The Brooklyn Summer Camp That Has a 500-Person Waitlist and Charges Nothing — And It’s Built Entirely Around Creative Play

A seven-year-old is adhering bottle caps to a kitchen table-sized piece of cardboard on a muggy Tuesday in late June, off a quiet block in Crown Heights. She refers to it as a “weather machine.” No one has instructed her on what to construct. She is not being timed by anyone. Walking by, a counselor wearing a T-shirt splattered with paint looks at the device and inquires as to whether it controls wind or rain. After giving it some serious thought, much like an adult would with a tax question, the girl responds, “Both. But mostly wind.”

Summer at the camp that everyone in some Brooklyn group chats has been discreetly trying to get their child into looks like this. There isn’t a glossy brochure. There are no fees. Additionally, there were more than 500 families on its waitlist as of this spring.

Operating out of a community space that serves as an after-school program for the remainder of the year, the camp was nearly unplanned. During the pandemic summers, when families couldn’t afford the $1,200-per-week programs blooming across the East River, a few parents and a former public-school art teacher combined donated supplies. What started out as a temporary solution is currently in its sixth summer. Walking through it gives you the impression that no one really anticipated it would turn out this way.

The model is nearly unyieldingly straightforward. No weeks with a theme. no set curriculum. No pre-printed craft kits, no tablets, and no aquarium field trips. When the kids arrive at nine, they are immediately engrossed in something, such as building a fort out of refrigerator boxes, creating a “restaurant” with handwritten menus, or playing a complex game of tag with hourly rules. The adults are present, but they are mostly on the periphery, observing and occasionally prodding.

It’s difficult to avoid drawing comparisons to the situation across the river, where parents begin updating registration pages in November and Upper East Side camps are now more expensive per week than some private school tuition. These programs—Caedmon, Hewitt, and Marymount—are run by reputable organizations and are worthy of their high prices. However, there’s something a little odd about a city where a family can spend $15,000 on swim lessons and themed cohorts during the summer, and where parents begin texting each other in February to ask for waitlist tips. Part of the Brooklyn camp’s existence is a subdued response to all of that.

Everyone starts by asking the funding question. A patchwork of small grants, a regular donation from a nearby credit union, in-kind contributions from a hardware store two blocks away, and a board of parent volunteers who manage weekend logistics make up the unromantic solution. The program is currently run year-round by the art teacher who founded it, who receives a meager salary. The majority of the counselors are local high school students, along with a few retired educators who view their work as a vocation. It’s possible that the entire system only functions because no one is attempting to scale it.

The kids take play very seriously when no one is doing it for them, which is remarkable. There isn’t a clipboard that tracks developmental milestones or an instructor-led mosaic project. A boy sorts found objects by color, shape, and a mysterious category he won’t explain for the whole morning. A three-act play about a missing dog and, in some way, the FDIC is written and practiced by two nine-year-olds. It has costumes by Friday.

For decades, researchers have maintained that this type of unstructured, self-directed play—what some refer to as “loose-parts play”—improves executive function and emotional regulation more than the majority of enrichment programs put together. Those papers were not read first by the Brooklyn camp. It just so happened to land on something accurate. As you watch the children cycle through their own made-up worlds, you begin to wonder why so much of what we market to children is so expensive and requires so much of them.

The waitlist continues to expand. According to the organizers, they are carefully considering whether to open a second location. They fear losing whatever this is. They should be the ones to try because of this type of anxiety.