Willowbrook Arts Camp is pausing this summer to re-imagine its future.
The longstanding program announced it won’t run a summer session in 2024.
Instead, after 40 hosting years of summer camps – the last 30 of them in Brown’s Ferry Park – Willowbrook will take a fallow season to remake its model and explore solutions for pick-up and drop-off related issues that were snarling traffic around the park during already busy commute times, raising safety concerns for drivers, bikers, and pedestrians.
Board members Donna Kleinman and Peter McKay announced this in a video on Willowbrook’s website (www.willowbrookartscamp.org).
“We want to be intentional as a business, including challenges that have been with us for some time. The drop-off and pick-up process, for example, continues to need significant improvements,” Klienman said.
Last summer, the board announced a three-year plan to relocate, asking parents to help look for a property with better parking.
The camp was the brainchild of Althea Pratt-Broome, who launched it as the Willowbrook Center for the Development of Human Potential at her historic Sweek House property in 1982. It operated there for a decade before outgrowing the space.
The organization is financially stable, and its relationship with the city is healthy, Kleinman said, adding the two are partnered in finding a new path for the camp, which they aim to reopen in 2025.
