Camp Kesem - it's three Duke students' attempt at waving their magic wand.
This summer, freshman Jeff Leibach and sophomores Yoav Lurie and John Rimel will lead a camp for children whose parents have had or are suffering from cancer - a plan that first developed in Tony Brown's Enterprising Leadership course last fall.
The course required the students to create and implement a student-run program. Now, the course is over and their grades are given, but Leibach, Rimel and Lurie are still working.
"It's really difficult to get a project up and running in one semester, and so after the class ends, it's easy to just drop the idea; you're no longer working for a grade," said Brown, a professor of the practice of public policy. "To stay with it takes pure intrinsic motivation, and these boys stayed with it."
Camp Kesem - a program whose name comes from the Hebrew word for magic - originated in the spring of 2000 with the Hillel group at Stanford University. Another branch arose at the University of Notre Dame last spring. Now, Leibach, Rimel and Lurie - who is also a Chronicle photographer - aim to expand the program to Duke.
At first, the project seemed difficult. The goal of the camp is to give back to the children of cancer patients a bit of the carefree childhood that they can miss out on because of the financial implications and the trauma of dealing with a sick parent.
To accomplish their objective, the three Duke students started small with frequent meetings and brainstorming sessions, and gradually built the camp up from there.
"You have so much to do with classes, and this idea has so much work around it, that you can really get overwhelmed and down about making it work," Leibach said. "But then little things begin to fall into place, you build a momentum and you can just get over the hardness."
The date for the camp has been set for August 3-10, when 40 children aged six to 13 will come from all parts of the state to sleep over at Umstead State Park in Raleigh, N.C. The counselors, about 20 in all, will spend the week leading campers in swimming, canoeing, archery, arts and crafts, not to mention the little things like bonfires - clearly this is a Duke-run program.
Alongside the three students, various organizations around campus have already stepped forward in helping Camp Kesem take shape. ARAMARK - the dining service that runs many campus eateries - has agreed to supply food to the camp at a discount. And Rachel Schanberg, director and founder of the Duke Cancer Patient Support Program, has helped locate counselors and nurses who will provide professional assistance during the camp session.
"[Schanberg] has told us that there is no doubt in her mind that she can easily fill up the spaces we have for campers," Leibach explained. With this in mind, the students have already made sure that the campgrounds have the space to allow an expansion of campers from 40 to 100, should they be able to accommodate more children next year.
From the start, the three students knew they did not want the camp to cost children's parents a cent. That means the current challenge is coming up with money - $25,000.
"While the boys have the curriculum worked out (the location, the dates, and so on), they now need to raise the money to make it a go," Brown said, adding that this will be hard but feasible.
As part of the project, the three entrepreneurs came up with a 25-page business plan for Camp Kesem, researched and applied for grants, put up fliers and designed pledge cards for the Duke Hospital lobby. "Just working on all these parts of the camp is great. I can't imagine what it will be like when it actually happens in August," Rimel said.
In the end, the only secret behind the magic of Leibach, Lurie and Rimel is the determination to help everyone fighting cancer - including the children who, at least for one week of their summer, can go back to being the carefree kids they deserve to be.
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