Camp Westwind

Westwind thrives through shared values of inclusion and working together to keep Westwind healthy and wild. Westwind’s Vision describes its highest aspiration around equity for children and nature; its Mission describes three core Westwind goals around conservation, education and sustainability; its Equity Statement reinforces the idea that all children deserve connection to nature and living in a diverse and nurturing community; and its Guiding Principles capture key values around operations and programs.

Vision

We dream that all children have access to wild and undeveloped landscapes and are allowed to discover the interconnection, complexity and splendor of living in balance with natural systems.

Mission

We will conserve the Westwind site in perpetuity; foster life-changing outdoor experiences for all children, families and groups; and promote environmental stewardship as a basis for sustainable living.

Equity Statement

Westwind’s future success relies on being a leader in getting all children outside, connected to nature and nurtured by the wisdom of many cultures, backgrounds, places and generations.

Guiding Principles

• Getting to Westwind is an engaging adventure, whether by river or trail.
• Westwind conveys a sense of solitude, of ‘being on an island.’
• Westwind welcomes you! Kindness and inclusion are paramount.
• Many hands make light work: we strive together to leave Westwind better than we found it.
• We steward and are stewarded by Westwind, and we honor its stewards from previous decades and centuries.
• Fresh, affordable, and delicious food; locally sourced where possible.
• Structures sit lightly on the land and remain visually subordinate to the natural landscape.
• ‘Buildings teach’: design, construction, and materials support environmental learning, and promote sustainability, and reinforce the principle that outdoors is the place to be at Westwind.
• Sustainable, and minimal, self-sufficient: conserve water, energy, raw materials; re-use, re-cycle, re-build; human and renewable power.
• The Westwind site is the best teacher; our programs key from it and work within it.

Land Acknowledgment

We are gathered on Tillamook and Siletz land, represented today by the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians. With gratitude, we pay our respects to the land, and the Indigenous peoples who have stewarded it for generations, and continue to hold a sacred relationship to this day. With honor, we recognize the opportunity for the collective of Camp Westwind to learn, study, and hold community on this land. We respectfully acknowledge the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Tillamook and Siletz people, and honor all past, present, and future Indigenous Westwind community
members.