Divided on
Unity
Students embarked on what was marketed as a life-changing leadership experience. But they may not have gotten what they signed up for.
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T’S DINNERTIME. Palo Alto High School senior Nura Mostaghimi knows not because she sees the food on the table or her friends bent over their plates — she can’t, her eyes are covered — but because she recognizes the sound of hungry mouths being fed beyond her blindfold. Not her own mouth, of course — she’s still waiting for a pair of benevolent hands to fill her growling stomach. “They” didn’t force this handicap on her — quite the opposite, actually. Instead, Mostaghimi is simply participating in a simulation designed to emulate what it’s like to live with a disability in the hopes it will to broaden her own perspective. “There were different challenges they made you go through to see the experiences of people with different backgrounds and lifestyles,” says Mostaghimi, who attended Camp Unity two years ago. “[Also], how they acclimate within their day-to-day lives and how that affects who they are.” Over the course of the next three days in the Santa Cruz mountains, she and nearly 80 other high school students will participate in activities akin to this as they listen, laugh and cry together. At camp, tears are shed for a variety of reasons: anger and acceptance, grief and reconciliation. But by the end, it’s almost as if neighboring faces are illuminated in a different light. Run nationwide, Camp Unity, Everytown and Anytown are among the many leadership-development retreats that have
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been around for decades. Hundreds of Paly students have attended various iterations of such camps since the early 2000s, but Paly hasn’t participated in the camp since March 2017 due to budget cuts says Principal Adam Paulson. Despite lacking an umbrella organization, all Everytown-style camps operate with the same goal: to teach youth effective leadership by cultivating greater empathy. Each program seeks to build community by identifying and appreciating differences between individuals. How each program does this, however, differs by director. Recently, the lack of standardized curriculum has generated controversy over what some see as psychologically injurious methods. On June 14, San Francisco Chronicle investigative reporter and former Paly parent Karen de Sá published “A Retreat’s Risky Lessons.” An exposé on several Bay Area camps, it detailed shocking incidents of emotional breakdown and self-harm as a result of camp activities through interviewing several camp participants and dozens of experts. “It was the accumulation of these trau ma inducing experiences day after day, hour upon hour,” de Sá says. “Just real manipulation and taking advantage of students while they were vulnerable.” According to de Sá, it was not uncommon for students to collapse on the ground in tears, or even run out of the room, often taking refuge in the woods or their cabins. While counselors led small group discussions
