The Best Kind of Summer Day

Two days into Summer Experience Week, Delta Project Program Director Shanda Vaughn turned a heat wave into a lesson in presence, and she let the young women participating teach it to themselves.

Grand Rapids opened the summer with a heat wave, and The Delta Project met it head-on.

Day one of Summer Experience Week began at Craig’s Cruisers, where the Healthy Connections crew walked into a building full of go-karts, bumper cars, laser tag, trampolines, and slides, and a sun outside that, by Program Director Shanda Vaughn’s own account, was not playing. It didn’t matter. The young women didn’t slow down for a second. They raced. They bonded. They went back for the buffet, and then they went back for a few rounds of ice cream. Day one ran loud and full, from open to close.

“Loud, chaotic, sweaty, and so much fun,” Vaughn wrote afterward. “The best kind of summer day.”

It would be easy to read a day like that as nothing more than fun. It isn’t. Play is where belonging gets built, and belonging is the whole point. Before a single lesson is ever named out loud, a young person has to feel safe enough to be fully herself in a room — to run, to laugh, to try everything without bracing for what comes next. 

That feeling doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone designs the day so that joy is allowed to be the agenda. On day one, that someone was Shanda Vaughn. What looked like chaos was a container, carefully held.

The proof came on day two.

Riding the rides at Craig’s Cruisers

Tuesday’s heat came back even less forgiving, and rather than force the schedule, Vaughn let the girls decide. They voted for a movie day. Fresh popcorn, cold drinks, and a matinee of Toy Story 5 which became a soft, cool antidote to a hard, hot afternoon. On paper, a rest day. What no one expected was how much the young women would carry out of the theater with them.

The film opened up a real conversation about screen time, about friendship, about technology, and about what it actually looks like to be present with the people right in front of you. And the girls had a lot to say:

“I learned that just because people use technology, they don’t have to change.” — Debrielle

“I learned not to use a lot of technology all the time.” — Kennedy

“Starting a friendship over a device is not always good.” — Diamond

“It’s okay to get off your phone once in a while.” — LaMiya

One of Ms. Shanda’s famous selfies with the Healthy Connections crew

These are not talking points handed down by an adult. They are conclusions the young women reached on their own, in their own language, because the space had been built for them to reach them. 

That is the quiet genius of good youth development: the director sets the table, and the young people bring the insight. Vaughn didn’t lecture a room about digital wellness. She took them to a movie, and then she kept the conversation going — all the way to Buffalo Wild Wings, where somewhere between the wings and the debrief, the girls turned their own reflections into a plan. 

They created a no-phones challenge for Thursday’s camp day. They set the terms themselves.

So the real question, as Vaughn put it, is simple: Will they make it?

The honest answer is that the challenge already worked, whether or not a single phone stays in a single pocket on Thursday. A group of young women watched a movie, examined their own habits, disagreed and agreed out loud, and then held themselves to a standard they wrote for themselves. That is exactly the kind of ownership The Delta Project exists to cultivate and it is exactly what a mission looks like when it is brought to life, in action, and on purpose.

Two days. A heat wave. A go-kart track and a movie theater. On the surface, a summer camp doing summer things. Underneath, something far more deliberate: a program director who understands that presence is taught by modeling it, that lessons land hardest when young people arrive at them themselves, and that the work of belonging is done in the loud moments and the quiet ones alike.

Summer Experience Week is only getting started. But its first two days already carry the signature of the person holding it together.

Thank you, Shanda.

Wrapping up day two at Buffalo Wild Wings and keeping the conversation going.