The goal is to remove distractions so there’s nothing between the camper or guest’s heart and the love of Christ.
The Renew Campaign Cascades is a 1,000-acre campus, employing 20 full- time staff and 65 summer staff who help us maintain 575 year-round guest beds. Before COVID-19, we recognized the need to upgrade two main areas at our property: our staff housing and three of our oldest guest lodges. Before what we called the Renew Campaign, we
had been using five RVs as permanent staff housing. We were making it work, but it certainly wasn’t an ideal space for our staff to call home. Tere were portions of our guest lodges that hadn’t
been updated in quite a while. Te fixtures were outdated, rooms hadn’t been painted and they were generally tired and in less-than-ideal condition. We had a goal of $750,000, which was raised via
major donors, a foundation grant and individual donors over a couple of years. Our goals for the Renew Campaign were ultimately pretty simple. Troughout the guest lodges, we replaced old furniture with new pieces, invested in new mattresses throughout, replaced the outdated fixtures and installed new car- pet and flooring, painted everything, swapped out old appliances for newer ones, deep cleaned (and deep cleaned again). A local contractor built tiny houses for our staff.
We would phase out one RV by moving that staff member out after rolling the new tiny house in, then repeated that for all five units.
All of our renovations and updates were planned
out across a detailed six-month timeframe, and dur- ing this process, we only had to shift one guest group to another lodge while we finished work on the building they were scheduled to use. (We upgraded them to a larger facility, so they didn’t experience much disruption in the switch.) The pandemic pro- vided a bit of a silver lining in this regard because we didn’t have to reschedule or cancel any guest groups to finish all the updates. One of the greatest benefits of the Renew Campaign
was the assessment we did with cleaning products and procedures. Ours was guided by our food supplier (who unfortunately no longer offers the service) but can easily be done in-house. Before COVID-19, we evaluated every product we
were using in our cleaning process and discovered that while the products were cleaning the surfaces, they weren’t actually disinfecting the surface. Aſter this assessment, we streamlined our cleaning carts to house three products instead of twelve, and now we order these key products in bulk from the distributor. Tey also provide us with free spray bottles, material safety data sheets and other bonus items.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed at the prospect of refreshing your entire campus in one single project. Break it up into one building or one room at a time. Just remember, the goal is to remove distractions so there’s nothing between the camper or guest’s heart and the love of Christ because that’s our key respon- sibility in caring for them.
Rob Mohrweis has served as the executive director of Cascades Camp and Conference Center (Yelm, Washington) for the past five years, and celebrates over 26 years of ministry there. His passion is to create space in the wonder of God’s creation for campers and guests to have a transformational experience rooted in the love of Christ. Rob and his wife, Becky, have been married for 20 years and have four beautiful daughters.
May/June 2024
www.ccca.org 27
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