we didn’t previously own the campsite, we only focused on some general maintenance. Now that the site is ours, it makes sense to make some long-term investments in upgrading our facilities.”
Tessler-Donen said Town Island is 200 acres in total. BB Camp occupies – and owns – just 30 acres on the island. The other 170 acres belongs to the Province of Ontario and is designated as parkland.
Once the BB Camp board and executive were able to acquire the 30-acre site, experts were hired to do a feasibility study as to what needed to be done to upgrade the camp facilities.
Winnipeg architect Jeff Frank was then hired to come up with a master plan. Among the proposed changes, Tessler-Donen said, will be a new two-storey lakeside lodge, an extension of the dining hall, and more cabins and communal bathrooms.
She said that $2 million was pledged prior to the official announcement of the campaign.
“We have a number of canvassers,” Tessler-Donen says. “We will be reaching out to alumni in Toronto and Calgary and elsewhere throughout North America. We are hoping to raise another $6 million over the next year.”
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She said that about $4.5 million of the funds raised will go toward upgrading existing infrastructure and erecting new buildings. Another $730,000 is intended to retire the camp mortgage. The remainder of the funds will be deposited in BB Camp’s trust fund, which currently stands at about $300,000.
This past summer, Tessler-Donen said, BB Camp had 360 campers. About 20 per cent of campers receive some financial support from the community.
And while BB Camp is and has always been a Jewish camp, she said, in recent years, the camp board has opened a non-denominational day camp program for the children of Kenora residents and area cottage owners.
BB Camp also runs two family weekends camps in June, one of which is for Russian-speaking families, as well as a ReJewvenation Women’s Retreat weekend in early June and a program in May and June in co-operation with the Winnipeg Girls and Boys Club and the Canadian Diabetes Association for 1,200 kids from schools in Kenora, Winnipeg and rural Manitoba.
“In recent years, we have built a positive relationship with the City of Kenora,” Tessler-Donen says. “The City of Kenora was really supportive of our efforts to buy our property.”