CHAMP Camp

Help CHAMP Camp fund the construction of a wheelchair accessible treehouse at Bradford Woods in Martinsville, Indiana.

CHAMP Camp provides a summer camp experience for children and adolescents with tracheostomies and those who require technological respiratory assistance. Our campers enjoy and fully participate in outdoor summer camp activities including swimming, canoeing, and climbing that encourage independence, confidence, and self-esteem to create memories that last a lifetime. 

CHAMP Camp is not only a physical place, but a community where children who are technologically assisted experience the wonder, beauty, and challenge of the outdoors. It is a community where campers and counselors think of each other first; giving and receiving from each other; and supporting and respecting each other in their feelings and experiences. 

We are constantly challenging ourselves to create new experiences and memories for our campers. To that end, we took our most aggressive leap yet and decided zip lining would be our campers’ next great experience. From there, we let our imaginations run wild. How long should the zip line be? Should we have a short zip line as well as a long zip line for our daredevil campers? From where and how high will the zip lines launch, and how will we get our wheelchair confined campers up there? Finally, what if we constructed a wheelchair accessible treehouse where our campers could hangout and that would also serve as the staging and launching areas for the zip lines?

Fueled by fundraising success, including a sizable grant from The Finish Line Foundation for Youth, we were able to fund two (short, 140’ & long, 375’ ) zip lines constructed in time for CHAMP Camp 2014. In June 2018, we completed a ramping system for getting our campers to the zip line launch tower. At present, we are working hard to raise the additional funds needed for the treehouse. Thanks to a generous donation from the AWS Foundation and an anonymous individual donor, we've already raised $68,000. We need just $182,000 to fully fund this magical, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant treehouse.