Registration Is Postponed To Saturday, March 27th at 10 am Eastern / 9 am Central
After consultation with several of our churches following the Sub Zero Winter Retreat (which your church should go to!), we’ve decided to push back the opening of registration. This allows us time to see if the State of Georgia’s COVID guidelines will allow us to open registration with more than the 225 spots currently allowed. We’re going to stick to the state’s safety protocols for the protection of our Campers, Volunteers, and Staff. And as those protocols evolve to match the changing COVID situation, we will be following closely and adapting.
Groups Will be Limited to 25 Campers & Adults (For Now)
As of right now, we will be limiting groups to 25 participants (Campers and Adults) in the registration software. We expect to be able to raise – or possibly eliminate – this limit if our allowed capacity grows and we are able to satisfy the safety guidelines . Church leaders will be able to decide how best to assign their available spots. We realize this is not ideal and will leave some leaders and parents with some very hard decisions about whether to attend with part of their group or not at all. We are tremendously thankful for the local youth leaders who organize their groups, in addition to their other responsibilities and work outside of the church, and we will do everything we can from our side to help navigate hard calls with grace and understanding.
After the initial registration fills up, we will be running a waitlist for available spots, and will be pulling from that waitlist on a first-come, first-served basis. As always, we will do everything we can to get as many people as we can (safely!) to Camp this year.
Camp Vineyard 2021 is $299 for Students and $239 for Adult Volunteers
Though we will be opening registration at half capacity, we have done everything we can to keep the per-person cost as low as possible. For comparison, the 2021 price increase is only $5 more than the normal annual adjustment. We are making some intentional decisions behind the scenes in our programming and taking advantage of our archive of games and events to create an awesome week of Camp while stretching every penny.
The 2021 Parent & Volunteer Pack is Live!
Download the Parent & Volunteer Pack, which will be continually updated to reflect the latest COVID-19 guidelines from the State of Georgia Department of Public Health. You can download slides for ProPresenter on the Home page.
Common Questions:
Why Can’t You Do a Second Week/Other Location/Guarantee Spots/Assign Registration Times to Churches?
The logistical and personnel needs of a second week or second location are basically identical: It requires a whole second Site Team, and we, realistically, need to focus on doing Camp safely in-person in 2021. We did look into assigning registration times or attempting to guarantee slots per church, but the 3rd party registration software is not able to give us a reliable or fair way of administrating that.
Why Don’t You Do A Sr. High Week and a Jr. High Week?
We get asked this one a lot, and not only this year. The short answer is, in addition to the above, it would be a nightmare for youth leaders to organize a second trip, a second set of adults, a second van rental – and most of our youth leaders are bi-vocational. A second week off of work just isn’t a possibility. We’ve talked to many youth leaders about it, and it would only make their jobs harder, so we aren’t going to do it.
Can You Limit Camp Vineyard 2021 to Just Sr. High?
No, because that would mean this year’s 7th graders would have waited two extra years to go to Camp for the first time (missing 2020 and then 2021). We want to give parents and youth leaders the agency to make that call for themselves.
What Happens If a Camper or an Adult Volunteer Get COVID-19 Within 14 Days Prior to Camp?
Per our COVID guidelines in the Parent & Volunteer Pack, they would not be allowed to attend Camp Vineyard in that case. We would issue a 100% refund, per the medical/family emergencies clause of our refund policy. See the guidelines in that document for some other answers to other common COVID-related questions.
Will There Be a Camp Vineyard Online 2021?
We’re working on it! We have an initial plan to stream the Opening Session, Morning Thing, and Evening Sessions (internet connection allowing), and are brainstorming ideas to involve folks at home in Big Game and Neat! Groups. We learned a lot from 2020, and we’re going to apply that knowledge to 2021. No formal announcements just yet, but we’ve had some pretty exciting discussions – we just want to be sure we can pull that off while still maintaining the quality of the in-person event.
That’s it for now! We will be doing updates about every two weeks, unless something changes that requires an immediate release. Thank you for your grace and understanding. We can’t wait to get back to Camp!