Resources to Train Your Counselors and Staff
Moving Traditions offers three distinct CultureShift trainings for professionals of summer camps or teen travel experiences to utilize when they train their staff.
Each of these three training sessions is designed to be run in full in 75 minutes and will help your staff members – particularly your first-time staff members – to better understand their responsibilities when working with Jewish teens.
Did you miss our informational webinar on March 29?
Register to view a recording of our webinar and learn more about our training units on “Embodied Consent-Modeling Healthy Boundaries,” “Gender and Wellbeing for Every Teen,” and “Hugs and Hook-Ups: Supporting Healthy Summer Relationships.”
CultureShift Session Options:
Boundaries, Communication, and Consent
This session addresses the question:
How do we maintain the playful freedom and physical “closeness” of Jewish camps and travel experiences while ensuring that staff and participants respect one another’s personal boundaries?
Moving Traditions’ embodied consent education training session combines elements of bystander intervention skills, assertiveness and empowerment training, and dance education, to help staff and participants of all genders understand the underlying dynamics of power and consent and learn how to set and respect boundaries. Through a series of games and movement exercises that can be run in less than an hour, participants experience:
- Maintaining awareness of personal space and respecting the space of others.
- Making a safe and boundary-aware physical connection with someone else in a consensual way.
- Reading the body language and facial expressions of others.
- Evading or escaping unwanted touch.
- Disrupting others when necessary.
- Discussing consent and social responsibility.
The curriculum includes a Jewish educational framing focused on healthy boundaries, positive relationships, and being an upstander. This is a great session to train your staff and it is a session that your staff members can lead for preteens and teens.
Gender and Wellbeing for All Teens
This session addresses the question:
How are participants of different genders experiencing safety and wellbeing in immersive summer programs and what can be done to make those experiences better?
During adolescence, navigating gender and learning when to fit in and when to stand out are top of mind. In this session, we will look at how pre-teens and teens are interacting with the changing world of gender codes, norms, expression, identity, and language and discuss ways to create more inclusive environments for all teens. We will discuss the experiences of boys, girls, trans and non-binary teens. Participants will:
- Map how and where gender shows up in terms of activities and relationships.
- Examine the landscape of gender codes, norms, and expression that teens are redefining, and why this matters for supporting teens from an adolescent wellness approach.
- Better understand the role of language in expressing and affirming gender.
- Experience tools to have inclusive and affirming conversations with teens about gender identity.
- Explore the Jewish framing for an expansive understanding of gender.
Healthy Relationships and Sexuality
This session explores the question:
What is the role of staff in supporting healthy summer relationships?
Even when staff effectively communicate the boundaries regarding sexual encounters, some teens are going to find ways to make-out or hook-up. It is also inevitable that staff will become aware of some of these encounters, and that, in some cases, teens will turn to staff for help navigating the ups and down of relationships or dealing with more crisis situations that arise. How can staff be better prepared for these situations, so that they understand what is helpful and what is potentially harmful? In this session, we will use games, videos from the CultureShift video series, prompts and Jewish wisdom to explore how staff actions can positively or negatively impact the culture of immersive summer experiences around hooking up and healthy relationships. Staff will be encouraged to practice various responses that decrease the social pressure in real-life situations that they may find themselves in with the participants in their care. This session is for staff of any level who interact with youth.
Participants will:
- Explore their role in creating a healthy culture around sexuality and hookups.
- Understand how to appropriately support participants on their individual journeys towards healthy relationships.
- Discuss the obstacles to reporting breaches of culture and appreciate their part in holding one another accountable.
Camps and travel programs that partner with Moving Traditions will have access to all three trainings, the guided overview, and implementation support from our Moving Traditions’ trainers. For an additional fee Moving Traditions’ trainers will train your staff online or in-person.
New for 2023: Teen Groups at Camp
Moving Traditions’ Teen Groups – Rosh Hodesh for girls, Shevet for boys, and Tzelem for LGBTQ+, nonbinary, and gender-expansive teens – are ongoing mentor-led programs designed to develop many of the protective factors that mental health experts recommend for supporting adolescent wellbeing.
The eight-part curriculum that we have designed for summer camps builds Jewish identity and offers teens tools that help them with relationships, responsibilities, and finding meaning during adolescence. Youth are led through a dynamic curriculum of structured activities, personal reflections, and guided conversations. The curriculum can be used for bunk programs, for an opt-in space for teen campers who want to “dive deep” into what shapes their identities and relationships or be integrated into your existing teen or counselor-in-training program.