Camp Sharon & Karen

Camp Sharon & Karen provides an engaging and innovative learning environment for parents of trans and gender non-conforming people. Through participatory activities, parents learn to address bias, demonstrate support, and manage uncertainty to build resilient relationships with their kids.

Camp Sharon & Karen began with a six-month ethnography of families with transgender kids. This experience facilitated access to a community of parents and enabled me to recruit members for my co-design cohort. This collaboration ultimately drove the development of Camp Sharon & Karen and ensured that we tailored our solution to the needs of parents struggling to adjust.

Learning directly from parents struggling through their kids’ self-exploration helped frame the shared challenges common among families as they navigate the process of transition. The majority of parents find themselves in unfamiliar territory and respond to their own uncertainty when their kid discloses trans identity instead of their kid’s explicit needs. Parents struggle to internalize that even with good intentions, their impulsive reactions can have long-term consequences.

In co-design sessions with these parents, we developed several participatory activities through collaborative strategy, design, and prototyping numerous iterations. Together, we determined that parents would benefit most from dedicated space and time in which to process their own bias and learn how to best demonstrate support. Our collaboration resulted in numerous participatory activities that encourage new frames of reference and approaches to approach difficult conversations with care and respect.

challenges:

Members of TransFamilies Project often arrive at group sessions with a frame of anxiety about showing vulnerability, feeling ignorant and the subject, and worrying about embarrassment. Building trust with these parents was a critical first step in the process. By sharing information, showing up regularly, and listening intently, I was able to build meaningful relationships with the group and later bring these parents directly into the design process.

During our conversations, these parents articulated their shared challenges, particularly the unwillingness many parents demonstrate to accept their kids for who they indeed are. To better facilitate this work, we created a safe and nurturing environment where learning could happen through play and self-exploration. With these parents’ participation and expressed feedback, we designed activities that felt helpful and productive, respected parents’ boundaries and gaps in knowledge, and initiated essential conversations.

With Camp Sharon & Karen, our goal was to create a new kind of space that welcomed mistakes and provided an environment where parents could explore their prejudices free of judgment. We built a summer camp because it allows for the ideal supportive environment to learn through play. After months of development, Camp Sharon & Karen hosted its first official programming at the JCC Manhattan. At the start of camp, each participant received a Camp Sharon & Karen Handbook that provides quick access to a collection of essential lessons, terms, and notes from their experience. 

Our day at camp combined the activities we designed with games, movement, and storytelling to create a full and exciting day for our participants. We designed each element of the camp experience to motivate a deep desire for personal growth to catalyze the discovery of new ideas, reflection on past mistakes, growth of compassionate communication skills, and to practice hard conversations and LGBTQ+ terms. Our final activity was a group conversation led by our trans and non-binary camp counselors. At camp, our participants received opportunities to learn through play so it felt less onerous, discover new perspectives to shift their thinking and build new community of other parents just like them.

Watch the debut presentation of Camp Sharon & Karen from the Design for Social Innovation MFA program thesis show at School of Visual Arts in New York City.