For Lori Dvirnak Lundblad, Camp Bentley is a family affair.
“I was there for the first time before I was even a year old, and I think my grandma — who was 96 or 97 at the time — was the oldest camper ever.”
Dvirnak Lundblad is the do-it-all executive director of the summer camp that has, since 1947, been hosting campers aged 0-100 on the shores of Lake Bentley in north central North Dakota. Growing up, her mom was the camp nurse, and, for the past decade and a half, her own kids have spent every summer at the camp, which runs each year from roughly Memorial Day to Labor Day. In the 1940s and ‘50s, her grandpa’s younger siblings were some of the very first campers.
“It’s truly intergenerational,” says Dvirnak Lundblad, who oversees Camp Bentley as part of her regional staff position with the American Baptist Churches of the Dakotas. “You get people in their 70s playing games with 5-year-olds on the same team. It’s so great to see them being silly and sticking cotton balls with Vaseline to their face, and you get the littles and the older folks all doing it together. Some of them are with their own grandchildren, and some of them are just being a great adult presence for another person’s kid.”
The camp, which hosts about 400 people total over the course of the season, is your typical summer camp — filled with swimming, sack races, and bonfires — but the focus is, first and foremost, centered around knowing Jesus.
“Everything we do at Camp Bentley is motivated by faith, by community, and by forming individuals,” Dvirnak Lundblad says. “And that is our formal times of chapel and worship, but it’s also in small-group time and individual devotions. So a big piece of (the experience) is faith-formation, but it’s also just living in Christian community for a week. It’s so valuable for kids who are maybe bullied at school or don’t quite fit in, to be included on teams and be given experiences and opportunities to succeed and be praised.”
She’s seen the true value of that Christian community countless times over the years, she says, but it hit particularly close to home a few years ago.
“One of my sons had some mental health issues, and it was a fellow counselor at camp who said, ‘This is what’s going on,’” she recalls. “And they really let us know about some of the things he was hiding from us. And that’s one of the things we always tell the campers: ‘If your friend is hurting, get them the help they need.
“We had another kid last summer who was in foster care — a really rough situation — and she accepted Christ at camp and went back to the same rough situation, but now she’s going to church. And now she has a community behind her and is doing really well, even though the family hasn’t changed at all. But she has changed.”
If you were to spend a day at Camp Bentley, one of the things you’d likely notice is something exceedingly rare in today’s world: There’s not a single kid with their face buried in a screen. This is no coincidence, according to Dvirnak Lundblad, who says the camp maintains a strict technology policy for their younger campers.
“Nowadays, we’re always reachable 24/7 and that’s exhausting,” she says. “And it just takes you away from being present. So we check in everyone’s cell phones at the beginning of camp. It’s unplug time. There’s a screen in the chapel for song lyrics, but that’s about it.”
While there’s occasional groaning from the parents about the policy, Dvirnak Lundblad says she’s started to notice less and less pushback from the kids themselves.
“We get pushback sometimes like, ‘How am I going to reach my kid?’” she says. “Well, you’re going to call the camp manager, and they’re going to go find your kid. They know how to reach them. One thing I love is when I’m asking a kid for their phone, and they’re like ‘Yep! I don’t want it! Please take it!’ That makes me feel so good.”
For an organization like Camp Bentley, which relies almost entirely on volunteer staff to operate and is funded 100 percent by donors and grants, an event like Giving Hearts Day is essential.
“Giving Hearts Day is about 95 percent of our annual budget,” says Dvirnak Lundblad, who helped get Camp Bentley involved in GHD for the first time in 2019. “I think in the communities around (the camp), the day has become pretty well-known, and people are getting converted in terms of thinking of it as their day of giving. I’m probably a biased sample because I work with a lot of other nonprofits, but each year I hear more people asking us about what our Giving Hearts Day plan is, and we’re seeing more and more people who are picking up Giving Hearts Day gift cards.”
While she’s implemented some social media and email into her Giving Hearts Day fundraising strategy over the years, Dvirnak Lundblad says that — like many of the smaller organizations that participate in the day — Camp Bentley relies heavily on grassroots support to meet their GHD goals.
“Giving Hearts Day has really helped us reconnect with people out of state,” says Dvirnak Lundblad, who, on the first day of early giving each January, sends a reminder to give to anyone who’s attended camp in the past two years. “One of our first donors every year is someone who lives in Florida who grew up every year going to camp. Most of the people who give large gifts are people who are camp alums or have some kind of family affiliation to someone who did.”
She says that one of the reasons why Camp Bentley was able to increase their fundraising total by more than 20 percent this year — and make their way into the top five in their budget category — was the fact that they had something tangible around which to rally their donors.
“We’re building a new building, and I think it gave us a very clear story,” Dvirnak Lundblad says. “We want to get started this year, and our donors want to see ground broken. Now, once the building’s done and funded, how will our goals and strategy look different? They will probably have to change, as our needs do. If we’re trying to hire more year-round staff or make camp free for every camper, how will our purpose in (GHD) look different?”
She says that one of the ways she’s worked through these types of questions has been to lean on her board, as well as to utilize the resources offered through their Giving Hearts Day subscription.
“Our board’s been very helpful just in terms of helping me talk through: ‘Is this idea silly?’” says Dvirnak Lundblad, who is active throughout the year with both the Minot and Bismarck GHD collaboratives. “And then the trainings offered through Impact Foundation are so important as well — especially when you have really part-time people with no fundraising experience.”
When asked what advice she’d give to her former self — the one who was just trying to keep her head above water those first couple years in Giving Hearts Day — her answer is pretty straightforward.
“I’m still learning, but I think it really is just about telling the story (of your organization),” says Dvirnak Lundblad, who acknowledges that Camp Bentley’s 80-year track record has helped them establish a solid donor base. “There are a lot of details to Giving Hearts Day. My first year, I felt like I was so caught up in the details of getting everything in and done, where now I feel like I’m getting better at telling the story of who we are, what we’re doing, and what we want to do.
“And there are smaller things you can do that really make a difference. One thing we’ve done is we have the actual campers do all our thank yous. They make me cry. They say things like: ‘Camp is the best week of my life. Thank you for making this possible.’ At the end (of GHD), I’m exhausted, but when I see notes in pink marker, it reminds me why we do it.”
About Camp Bentley
Camp Bentley is a special, sacred place for many North Dakotans, regardless of age, creed, or race. Campers come from across the region to enjoy this peaceful place on the prairie. The foundation of Camp Bentley is the Word of God and the example set forth by Jesus Christ. Camp Bentley is dedicated to providing people of all ages an opportunity for a Christian camping experience with adult, youth, and family camps scheduled throughout the summer. Their desire is that all campers come to know Jesus as their personal savior and grow in their Christian walks.
