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You Can Mentor is a network that equips and encourages mentors and mentoring leaders through resources and relationships to love God, love others, and make disciples in their own community. We want to see Christian mentors thrive.
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Zach:You can mentor.
Randy:On today's episode of the You Can Mentor podcast, I am with Randy Odom from Kids Across America or KAA camps. Randy has been working with kids since 1988. Man, that is almost forty years of serving kids in urban youth settings. Randy's the man, and you are going to learn so much from this podcast. Great stories, tips.
Randy:You're gonna leave equipped and encouraged. Like I said, Randy is with Kids Across America, which is in Missouri. Their vision is to transform urban youth to impact their communities for Christ. Their mission is to build Christian leaders by encouraging, equipping, and empowering urban youth and their mentors through camping and education. KAA started in 1978.
Randy:It is a Christian sports camp committed to transforming urban youth with the gospel. They do so using sports and urban arts as a platform to share the gospel with youth and their leaders from all across the country. It opened up in 1991. In 1995, they started their second camp, and they have just impacted a remarkable amount of kids in the name of Jesus. So learn more about KAA.
Randy:Find them on social media or on their website. But I'm so excited for you to learn from Randy Odom, and I just know it's gonna be a blessing. So share it with your team, with your volunteers. You can mentor. Alright.
Randy:Welcome to the You Can Mentor podcast. This is Zach, and I am with Randy Odom from KAA. Randy, say hello, my friend. Hey. How are you?
Randy:How are you? Good to see you. Man, anytime I get to talk to someone from Kids Across America, it's a good day, Randy. So Hey. You know.
Randy:You know. Right? Man, so I, I've been involved with KAA for quite some time now. And if I'm, you know, being honest with you, as I was kinda starting out in my not for profit mentoring kinda journey, I mean, k KAA really is a staple. Like, just an amazing place where you can send your kids, and they can have fun.
Randy:They can, you know, have that out outdoor camp experience in a safe place where they're gonna hear about Jesus and where they're gonna be, surrounded by counselors who love them, who kinda might have the same story as them. And it is it is just a special place. So I'm super excited to hear more about Kids Across America, KAA today. But first off, Randy, I would just really love to hear about you and your story and who you are and all of that good stuff.
Speaker 3:Well, man, I'm honored to be here, and really, excited to just partner in some kingdom work with you, man. Yeah, I wouldn't be, I don't know where I'd be without mentors in my life. So I grew up in Dallas, I grew up in West Texas, shuttled back and forth, and early on, I was adopted and I was in a home that really wasn't positive Christian environment. It wasn't a good environment for me, but I had a basketball coach. I had mentors who were in my life.
Speaker 3:And so, during high school, I had a coach who was a Christ follower and he played a huge part in me coming to Christ. And then I went to college and I had a basketball coach at Oklahoma Baptist, coach Bob Hoffman. And he said, Man, think you should go work at this camp. They just started this camp for urban kids, it's Christ based and you'll learn a lot. And I said, No, coach, I don't wanna go to camp.
Speaker 3:I don't know about the woods. And at that time I said, Man, I wanna hang out with no kids. I don't know, I was trying to play ball and go to school. And he said, Man, if you don't go to this camp, I'm gonna cut your scholarship. Because he knew I would go back home and I wouldn't do well.
Speaker 3:And so I came to Kids Across America and as a freshman in college in 'ninety three, and it had been open for two years. And it was the first place that I saw people who looked like me, who played sports, who really I saw people who, while they weren't perfect, they were authentic. And it was there, I'll never forget, Zach, I was taking these kids to go to fishing, to do some fishing, and I reached down, I picked up a piece of grass and I put it in my mouth, just messing around. And I turned around and all of those little boys were reaching down, picking up a piece of grass, putting in their mouth. And that was a God moment for me.
Speaker 3:I felt like God said, you know, that's leadership, that's mentorship. But up until this point in my life, I'd only mentored or led somebody in anything that was, it was all about me. And so, that moment, I realized, and I really got to reflect on the mentors that had been in my life. And those 10 little boys, I was their coach now, I was their mentor, and it just made my why to live for Christ and to impact kids larger than myself. And so I knew I wanted to be in that environment.
Speaker 3:I love sports, God turned my heart to him and to the kids. And so I spent the next seven, eight years at KA. I lived in Memphis and I worked for Urban Ministry there. I met my wife, Kalandria at KA, and I have one son, Enoch, he's 20 years old. But God used KA to put me into an environment that was conducive for me to grow, And it put me into an environment where I was in college and I had a mentor, Stephen Moore, Eric Williams, some of the Marvin Daniels, some of the originators of KA, they were my mentors.
Speaker 3:They were the people I looked up to when I had an issue in school, I called them. And so, it's no surprise that God kind of led me back here about five years ago, just to My heart was always at camp. And as you know, you've been there. Camp is a great place to begin a mentor relationship. It's a great place to kind of encourage, equip, and empower relationships that you might have.
Speaker 3:So even with the kids, I'm big on peer to peer mentoring too. So yeah, camp was a place that God kind of used to put it all together for me, and I just wanted to be I wanted to keep doing that same type of work. And so, yeah, I've been I've been doing urban ministry for about thirty years, and and camping's been been the majority of that.
Randy:Man, it's almost like the two of us have very similar stories, Randy. I mean, you know, I'm a big guy, played some basketball, had a coach, you know, who invested into me, invited me to go to a men's, little bible study, invited me to go work at a camp. Mhmm. And, man, that's where God transformed my life. And there's something special about the camp environment.
Randy:There's something special about getting away that the Lord can really just do amazing work in a short amount of time. And it's, I don't get it. I don't understand it, but I've seen it happen time and time and time again. And so, man, I'm I'm I'm so, I'm just really excited about what you guys are up to and just the amount of kids who have been not only positively impacted by KAA, but transformed. I mean, you wouldn't be here today.
Randy:You wouldn't know your wife. You wouldn't have a like, your life is centered around KAA. And it's not necessarily the brand KAA. It's a special place where you got to see what a godly father looked like. You got to see what a godly man looked like.
Randy:You you got to tangibly look at a man who looked like you, who had the same story as you and said, I can be like that. Yes. Yes. And then that is a that's a special thing. And so I don't know.
Randy:I'm just getting all jazzed up just talking about it. But Come on. Yeah. Okay. So
Speaker 3:We like to say you will you will become what you behold. You will be what you see. But if you don't see that, how can you be that? You know? Yeah.
Randy:And in a time today where I feel like, you know, it's the simultaneous rise of the wheat in the weeds. Right? And so, like, we more than ever need godly mentors, which I guess is why the two of us are on on a podcast talking about
Speaker 3:talking about mentoring. But Yeah. I lived in for about twenty years, and, I love that city, but I also got to see what the absence of mentors does. So that's one reason I wanted to be on the You Can Mentor podcast. I wanted to be here with you today because I think, I firmly believe that government programs, church programs, it's the mentoring relationship that will bring hope to the young men and the young women in cities that have no hope.
Speaker 3:It's that mentoring relationship. It's not a program, but it's a person who takes their time to invest, love on, challenge, coach in, coach up someone of a younger generation. And so, yeah, when you called me and gave me the opportunity to be here, I said, Yes, no way I won't be. Because I think what you're doing and the message that you're sending, you can't say it loud enough to the generations of young people who are coming up today, Right? Because now their cell phone has been torn down.
Speaker 3:When they need they need someone, they need a person to step up alongside of them. And so, yeah, I'm a I'm a I'm a huge advocate.
Randy:Man, so just like, you know, over the last ten or fifteen years with you doing your work up in Memphis, with you doing KA, just kinda try to paint the picture of what you're seeing today in regards to our youth. Like, what are they experiencing? Where are some of
Speaker 3:the gaps? And what can we do to best love and serve them? Yeah. I think COVID, you know, COVID played a huge piece. In Memphis, everything shut down.
Speaker 3:There was no school. So you had kids who were who were tied to a screen for eight hours, seven hours a day, lost that personal interaction. And I think out of COVID that you still have that, they're tied to their cell phones. You have a generation that's being mentored by YouTube and by Instagram and TikTok. I think they're missing that personal connection.
Speaker 3:I see that when I go to certain college campuses or I go to high schools and I speak, and then I ask them, Do you have any questions? Do you have any insight to share? And they'll look at me with blank stares. And it's not that they don't, it's that they lack that skill to ask that question in that setting because they weren't. I also think, and this is a multilayered topic, but I think some of the things I see is now mental health is huge, which I agree with, but sometimes what I see in young people is they'll take the diagnosis and that becomes who they are, It's not that I have ADHD, so I can't focus, and that's who I am.
Speaker 3:And they'll take it and internalize it. And I think one of the things mentorship allows a person to do is to do hard things well. And so without that mentor, without that caring, loving adult in their life, they'll own that diagnosis and say, that's what I am and I can't get any better and I can't achieve victory or I can't overcome these obstacles and they tend to live out that. And so I just think I think that the absence of mentorship has created a generation that is looking for that in every other thing, but but a Christ like mentor, you know? And you see that you see that in youth violence, you see it in suicide, you see it in you you see it throughout our culture.
Speaker 3:I just think because the it's the lack of a caring adult and and the child knowing that they have that that resource in their life.
Randy:That that makes me think, like, one, it is it is not good for man to be alone. Right? Exactly. And Jesus came for the one. Jesus came for the three.
Randy:Jesus came for the 12. I mean, he did and, yeah, he went and he spoke and he did all these things, but most of his time was with a small group of people. You're right. Yes. And just the power of that one on one, the power of the small group.
Randy:I mean, if it worked for him, it transformed the world, it transformed, us, then I think that that's a pretty good model. You know what I'm saying? So
Speaker 3:Oh, the best. He called the 12 that they might be with him. And then he sent them out two by two. So he was already about community. He was already about mentorship, discipleship, in the Jewish culture, the rabbi and and and the disciples.
Speaker 3:So, I mean, I think we get it we get messed up when we try to change that and do something different. Yeah. Man, so, I mean, I have
Randy:a heart for kids who have experienced hard things, certain kinds of traumas. I mean, whether it's, going to a tough school, growing up without a dad around, you know, socioeconomic, race. I mean, just the obstacles that our kids are facing today. I mean, first and foremost, we got life is hard, period. End of story.
Randy:When you start adding some of these things on, I'm like, man, I like, there's a kid who I'm talking to, and he goes to a tough school, and he has a dad in jail. And, you know, he deals with the race stuff. He deals with all of the poverty stuff. And he's got an uncle who's, you know, up to no good. And I'm just looking at him, and I'm like, man, you got a lot of obstacles.
Randy:And then, right, like, you have to be trained up to know how to love and care for that person well. You have to know how to to talk to them. Your heart has to be filled with compassion. Your heart has to be filled with just, like, a bunch of grace. And so tell me how do you train up, and how do you best prepare your counselors and other people to serve our kids well?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we we take that very seriously. We We have three camps, elementary, middle, and high school, and then we have a leadership camp called Higher Ground. So each one of them, the DNA is the same, but the approach might be different. There's a difference between a nine year old and a 12 year old.
Speaker 3:I mean a nine year old and a 17 or 18 year old. But in general, we'll go through about eight hours of trauma care, of trauma training. Hear some horrendous stuff from these kids and it touches your heart. So, this summer, we're providing an online portal for our staff to get counseling once they're working with the kids. But one of the things we are big on connection, And you said it earlier, camp is a place where you build connection.
Speaker 3:Number one, at our camp, because you don't have a cell phone and you're out of the woods, but you're in a place where you're gonna be uncomfortably comfortable. Right? Our kids in the city, they've never seen the stars because in the city, the city lights drown them out. But at KA, you can go up, you can look at the stars. Some of them never seen it.
Speaker 3:They never experience quiet, right? Because in the city, there's always noise. But one of the things we wanna train our counselors on is when a child, when a young person trusts you enough to tell you something, you have to handle it a certain way. We call it carrying the water. So, if they're gonna trust you to carry their water, you gotta make sure you don't spill it all over the place, right?
Speaker 3:You have to earn that trust, and we do that through sports, we do it through relationship. You know, there's power in If you're an athlete, but I say I'm a recovering athlete because I'm 55, so my body don't work like that no more. But when somebody put coach on your name, that meant something. It does something. And so we wanna train our staff to, number one, we know we're not trained counselors.
Speaker 3:So one thing about Kay is we have the group leaders who are there who work with the kids year round. So we use them as a knowledge base. We draw them in. We wanna counsel a kid or talk to a kid without this group leader who knows them, has been with them during the year. But we wanna be able to handle tone, tag, and timing, right?
Speaker 3:We want our tone to be right. We want how we say things. Even in the face of when a kid's frustrated, It's so cool to see a kid come to camp, and because they're not used to it, like I had a young person, a young guy from East LA, never been to KA before, never this blew my mind, Zach. Lives in East LA, but never saw the ocean that's ten minutes from his house. But comes to camp, and it was a hard adjustment.
Speaker 3:And you see kids the first couple days, I hate this camp, I hate this camp. And by the end of the week, they're crying, talking about, I don't wanna go home, or you're saying, I love you. But we had this kid, and I got to sit with him, and he angry. He was frustrated. He had gone off on counselor, gone off on his Kaleo, and we're sitting there, and it's pretty late at night, and I drive by and I see what's happening, so I get out of my little cart, and we teach, it's called a redirection technique.
Speaker 3:So he's sitting there and I happened to notice a raccoon, his red eyes, a raccoon was not far from us, and he was going off and I said, Hey man, you ever seen a raccoon? He just kind of looked at me like, Number one, why are you asking me that question in the middle of this? He goes, No. And I said, Oh really? Because there's one right there.
Speaker 3:And he looked, and we just redirected him from the anger, redirected him from those emotions, and we train our staff, if a kid is activated and he's angered, it's probably gonna take about thirteen minutes for those hormones to come down. So I knew we had some time, and so he saw the raccoon, we started talking, and I said, Hey man, you wanna go see some more? You wanna see something cool? He said, Yeah. So I put his group leader, his Kaleo, that's what we call him, and I put him on my golf cart, and we drove up.
Speaker 3:Now, guess because I'm the president, I can do this, but I took him over to where our dumpster is, and there's 45 raccoons living there, or at night, they all go there. And so I pulled up with my lights off, turned the lights on, all these raccoons run everywhere. He's like, Ah! He's yelling, and it was a great little moment, and then immediately, I had this little bluey, like a little toy somebody gave me hanging on my golf cart, and I said, Hey, you want that? And he said, Nah, man, that's for little kids.
Speaker 3:And I said, Okay, and then he said, Can I have it? And so I took it down. Now he's probably 14, 15. He was at high school camp, so he's gotta be 15. So I give it to him, immediately he starts crying.
Speaker 3:Turns to his group leader, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so angry. And it's because he's been in foster care most of his life. And we just redirected him, and then, man, he ended up having one of the best weeks. And so the following last two years, I have been to East LA, to his neighborhood, to where he comes with the East LA Jujitsu, and we got to go see them where they live. Right?
Speaker 3:And they because we said, we want to come see you. We want to understand where you come from. And so those are some of the things, and that's a real life story of what God does, but those are some of the ways we train our staff. We're constantly evaluating. We're doing pros and grows every week to go, what worked, what didn't, what did you see?
Speaker 3:But we know the behavior tells a story, and we want to connect. Right? That's the goal of of what we do at camp. We wanna connect so that we can impact in a positive way. Man,
Randy:that's an amazing story. And that that is one that he might remember. I'm gonna bet that he will remember for the rest of his life. Anytime he sees a raccoon, you know, he's gonna think back to KA.
Speaker 3:We we communicate on social media, and we laugh about that. And I'm telling you, probably be out to camp, he'll be out to camp this year, but he went from, Why am I here? To, Now I can't wait to get back. And I don't really think it's not about the swimming pools, it's not about the the water slides. It's not about that we have all this stuff to do.
Speaker 3:It's really about the people that can connect, show love, and then speak life. Right? Like, you you said it earlier. You're not the trauma. You're not your what happened to you.
Speaker 3:You you that doesn't have to define you. It can impact you. It can help you or hinder you, but it's not who you are.
Randy:Okay. So let's talk about Kaleos. Okay? So the thing that was really, really kinda stood out to me whenever I first experienced KAA was this. Most camps, you send kids, and the kids show up, and they might know a couple people.
Randy:But for the most part, they don't know any of the counselors. They don't know any of the staff, and it takes a couple days. Right? Right. If you do that with kids who experience trauma, I mean, it takes them longer to trust.
Randy:It takes them longer to open up, which makes total sense. What I love about the Kaleo is the kid doesn't come by themselves. Yeah. But the kid comes with the group leader. And if I'm not mistaken, you can't come unless you come with some kind of adult leader.
Randy:Right? Isn't that right? Right. Right. So so you've got not only the kids who are being mentored by these counselors who are younger, who are cool, who, you know, might have had some of the same experiences as them, but then you've got the people who are investing into them all day, every week, every year, people that they know, people who have rapport with them, people who know their story, who are also there.
Randy:And so it is just this amazing environment of hospitality where the kids are being mentored by the counselors, the kids are still connecting with their Kaleos, with their people who they know and love, and y'all invest into the Kaleos. You make sure that they have a good week, that they get rest, that they get interaction with other people who are serving so that they leave filled up. And so everyone's getting, everyone's receiving something when they come to KAA, and, I just love that. So tell me more about the Kaleo and why y'all invest in to those who invest in, in kiddos.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So many years ago, doctor Renee Rochester, she she's one of the, just founding leaders of urban ministry, helped start K. She had a vision for the group leaders. We know that on average, an urban youth worker is only gonna Average lifespan of an urban youth worker's three years, two and a half now. And so, we knew to have longevity, needed to give those youth workers a bubble bath in Jesus.
Speaker 3:We need to give them a place where they can rest, a place where they can have life spoken into them, a place where they can be a kid too. You know, go swim and do treetops, play some sports. And so, we created a program where we equip, we encourage, and we empower them. And we try to put tools in their toolbox. We try to do marriage seminars.
Speaker 3:We do some financial literacy. We also do, Hey, how do you do development? What are some strategies that work for us? Do you need curriculum that you're working for with your kids? Okay, we'll post it online.
Speaker 3:We'll share everything that we have with you, and we'll help create curriculum because we knew that youth leaders work with the kids. We get the kids three sixty day we get them five days, they're with them three sixty. So we wanted to build into them and just create longevity and give them a place where they can get poured into, like you said. One of the interesting things is since 2019, we hire about 400 college students during the summer, and over 100 of those staff are former campers. So we made an effort to call Kaleos and say, Hey, instead of us going to a college and recruiting, do you have anybody in your ministry that if you're 16, we can hire you at camp to be a junior counselor, to work in other jobs.
Speaker 3:But we've hired over a hundred a hundred of our counselors and staff are former campers. And that does wonders because the counselor or the person in the kitchen or the office, they were a camper. They can speak to that. They have that experience. And then those campers who go back home, they know somebody from their neighborhood who works at KA.
Speaker 3:And so, just wanted to create a continuum of youth ministry and of service. But the backbone for KA is the Kaleo program. So during the year, I have a team of probably about three full time people and a host of other volunteers, and they travel the nation going to seek Kaleos, going to seek kids, going to do little pop ups with them to encourage them, to give them curriculum, to just sit with them around a round table, share a meal and catch up, but also to keep that relational equity with them. And so, yeah, the Kaleo program is vast. This summer, I'll probably have over 400 to 500 group leaders throughout the summer at camp.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, it is the backbone of what we do, and we really wanna we wanna train up the kids who come to higher ground to return to their community as a Kaleo, as a mentor. We take the kids from higher ground in their first year, and they adopt a cabin, and they become a junior counselor in the cabin. So then when they go home, we can tell the Kaleo, if little Randy was at higher ground and he was a junior counselor here, then he can help you mentor. He help you in that space. And so we wanna make everything applicable so we can create a workforce to go back into the city and help those Kaleos in their work.
Speaker 3:And
Randy:I just love that. It reminds me of that second Timothy two two. Right? Like, it's you know, it reminds me of that follow me as I follow Christ. But but you're investing into the workers because you know that the harvest is plenty, but the workers are few, especially in urban kinds of ministries.
Randy:Like, I I mean, I think that when you hear that the average person who works with our kids last three years. Right? And then you step back and take a look at the at our kids who have issues with opening up issues, you know, giving faith, giving all of their trust, that is that just doesn't work. And so how how can we help people serve in their community for the long haul in a healthy way? How can we take care of them?
Randy:And that is the CALEO program. So, I mean, I
Speaker 3:just love that. They get to come to camp for a week just like the kids. We fun, you know, and cost effective. That's another thing. You know, Average cost for a camp in America overnight is $2,500 a week.
Speaker 3:We drive our cost down to about $1,400 but we only charge $225 That way a Kaleo You know, Zach, most Kaleos are working another job. They're bivocational. And so, we wanna make it cost effective so there's no barriers to get them to camp to help them do another five, ten years of ministry.
Randy:Yeah. Okay, Randy. So talk us through the actual camp experience. You know? What is like, what does it look like day to day?
Randy:Talk about the crosstalk. Talk about the, you know, I am third award, just all of that stuff. If someone chooses to engage with KA, what can they expect?
Speaker 3:Well, so when when you come to camp, we we have a term called fast to fun. Right? We're gonna so kids come on on Sunday afternoon around 01:00. We and we have buses, vans, they all come, and we don't want you to sit on the bus, so we're gonna pull your luggage off, no kid's gonna touch luggage, we're gonna pull it off, we're gonna get you acclimated, registered into camp, and the kids are gonna go to a pool party immediately. They're gonna go fast and fun.
Speaker 3:Basketball, pool party, first night, we're gonna have parties every night, a program, whether that's elementary, it might be a superhero party, it might be Christmas in July, It might be a pirate party. Whatever, we're gonna have a party for them, a color war. We're have a party for them every night, but every day, they're gonna have classes. Now, elementary camp, they go to classes as a cabin. They stay together.
Speaker 3:Right? A nine year old, they can't just go everywhere because they'll end up somewhere else. So, go as a cabin. Everybody else kinda does like junior high school. They choose their classes, and they go to their classes.
Speaker 3:So, they're gonna go to classes, class fifty five minutes long, but if they're at archery, they're gonna shoot archery. Our counselors are trained. Our counselors do ten days of training before the kids get there, but every class has a gospel thread. So, if I'm at archery and I'm shooting archery, we say, Hey, what's the goal of archery? To hit the bull's eye.
Speaker 3:Well, sin misses the bull's eye. The gospel hits the bull's eye. If you're on the tube and you're going on the lake, we're on the lake, you're on the tube and the waves are coming, and the boat is where safety is, well, Jesus is the rope. He connects you to God. And if that rope breaks, man, you're gonna be out there in those waves, so you gotta keep the contact intact with the rope to God.
Speaker 3:Jesus is the rope. And so, use those teachable moments and those nuggets to illustrate the gospel. The kids go to class from seven in the morning to ten at night. They're gonna be in class, they're gonna have fun. It's just gonna be constant activity.
Speaker 3:They're gonna be tired, so we give them what we call flat on back, FOB. They have a rest time every day. They have an hour rest time, but we're gonna pack that day with so much fun, high treetops course, sports, the swimming pool. We got huge swimming pools. We can fit 200 people in our swimming pool.
Speaker 3:So, it's just gonna be fun, but it's all gonna be gospel focused, and it's all gonna be urban in nature. So, we're gonna take the urban culture, and we're gonna gospel it. So, you're gonna hear Christian hip hop. We don't play any secular music. We take everyone's phone, so we force them to unplug.
Speaker 3:Everything's a competition. How hype you can get, do you have energy? You're gonna compete on how do you clean your cabin up the best? Who has the most energy at lunch? When you do play sports against another cabin, do you have a good attitude?
Speaker 3:Did y'all win? Were you Christ like? And so we're gonna look for a couple things. I'm third. God first, others second, I'm third.
Speaker 3:We look for those kids who are selfless, but these are kind of the three things we started to focus on. Number one, we're gonna teach our kids to do hard things well, because camp's hard. They're gonna go from no schedule to schedule. They're out in a new place, that's hard. And we wanna teach them to do hard things well, and camp's fun, but it is hard.
Speaker 3:Number two, we're gonna have them in a Bible study that's gonna teach them how to study God's word in the context it was written, so they can apply it where they live. A lot of times, if you grew up in the environments we grew up in, you just go, Man, God, why didn't you let me grow up in this environment? It's hard. Don't you care about me? Well, we want to teach kids that God does care about you, and that's why He puts you there, and you can be a light to your community, and that He's never left you or forsake you.
Speaker 3:So the way we teach Bible study is gonna be wrapped up in their culture, but it's gonna be Biblically correct. We're gonna share the gospel all day, every day. And number two, we're gonna put them in an environment where they build relationship. So, if you have kids from Dallas come from one group, and you got kids from, say, East LA or Memphis, we split all of them up, and we kinda shuffle the deck and put them together. So, you got kids from Little Rock with kids from Des Moines, Iowa, they're gonna learn to build relationship.
Speaker 3:And then, one night in camp, the fourth night at camp, we do what's called a crosstalk, and we've changed it over the years because we recognize that there's some trauma out there, so we wanna take it and make you be sensitive to the age group, elementary, middle, or high school, but we're gonna take a story of what the kids deal with, real life issues, and we're gonna gospel it. So it might be a kid from a broken home. It might be a kid from abusive situation. It might be a kid who has experienced divorce, but we're gonna take the gospel. And so it's a play.
Speaker 3:It's like a movie or a play, a skit. When actors start talking about the situations and problems they have, in that skit, somewhere along the line, it's gonna be, Well, we should pray, or What does God think about that? Well, then instead of having them pray to Jesus, they're gonna pray, but then Jesus is gonna come out and have a conversation with them. So the kids can see how prayer works or how the gospel works. And then we call the group leaders to come up, and all we do is ask the kids, if God is working in your heart, come up to the front of the arena or wherever we're having it, and talk to your group leader.
Speaker 3:It's not the counselors that stand up there. We want the group leaders who've been working with the kids to be there to simply respond to whatever's going on in that kid's heart. You see a lot of tears, you see a lot of brokenness, you see a lot of tears of joy. I think because the group leaders who invested and poured into and built these kids, the group leaders, the Kaleos who have mentored them, now get to see, like you said before, the fruits of their labor, the fruits of God's labor in that camping moment. And so that's one thing, we wanna give that special moment to the kid and his mentor and his group leader, and not the counselor.
Speaker 3:We're just there to kinda facilitate that and let that work. And so, we have parties every night. We're gonna have a Vespers Awards. The last night, every kid's gonna get an award, but it's not an award like in basketball. This is gonna be an award where we saw the counselors write these out, handwritten.
Speaker 3:We saw your character. You have high character, you had integrity, you were honest, you showed determination. We're gonna back that up with scripture, but we're gonna give those young people a certificate and an award from their cabin, from their classes. Been this is so crazy. I've been places and seen kids who were in high school have on their wall their character quality from KA fifteen years later.
Speaker 3:I did a prison ministry in Memphis, and I went to Tennessee Department of Corrections, and the guy in the cell who's grown had his Kids Across America certificate on his wall. I said, Why'd you keep that? I said, Man, you're in prison, what happened? He said, Man, that's one of the first times somebody said something positive about me, and I never forgot it. I didn't know how to be that, but I kept it.
Speaker 3:And so, those things are huge, and we wanna give every kid the opportunity to have life spoken to him, right, in a meaningful way. And so, what we try to say, the thing that I kind of coined is, God takes kids from everywhere out to the middle of nowhere to meet somebody who loves them more than anybody, and that's Jesus Christ. And so, our mission is to put them back on the bus and have them so excited they can't wait to come back next year, and have their cups overflowing with encouragement and love, all cultivated by this crock pot of urban hip hop, Christian, fun, excitement, and and hope.
Randy:Man, Randy, that's a it's a perfect picture of KA, man. It's a special place, and so very thankful that you were able to tell our audience about it today. Tell tell people how they can find out more, man. Man, you can
Speaker 3:go to our website, kidscrossAmerica.org. Man, you can go to the website. You it'll have all the information. Man, you could email me at randykacamps dot org, and you know what? You can even call me at (901) 412-9446.
Speaker 3:Listen, I'm the president, but that's just the title, man. I serve here, I want to be available. So once again, you can go to our website. We're on all platforms, social media, Instagram, Facebook, and above all, just pray for us. Right?
Speaker 3:This year, we have 200 more group leaders than we had last year, and we're almost at 4,500 kids, which when COVID hit, we went to zero. So, we have more kids than we've had in the last few years. We're hiring more staff. So, just be in prayer for us. And, man, above all, too, if you got some kids or a ministry and you want them to come to KA, reach out to us because we don't want anything to stand in the way of any kids coming to KA.
Randy:That's good, Randy. It's a good place, man. Been. I've experienced it. I'm grateful.
Randy:So thanks a lot
Speaker 3:for You got an invite to come anytime you want. Anytime. We'll host. Man, I've been talking to Sue. And so And you should come up there and do your podcast one time up there.
Speaker 3:That'd be that'd be that'd be nice.
Randy:Oh, man. I would love that. Got an invite. Thanks, Randy. Alright, guys.
Randy:Hey. Thanks so much for tuning in to the You Can Mentor podcast. Remember this, that you can mentor. It doesn't take a superhero. It doesn't take an all star.
Randy:You just gotta show up in the life of a kid and be like Jesus. So have a great day. Thanks for tuning in. Give us that five star. Share it with your staff, your volunteers, all of that good stuff.
Randy:You can mentor. See you. Thanks for tuning in to the You
Zach:Can Mentor podcast. Give us that five star rating and share this podcast with your mentoring friends. Learn more at youcanmentor.com. Thank you.