Three weeks after the 2026 camp, the core leadership team sat down for two hours with a written list of prompts. Before the meeting, each leader had typed answers into a shared table and initialed them. The answers are blunt. “The pieces were there to make the event successful, but not smooth,” one leader wrote. She scored the camp 3 out of 5 on student learning and career exposure and 2 out of 5 on logistics. Another called it a clear proof of concept and gave it 6 out of 10, “with lots of potential for quick refinement.”
Both were describing the same week. Students threw themselves into the work, partners wanted to come back, and the camp did what no one had tried before. It also ran on a four-and-a-half-month planning runway, with a schedule that changed daily and a command structure that faded after the first day. The candor of that review is the reason this help center can tell other regions what to change. This collection covers what to measure, how to run the review, what year one got right, what it would change, and how to keep partners engaged once the tents come down.
Measurement is easy to plan and hard to retrofit. The 2026 camp built a tool for it: a passport in the Student Activity Guide that would record each session a student attended, so leaders could issue certificates from hard data at the end of the week. No one owned it, and it went unused. Afterward, leaders could not say which sessions had drawn students. They knew only that some students had skipped classes to keep working in their villages, and that at least one Be 2 Weeks Ready session was empty on day four.
What to count. The table lists what leadership wanted to report to funders and future regions. The owner column is a suggestion; what matters is that every row has one.
Measure | Why it matters | How to collect it | Suggested owner |
Educators trained | Funders; replication | Registration and stipend records | Education sponsor |
Students attending, by school and region | Funders; reach | Registration and check-in | Education sponsor |
Session attendance and credentials issued | Certificates; honest advertising | Passport stamped at each session | Planning section |
Units started, completed and delivered | Funders; recipients | Build log by village; delivery records | Builder village leads |
Industry and agency partners engaged | Funders; next year’s pipeline | Partner log | Liaison officer |
Safety incidents and near misses | Safety review; insurance | Medical tent log; safety officer reports | Safety officer |
Participant satisfaction | Program improvement | Exit surveys for students, educators and volunteers | Planning section |
Readiness to replicate | Future regions | After-action review | Core team |
What to ask students. The Portland General Electric Foundation, which awarded the camp a chair’s grant, suggested a pair of questions that any region can use. On the way in: do you know what career path you intend to follow after high school? On the way out: the same question, plus whether the camp inspired the student to pursue something new in school, training or work. The foundation’s report asks for demographics reached, impact, how the funds supported the program, and lessons learned and surprises.
The student exit survey in the 2026 Activity Guide asked four anonymous questions, and students turned it in at the registration desk:
What did you like best about Ready2Respond?
What is the most useful thing you learned this week?
What is a career path you heard about this week that you would like to explore more?
What is something we can do differently next time to give you a better experience?
Follow students afterward. Funders cared most about what happens next. Ideas the team raised with the PGE Foundation include checking in with students in the second semester of their senior year through their teachers and counselors; adding “Did you complete a Ready2Respond summer camp?” to future surveys; asking attending agencies and businesses whether they hired anyone from camp; and exploring whether the student identifiers that CTE reporting already uses could flag camp participants. Handle that last idea with your education sponsor’s privacy staff.
Agree on the numbers once. Year one’s sources give different counts. The first internal recap, a week after camp, counted 130 youth participants, 35 educators, 24 support staff and 100 volunteers. It also said students had earned the Ready2Respond certificate and qualified for an invitation to Oregon Volunteers in Disaster, though organizers had cut the ORVID session from the schedule. Decide before camp who keeps the official count of each measure, and publish only that count.