 I'm very proud of my identity but I am the only gay person in my school. He stayed home most summers and we started to worry. I literally just googled gay camp and brave trails came up. The mission of Brave Trails is to bring together LGBTQ youth in leadership and traditional summer camp activities. So it's really to build and foster the queer leaders of tomorrow. When we created camp brave trails, it really mattered the quality of the kids and that they would actually take what they learned and apply it to life. We have a wide variety of leadership workshops and we also have what we call our social entrepreneurship course. It's a huge activist tool. There's been so many stories of the campers going back to their communities and really growing as leaders. You need to be able to have a space where you feel safe and you feel welcome in order to grow. It was just so amazing to go to camp and just be surrounded by so many people who have the same experience as me. There's just kind of always an internal dialogue going on about how others see me versus how I see myself. It almost felt like how the other half lives moment because I could just like walk around and not have to worry about how I'm presenting my gender or my sexuality. That's like a huge success to be able in just in those two weeks to see that much growth from my youth. It's inspired me and proven to me something I already knew but we don't give our young people enough credit. They're the people who are changing the world. Having this community where we not only meet people with the same struggles as us but we learn how to take our struggles and translate them into leadership roles. I just think it's really valuable. This whole experience, the LGBTQ experience is very different for us. He's introducing us to his world. We find that he's more open at home with us when he comes back from camp. He also meets so many kids, so many friends that he would never have had the opportunity to do at this age because it's hard for teens to reach out. It's been a life saver for us.