Alliance Member Spotlight: Scott Greenberg
by Sondra Rodriguez

From Camp to Career:
The Impact of Leadership Camp

Parents often send children to leadership camp to make friends and become inspired to positively influence the world around them. For Alliance member Scott Greenberg, years of attending a leadership camp helped him realize a passion for encouraging others, which led to his career.

Greenberg is a motivational speaker with Jump Start Performance Programs who travels to the leadership camps he attended as a boy to deliver messages of encouragement to youths.

“I still get to go to the leadership camp,” Greenberg said. “Instead of just singing the camp songs, I get to lead them. I think it’s the best thing out there for teens.”

After his first experience at a leadership camp, Greenberg built relationships with friendly and positive people who were serious about their lives, he said. This bought him back each summer.

“I wanted to reconnect with them and return to that environment as often as possible,” he said. “Because high school is not enough.”

Greenberg heard his first motivational speaker at leadership camp and was inspired by the influence the speaker had on him. “They blew me away,” he said.

Although he did not know where his life was headed at that point, he accepted an offer to speak at camp. “I was honored with the thought that I might be able to do what those guys did. More importantly, it was incredible to think I had a chance to make students feel the way speakers used to make me feel,” Greenberg said.

Leadership camp provided a place for growth and education surrounding critical life skills for Greenberg and teens that attend today, he said.

“It teaches them to be conscientious about their thoughts, beliefs and behaviors, and how to better relate to others,” he said. “And of course, it helps them realize their ability to impact the world.”

Without leadership camps, students rely on the influences of high school for social development. With all the emphasis on test scores and budgets, there is not much room to encourage personal growth, Greenberg said.

“If I had to attribute any success to what I learned when I was younger, it was mostly from my extra-curricular activities, and from the contacts I made while involved with them.”

Leadership camps are designed to encourage youths in personal growth, social interaction, and critical life skills.  Participation and active involvement has the potential to better a student’s path to adulthood—or even inspire a young man to choose a career that allows him to encourage youths by letting them know that, “they ‘re better than they think. I want them to know the world can be a tough place, but they’re strong enough to handle it,” Greenberg said.

“I want them to know that I was once where they are, and that everything they’re being taught at camp is true and useful.”

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Sondra Rodriguez is a senior Print Journalism major at Abilene Christian University. She is from Dallas, Texas, and is participating in an internship with Lyn Fiscus at Leadership Logistics.