Since 1970, Downtown Associated Youth Services has provided a free six-week Summer Day Camp for children and youth in Long Beach. Camp is open from 8:30 am until 2:00 pm Monday through Friday, starting the last week in June until the end of the first week in August. Because of the population we serve, pre-registration is not required, which means our total camp numbers are unknown until the end of the first or second day, although annual attendance is consistently above 200 per day. DAYS summer camp provides thematic field trips, art and craft classes, chess classes, computer classes and a nutritional program as well as daily enrichment activities. Our annual Summer Day Camp has been a program of concern and care to foster personal growth for children aged 4-17.

To meet the needs of the campers, over the last several years, we have partnered with several non-profits, The State of the Art (TSOAP), The Neighborhood/LaVencidad, and Long Beach Opera to name a few. Each summer we attempt to build our program around a theme. Our 2006 theme, “Widening Circles” gave the children an opportunity to explore their relationship within their family, their circle of friends, their community and the world. The 2007 theme, “People Who Rocked the World,” showed the children that ordinary people could make extraordinary contributions. In 2008, the summer theme of “Common Ground, the Interconnected World” established a framework for the children to see how everything in the world, from personal interactions between people to the interactions between disciplines such as art and science, is connected. Due to the success of our 2009 theme “So You Want To Be A Rock Star?” aiming to give campers a framework for planning their careers, we will revisit this theme once again.

Recently, we introduced Counselor-In-Training, a community service based program. This program helps prepare the youth for the job market by teaching responsible work standards and ethics, give them meaningful, supervised work experience and to help them lay a foundation for becoming responsible citizens. Many of our counselors have since graduated from the program and are now part of the summer day camp paid staff. In response to the increased needs of the children and youth, starting in the fall 2010, DAYS will launch an after school program targeted to middle school and high school youth.