Ottawa Community Housing Foundation – CAMPS Project

The CAMPS Project is a joint initiative between the Ottawa Community Housing Foundation’s recLINK program and the Ottawa Sportspage newspaper. Ottawa Community Housing is the largest social housing provider in Ottawa and the second largest in Ontario. It’s charitable entity, OCH Foundation, goes beyond the bricks and mortar in order to help each of its 32,000 tenants achieve personal success through education, employment, and community engagement.

The mission of the CAMPS project is to leverage partnerships with community sport clubs (and other partners) in order to provide completely free spots in existing, organized sports programming to children and youth living in Ottawa Community Housing.

The recLINK and CAMPS Project team works to identify at-risk children and youth from OCH communities and works with these families to understand their personal barriers to organized sport participation. Next our team works to remove these barriers, facilitating active engagement in organized sport.

We believe in the power of sport to not only improve health benefits through physical activity, but to also provide children and youth with confidence, role models, teamwork skills, and ultimately opportunities to grow and become a positively contributing member of their community.

In 2017 and in celebration of Canada’s 150th, we aim to connect 150 children and youth from OCH to organized sport through our initiatives. We will also host a celebratory week of clinics and introductory sessions on-site in OCH neighbourhoods in early July.