The idea started with a view out a window. In April 2025, Taylor was touring the Knife River Training Center during a Workforce Talent Development Board conference with Kris Latimer, who leads training at the center. The two were standing at a window, Diet Cokes in hand, when he looked out at an empty field and said it would make an amazing place for a summer camp. “And she looked at me and she smiled and she said, are you serious?” Taylor recalled. “I said, yeah, let’s make it happen.” He could already picture it, he said: crews building units, tents going up, kids running around.
He had been carrying a version of the idea for a while. Amber Rawson, who would become one of the camp’s primary planners, said Taylor first designed it for a coastal town facing a Cascadia earthquake. Then he told her he wanted to bring students from all over the state and have them “act as if a disaster had happened.”
The concept snapped into place seven months later. At Ridgetop to Rooftop, a November 2025 conference that the Department of Forestry and the State Fire Marshal hosted, Taylor sat through sessions on how wildfire moves from forest land into neighborhoods. He was one of only a few people from his agency in the room. “And I thought, okay, there it is. There’s the summer camp,” he said: a simulation in which a disaster pushes students out of their homes and they have to learn to survive.
A week later he called together what he calls “the generators”: younger colleagues from agency work and conferences who had energy and, he hoped, an appetite to be change agents inside state government. They came from different agencies, and each found a different way in.
Ashley Brown, who writes wildfire policy for the Department of Forestry, had sung in Taylor’s high school choir years earlier. When they ran into each other at a conference late in 2025 and he learned what she did, he told her, “So let’s collaborate. I’ve got a project.” His pitch, as she remembers it, was a camp that would bring emergency management, construction and manufacturing, culinary, and fire and EMS “together in one space to show that, yes, agencies can collaborate.”
Kayla Thompson of the Department of Emergency Management, who works with young people on preparedness, said her involvement “started with an email” from a coworker who thought she and Taylor should talk.
Amber Rawson of the Department of Human Services, whose day job is resourcing and logistics for disaster recovery, got her invitation in January, over crepes. Taylor told her he had a team and wanted her on it. “And I said, I can’t say no, I want in.”
Rawson remembers the meeting that committed the group as crepes; Taylor remembers a long three-hour coffee and doughnuts. Both agree it ended with a decision and a deadline: go for it, and decide by April 1 whether the camp was real. The group sketched the week on whiteboards, mapping what each day, each village and each team could look like. Every idea got the same test, Rawson said: how realistic is it, who do we know, where do we get it, and do we chase it or drop it? Taylor and Rawson took the conversations with funders and partner organizations. The group met weekly, named its remaining gaps and gave each one an owner.
Over the spring the circle widened: the National Guard, which would supply the incident commander and the ICS training; Lane ESD, which agreed to sponsor the students and educators; the training center as host; and dozens of educators, counselors and volunteers. On the first Friday of April 2026, the team met to decide whether to proceed. “We had enough partners, we had enough elements in place, we had enough agencies, we had just enough money to start the ball rolling,” Taylor said. One of the last pieces fell into place in the final weeks, when Thurston High School’s film program stepped in to run communications after another school’s plans fell through. Camp opened eleven weeks after the go decision.