Summer Programs

Summer Camps

SOY believes in the holistic health and well-being of our youth, which includes spending time outdoors and enjoying the wonders of nature. Summertime is a great time to do this. It is also a time when most of our youth stay home with no opportunities to explore their environments or participate in camps because of the costs involved in fun summer activities and because their parents are working full-time, and they do not have transportation to these events.

SOY provides a variety of options for our youth including:

Sail Camp—through OCC College of Sailing and Seamanship

Through our long-time collaboration with OCC, we have been providing sail camp for our students for over 25 years. OCC College of Sailing and Seamanship provides a week of free sailing instruction for our students in Lido 14s, teaching them not only how to sail, but also confidence and independence while being in a boat on the water. We try to offer this to new students every summer, but some years our students beg to return to this amazing opportunity to sail in a boat in our harbor for four hours a day. They learn how to tie knots, to be safe on the water, about the wind and weather, how to maneuver the boat, trim the sails and about the rules of sailing. It is amazing to see how they grow in one week in confidence and self-esteem.

Many of our students never realized that there was a bay so close to their homes, just 2-3 miles away, and although they may have gone to the ocean, they have never had the opportunity to be in a boat in the Newport Harbor.

Surf Camp

SOY has also provided surf camp for almost 20 years. Each summer, with the help of Volcom, Frog House, Newport Board Club and local surfers and volunteers, we are able to teach 20 to 30 students how to surf for a week during the summer. Most of our students have never had the opportunity to try to surf before, and this is a wonderful opportunity for our students to be with friends, enjoy the beautiful local beaches, meet new community volunteers, and learn a new sport that hopefully can become a life-long hobby. We have some SOY volunteers and alumni that have come back after learning to surf 10 years ago as SOY students and are now teaching the new students how to surf.

Thank you Volcom!

Thanks to our sponsors, including Volcom, Frog House and Newport Board Club, as well as donations from the Connor McShea Memorial Surf fund which was to honor Connor in 2022, we are able to provide wetsuits and surfboards for our students to use and also rent vans and provide the weekly necessities for students to have fun learning to surf.

We would also like to thank our local merchants who provide free or discounted breakfast to our hungry surfers and our volunteer teachers who get up very early to catch the waves.

With the US Open of Surfing at Huntington Beach each summer we often get professional surfers to come by and surf with our teens. Here is professional surfer from Australia, Philippa Anderson, with a group of our SOY surfers.

If you would like to volunteer and help us provide surfing year-round, please click here.

Field Trips

Field trips expose SOY students to enriching aspects of life beyond their home and school environments, from sporting events and museums to camps and college tours. Thanks to grants from local foundations, collaboration with the City of Costa Mesa, and assistance from local businesses and cultural groups, and other nonprofits, these field trips are possible.

Popular field trips have included:

An Angels baseball game, in collaboration with the Angels (tickets), the Orange County Youth Sports Foundation ($10 food vouchers), and Newport Rib Company (sliders for the bus ride).
A soccer game, with 60 tickets provided by the Orange County Soccer Club
An overnight trip as well as multiple day trips to visit colleges, with many tours led by SOY alumni. Our Chapman College visit also included a visit to the Hilbert Museum of Contemporary Art.
An Earth Day visit to the Back Bay to hike and learn about the natural resources
A SOY Girls trip to the Argyros Girl Scout House to learn about STEM careers in collaboration with Girl Scouts of Orange County
Museum Trips to museums in Los Angeles, including the Getty Museum and LACMA,
Museum Trips to Local Orange County Museums including the OCMA and Muzeo as well as the Noguchi Gardens in Costa Mesa
Orange County Fair Day Trip, in collaboration with the OC Fair (40 free tickets)
Knotts Berry Farm
Trip to Catalina Island
Whale Watching
Shows at South Coast Repretory
Shows at South Coast Repretory

Students saw play at SCR and Edward James Olmos, Mexican American actor, was there too!

Pool and Beach Days

What does summer shout more than pool and beach, and yet how many of our students actually go there? Most of our students have never been in a pool, and many do not know how to swim. Thanks to the collaboration with the Newport-Mesa YMCA, we are able to take students to weekly swim days in the summer. They also provide swim lessons for our students that do not know how to swim.

We also take students on beach days a couple of times a month in the summer. We have found that with many students working in the summer and taking summer school or babysitting their siblings, they don’t have the time to go to the beach on their own, let alone go with friends. SOY plans these beach days so that they can go with other friends, or meet friends, and spend a relaxing day at the beach rather than staying at home alone. We often ride SOY bikes to the beach, and we often get rides from city vans thanks to our collaboration with the city of Costa Mesa.

Beach day and barbecue with Mr. Irrelevant

Summer Camp at OC YMCA’s Camp Elk

Thanks to the generous collaboration with the Orange County YMCA and generous donations from numerous donors, SOY has been able to provide a once in a life-time summer camp experience for our youth. For four summers before the pandemic, SOY was able to take 60 kids to a week-long camp to experience the wonders of staying at a camp in the mountains of Wrightwood, taking outdoor classes in archery, hiking, mountain biking and even star gazing.

The opportunity for our students to be able to go away for a week and be free of cell phones and stresses of the city and make new friends, sing songs, do skits, dance, learn new skills, swim, learn how to collaborate on making dinner for a group and doing chores in the group setting with students of their peers and meet older camp counselors who teach them life lessons is incredible.

SOY also took students to leadership camps in the winter and provided them not only with leadership training, but also their first experience with the snow.

If you would like to donate to the camp funds or help organize or volunteer, please click here.

I could not believe how beautiful Camp Elk was! It was great having the opportunity to explore nature.

Edwin, 15

The fact that there was no wi-fi ended up being a good thing! We did fun, active learning programs that we tend to forget about with the phone glued to our hands.

Jasmine, 16

Camp was an amazing experience!

Christian, 14

Camp was a great experience because we learned to communicate by talking to each other instead of texting.

Joana, 13

My favorite part of camp was laying under the stars and learning about the constellations.

Mariana, 16

I experienced a camp fire, storytelling and star gazing for the first time-it was so cool!

Evelyn, 14

Camp Elk allowed me to connect with people on a different level and experience new things. Being in the mountains away from home really allowed me to clear my mind and feel at peace.

Israel, 15

Camp Elk was fun, and liberating. I was exposed to archery, team building exercises, and above all the beauty of nature. Thank you SOY for a memorable experience.

Kristina, 13