Camp Hope, venture of Sonoma County’s Family Justice Center, offers adventure, support and resources for children in need
It’s horses and rafting and zip lines, but Camp Hope, funded by the Family Justice Center of Sonoma County, also offers trusted adults and fellow campers who understand that life is not always ‘picture perfect.’
Genevieve Medel, 17, right, gives Madeline Espinoza, 8, a hug during the Camp Hope reunion at the Finley Aquatic Center in Santa Rosa Sunday, July 27, 2025. (Beth Schlanker / The Press Democrat)
Girls make bracelets during the Camp Hope reunion at the Finley Aquatic Center in Santa Rosa Sunday, July 27, 2025. (Beth Schlanker / The Press Democrat)
Mila Ibarra, 11, left, and Viri Nunez, 11, eat ice cream and joke around during the Camp Hope reunion at the Finley Aquatic Center in Santa Rosa Sunday, July 27, 2025. (Beth Schlanker / The Press Democrat)
Marsha Lucien, center, the executive director of the Family Justice Center, attends the Camp Hope reunion at the Finley Aquatic Center in Santa Rosa Sunday, July 27, 2025. (Beth Schlanker / The Press Democrat)
(From right) Mila Ibarra, 11, Sariyah Novella, 11, and Asucena De La Cruz, 17, play in the pool during the Camp Hope reunion at the Finley Aquatic Center in Santa Rosa Sunday, July 27, 2025. (Beth Schlanker / The Press Democrat)
Asucena De La Cruz, 17, laughs as she grabs the ball during the Camp Hope reunion at the Finley Aquatic Center in Santa Rosa Sunday, July 27, 2025. (Beth Schlanker / The Press Democrat)
Kids play in the pool during the Camp Hope reunion at the Finley Aquatic Center in Santa Rosa Sunday, July 27, 2025. (Beth Schlanker / The Press Democrat)
Kelsey Price, center, a department analyst with the Family Justice Center, attends the Camp Hope reunion at the Finley Aquatic Center in Santa Rosa Sunday, July 27, 2025. (Beth Schlanker / The Press Democrat)
Bohde Campbell, 11, left, and Tyler Beedle, 11, right, play with a ball in the pool during the Camp Hope reunion at the Finley Aquatic Center in Santa Rosa Sunday, July 27, 2025. (Beth Schlanker / The Press Democrat)
Michael Mendoza recalls being about 8 or 9 and feeling like life wasn’t great.
He wasn’t living with either of his parents. Instead, he was staying in a foster home where other kids teased him mercilessly.
“In that home, I did not fit in,” Mendoza, 19, said. “I was getting teased all the time and I didn’t really talk.”
A friend of his mother, a woman he now describes as his godmother, encouraged him to attend a new program through the Family Justice Center of Sonoma County.
It was a sleepaway camp, and the young Mendoza would have to go off on his own.
“But in my mind, I didn’t really have a home,” he said. “I wasn’t really living with my parents growing up. It was either I go back to that house or I give this a try.”
He got on the bus. And he headed for Camp Hope.
Today, with more than 10 years of summer trips to Camp Hope under his belt, Mendoza speaks eloquently and reverently about what the experience continues to mean to him, even while almost struggling to describe exactly what makes it so.
The words are hard to come by. Some things can only be felt.
“The environment is nothing you will ever experience again,” he said. “When you are there, your mood changes.”
Maybe even your life.
And the lives of those who love you.
“I remember my first year, my godmother telling me that I had the biggest smile on my face and that it changed her life, too,” he said. “It was definitely scary. I am so glad I did it. I could not imagine my life if I never went to that camp.”
Healing place, in its second decade
Today, Mendoza is a volunteer Camp Hope counselor, guiding other kids through a weeklong experience meant to show them the time of their lives, but also give them tools to navigate the other 51 weeks of the year when they get home.
Launched in 2014, the same year Mendoza was one of two Sonoma County kids who attended, Camp Hope is a weeklong camp at Kidder Creek close to the Oregon border and near the town of Etna.
Funded by the Family Justice Center of Sonoma County, the camp is for kids ages 7 to 17 who have suffered trauma or abuse, or have lived in homes where it occurred.
Campers are often referred from partner social service agencies like Child Protective Services; Verity, Sonoma County’s rape crisis, trauma, and healing center; or school officials. Kids attend the camp free of charge, are given all necessary gear (down to sunscreen and bug spray) and pay nothing for activities, food or any other part of the week.
“I find that they are excited to have community,” said Marsha Lucien, executive director of the Family Justice Center. “They get to meet other kids who have had similar experiences. It’s ‘Hey, there is nothing wrong with me, other kids have had this experience.’”
“It gives them a tribe,” she said.
This summer 43 students attended. The maximum number under the current model is 48, Lucien said.
The Family Justice Center, established in 2011 by the District Attorney’s Office Victim Services Division, works to consolidate resources for survivors of violence, who sometimes struggle to coordinate services from multiple agencies. The center spearheads fundraising efforts to collect the roughly $50,000 it costs to cover nearly 50 children to attend Camp Hope.
Local reunion
On July 27, many of this summer’s campers got together for a one-month “reunion.”
They swam at the Finley Aquatic Center in Santa Rosa, ate pizza, ate ice cream, ate candy …
But they also sat and talked, they checked in with each other about favorite memories and best moments from camp. They watched a slideshow with pictures of faces covered in chocolate syrup, kids on horseback, river rafting, zip lining and all the best kinds of camp mayhem.
And smiles. Lots and lots of smiles.
“They are acting like kids,” said Kelsey Price, a Family Justice Center grant coordinator who now oversees the Camp Hope program. “So often they show up and they don’t seem like kids. They are shut down, they are nervous and scared and you can see the anxiety of everything they have had to handle.”
“But when they are at camp, they have chocolate streaming down their faces because of a messy game,” she said.
Prior to her role with the Family Justice Center, Price worked in direct service to kids and families in immediate crisis.
“I saw kids severely impacted by what had happened at home,” she said. “I never got to see the healing process.”
Camp Hope gave her that gift.
“To be able to see the full circle of what we are providing further down the road?”
A legacy of ‘mutual respect’
More than seven out of every 10 campers return to camp the following summer. It’s a program that builds over time, over the evolution and building of trust and relationships.
Longtime camp volunteers and staffers describe a key component as something akin to asking kids to remove “their cool jacket.” Kids are invited to be silly, to be loud, to be quiet, to be anything they want to be, just so long as they don’t use their words or bodies to hurt or denigrate others.
“At school, everyone pretends to be perfect and have a perfect life — there we are allowed to be vulnerable,” said Lucy Ramos, 16.
Ramos has attended camp for 10 years.
“We all come from the Family Justice Center so our lives aren’t picture perfect, but we understand each other,” she said. “We all have mutual respect for one another.”
For Ramos’s mom April, giving Lucy and her older brother a chance to attend Camp Hope was life changing for them and for her.
Ten years ago when her kids started attending Camp Hope, the family wasn’t living at home. The children’s father was incarcerated and Ramos herself felt uneasy about just about everything.
“Your world is kind of collapsing around you and you are not sure who to trust,” she said.
The idea of sending her kids away to the mountains made her nervous. But at every step — before the kids left, while they were in their cabins and not using their personal cellphones — Ramos was kept updated with photos and quick messages.
If she had a question, staffers had an answer, she said.
“I think it helped having a very supportive staff, with lots of information. You build a rapport with staff so you don’t feel like you are handing your kid off,” she said.
Ramos remembers the first year her older son attended. He was having a rough go of it at home, but Ramos felt he could benefit from camp.
“He gets off the bus and says ‘Mom we got to have a watermelon fight,’” she said.
Something so simple, so childlike, put her heart at ease.
“That memory,” she said. “You think about a kiddo with dysregulation” — an inability to control or regulate one's emotional responses — “trying to articulate big feelings around that time, losing a father and the family unit.”
And he wanted to talk about a messy food fight.
But over the years, Ramos saw Camp Hope evolve into a place where her kids could access other trustworthy people to talk to about their “big feelings.”“When traumatic things happen to kids when they are young, it makes them a little more guarded and they are carrying around a little extra trauma that can’t be off-loaded. The body keeps score,” she said. “We all want to think our kids want to tell us anything, but it’s also nice to have other people that our kids can feel safe opening up to.”
Powered by volunteers
The Family Justice Center puts everyone who volunteers at the Camp through vigorous screening, background checks and training, Lucien said.
More remarkable still? All Camp Hope adults, barring Lucien and Price, are volunteers. People burn their vacation time to help support Camp Hope year after year.
Regular volunteers include students in graduate degree programs, teacher’s aides, and therapists.
Not all are so-called pros. Some are just adults who care.
“We have been very fortunate to have some really consistent volunteers,” Price said. “We have a local realtor, he’s been eight times. He came to a fundraiser many years ago and he’s like ‘I’m in, I want to do this.’ He shows up, he’s fully committed to the experience. He’s really amazing at making the kids feel seen. He went to a graduation of a kid from high school.”
Mendoza said kids may not know that adults there are volunteers, or that their day jobs are not remotely related to counseling or therapy or even teaching, but he said kids can feel that all adults are invested.
“You can feel their passion and how they wanted to be there,” he said. “It didn’t feel forced or anything, you could tell. They weren’t there just because they had to be. As a kid you can definitely feel it and it helps you.”
And that is one reason Mendoza, one of the very first Sonoma County kids to experience Camp Hope, is now a counselor. He’s a believer. And he wants to pay that experience back for younger campers.
So, too, does Genevieve Medel, 17, who has been going to Camp Hope for a decade.
When she was younger, it was about the water fun and messy games and seeing friends she had met the summer before. But as she aged, she found even more reasons to look forward to this one week every summer.
“Growing up with some adult topics that kids just shouldn’t be around, that was very confusing and very hard for me,” she said. “So having the resources that camp gave me and having people to talk to and having people to relate to and knowing that there is always someone there for you, people heal from that.”
As a veteran camper, Medel said she feels less the weight of responsibility and more the positive hope that she can play a role in maintaining the special vibe of Camp Hope.
“I am definitely wanting to see the younger campers really thrive in the camp,” she said. “All of the counselors that I have previously had, their love and support, all the memories I have with them, is the biggest reason. I want to hand that love down to other people and give back to the program. The program has done so much for me.”
Lasting bonds
Beyond Camp Hope itself, there is a special bond developed between campers and counselors who maintain relationships and contact throughout the year.
There are movie nights and skating parties hosted by the Family Justice Center. There also are casual group chats and meet ups and lasting friendships born at camp and maintained at home.
Those connections take time to build, and the foundation is laid in trust. Little bits of letting one’s guard down, of joyful encouragement and honest conversation.
Price remembers a float on the river a number of years ago. She was in a boat with older campers and the group had stopped to give kids a chance to leap from a high outcropping of rocks.
Not everyone was game. There were some nerves.
But one of the key rules of Camp Hope is “challenge by choice.” No one is forced to talk if they don’t want to, or swim in the river if they don’t want to, or fly off on a zip line if they don’t want to.
So cajoling or teasing is not what Price heard sitting in that boat, floating in the river with a bunch of teens.
It was support. And love. The kind of encouragement that may have been in short supply in many of the campers’ lives up to now.
Price remembers the feeling as nearly overwhelming.
“That was one of those moments where I thought, ‘I could do this forever.’”
And with the sounds of cheers in the air and Price waiting for them in the water, every kid made the leap.
You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Instagram @kerry.benefield.
