Hope Heals Camp is a week-long summer camp experience offering rest, resources, and relationships to families affected by disabilities.
Hope Heals Retreat is a weekend getaway offering refreshment and fully accessible adventures to families living with disabilities.
If you’re isolated and lonely in a world not made for you, we can give you a place to belong.
If you’re spiritually disconnected, we can offer you a hopeful theology of suffering for real life.
If you’re feeling unknown and unseen, we can celebrate who God has made you to be.
Designed for Families
We know disabilities affect more than just the individual with the diagnosis. Hope Heals Camps and Retreats are built for entire family units in which one or more people are living with disabilities. Individuals and families are invited to volunteer!
All Ages & Diagnoses
Hope Heals Camps and Retreats offerings are not limited to a certain type of diagnosis or a specific age range. Participants of any age and experiencing all types of disabilities are invited. Volunteers age 8 and older are welcome!
Inclusively Faith-Focused
Our sacred spaces exist for families affected by disabilities to experience the sustaining hope of Christ. While our mission and programming are rooted in the Christian faith, you do not have to follow Jesus to have a place in this community.
Creating and sustaining Hope Heals Camp and Retreat is among our highest callings and greatest honors, but it was never the work we expected to do with our lives.
After I survived a near-fatal brainstem stroke in 2008, we were left with a bittersweet new normal—living a miraculous second chance but also dealing with long-term, life-changing disabilities.
At first, I didn’t want to be the “miracle girl” in the wheelchair. I did not want to be a part of the story of disability. But after years of connecting with all kinds of hurting people, I found my external disabilities were a bridge to those with “invisible wheelchairs.” We came to see there is a deeper, universal reality that we are all disabled—unable to do life without God or each other.
I realized that the story of disability could be deeply hard and deeply good.
In 2014, my husband Jay and I were the speakers at a camp for families with disabilities where we had a profound revelation: although we were on stage as speakers, we could just have easily been in the audience as campers. These were our people. We intimately understood their struggles and their fear, which meant we were uniquely equipped to uplift and resource this underserved population—the largest minority group in the world! In a plot twist only God could write, we were given ownership of that camp in 2017, and along with it the opportunity to re-imagine it as a sacred space of our very own. We’ve been running sessions of Hope Heals Camp and Retreat ever since.
Our story of disability is hard but good. We’ve been able to flourish within these constraints because of the spiritual resources and communal support we were given. Sadly, our story is the exception, not the norm. Most individuals and families affected by disability are struggling to live in a world not made for them. Hope Heals Camp is a subversion of that experience, a little world made specifically for families affected by disabilities.
Since 2017, we’ve been building a space of belonging and belovedness alongside our community of over 7,000 Hope Heals Camp and Retreat participants. We’ve prepared this sacred space for you—the hurting, the healing, and the hopeful—to experience the goodness of God in the context of an inclusive, intentional, inter-ability community. Welcome home, friend.
