05/05/2026
Crossing Barriers
Chris has never met a stranger. Ask anyone who knows him — he'll talk to anybody, remember everybody's name, and somehow make you feel like you've been friends for years within the first five minutes. It's just who he is.
So when The Hope Project started at Camp Indicoso, he was excited to get to meet more kids and make more connections.
The Hope Project allows kids and teens to attend camp who would otherwise be unable to attend due to their families’ financial situations. Two Indianapolis neighborhood centers connect these families to Impact 2818 with the help of grants and donations to Impact 2818’s scholarship fund.
Chris has been volunteering as a counselor, then director, at Indicoso for over 20 years. Every year, in the first hours of camp, he notices clusters. Teens arrive and do what teens — what people — naturally do. They stay close to who’s familiar. The students who came together from the same community sit together. They walk together. They find each other in the crowd and hold on. It makes sense. When everything around you is new, you reach for what you already know. Chris sees it, and “I get it. But I like what comes next.”
Because something always comes next. A game that scrambles the groups. A prayer partner assignment that puts two strangers together. A moment at the lunch table where the only open seat is next to someone you didn't come with. And then, if the conditions are right, a conversation starts. A real one. The kind that doesn't happen on a screen, but face to face, with nowhere else to be.
Chris has watched teenagers who arrived locked inside their own circle take one small step outside of it and discover something they didn't expect: that the kid from the other side of the city, the one they never would have met back home, is someone worth knowing.
“That’s one of the best things about camp,” Chris shares. “The cliques, groups, stereotypes … stop mattering at camp. To see that happen among teenagers who didn’t know each other at the beginning of the week is special.” It is the work of the Spirit in real time. The same love that crossed every barrier to reach us, reflected back in the small, brave moment when a teenager decides to sit down next to someone different than them and say hello.
Camp offers the space to disconnect (literally, no phones are allowed at most sites!) and connect with others around you who are also seeking God. It removes the noise and gives kids the space to actually see each other; not as strangers to be cautious of, but as people made in God’s image. As friends they just haven't made yet.
Fifteen years of The Hope Project at Camp Indicoso. Fifteen years of kids arriving in clusters, and leaving in something bigger. For fifteen years, Chris has watched it happen. And every year, he shows up again, because he knows what's coming, and he doesn't want to miss it.
The Hope Project is made possible through a partnership between the Indiana Conference of The UMC, Impact 2818, Concord Neighborhood Center, East 10th Children & Youth, and the Indy Summer Youth Program. Students attend Camp Indicoso and other Impact 2818 sites free of charge through this program.
