Happy Trails for Kids offers L.A. Foster Kids a Summer Camp All Their Own

For the millions of American kids who get to go year after year, summer camp exists on its own special timeline: As you grow older, camp stays the same. Campfire songs are impossible to forget, and the lifelong memories retain a bonfire glow. For foster kids bouncing between homes, often separated from their siblings, nothing is that consistent. And a week of camp can make all the difference.

Happy Trails for Kids was founded 11 years ago with 60 kids, ages seven to 12, in its first summer – by Susan Abrams, a lawyer for children in foster care and now the policy director for the Children’s Law Center. Now, Happy Trails serves as many 400 campers starting at age seven through adulthood each year. Abrams had seen countless cases and knew how profoundly beneficial camp could be.

“I realized just working directly in the system that that was something really lacking for our clients,” Abrams says. “We came back after the summer and talked to our clients about what they did that summer — and it was a lot of nothing, or TV.”

Happy Trails for Kids prioritizes sibling reunification: They have a waitlist in the hundreds, but do everything they can to bring siblings who have been placed in different foster homes together at camp. 

“Even if that’s tracking down social workers and caregivers, sending Uber rides for registration, we make it work,” says Lindsay Elliott, Happy Trails for Kids executive director and a former child welfare lawyer herself. Seeing kids’ anxiety lift and their sense of belonging grow while settling into a cabin or being by the lake was exceptionally powerful, she recalls, after the pandemic made camp impossible.

It also reinforced the ongoing need for accessible virtual programming to keep campers consistently connected and engaged throughout the year. More than 100 campers return over the holidays for Winter Camp – a festive interlude from what’s often a lonely time of year in foster care. But now virtual hangouts make the reunions far more frequent. They’re an hour and fifteen minutes every Thursday, with a special guest (a pro athlete, a Disney Channel actor, a martial arts expert) and time for virtual mingling and games or crafts. In-person camp was able to pick back up in the summer of 2021 after being canceled the previous year, but the virtual hangouts continue. 

Happy Trails started offering junior counselorship to teenage campers five years ago, training campers to become counselors.

Carolina Wolf was referred to Happy Trails back in 2018 as she was aging out of foster care. Now, she and her siblings are counselors together every summer – role models for campers – affectionately known as the Wolf pack. And Carolina is now a full-time employee, overseeing the year-round Trails to Success program, which offers college readiness workshops for campers. There’s no “aging out” of Happy Trails for Kids.