OUR campers are finally here! After six months of looking at master lists and speaking to people over email, we finally put names to faces and have started getting to know each other.

Day one of camp is always really overwhelming, speaking from my experience as a camper, and that definitely translated into this year as well.

There is an extensive check-in process, a lot of strangers to meet for the first time, shared cabins to get settled into, a dinner, a welcome ceremony and a social games night all to get through.

And that for a lot of people is on top of travelling to the US from their home country, and the four-hour bus ride the campers all took from New York City up to Warrensburg.

For anyone, it’s over-stimulating and uncomfortable. Even more so for neurodivergent people, of which there often tends to be a decent amount of representation in spaces of this nature, which has been mindfully incorporated into the process.

Although this is an innovation lab, day one is all about the connections and the foundations we build with each other that are the cornerstone of the work we are about to undertake. Without forging those initial connections, and in a meaningful way, the innovation process itself would be impossible.

This is a group of some of the most passionate and successful change-makers in the world, and naturally, that means there are a lot of opinions in the room that ultimately need to be dissected and worked around in order to achieve the deliverables that camp demands. That would not be possible if we didn’t take time in the beginning to allow for the relationships to take shape.

We kicked off with a friendly football game – that unfortunately ended in one sprained ankle before we were even an hour into camp – before moving on to our first group dinner and a social hour in the quad.

I was introduced to Skee Ball and Cornhole which felt like a peak American culture experience. We ended day one in a similarly American style with s’mores around the campfire.

Day two of camp is really when the innovation process starts to take shape. This morning I met with my assigned track for the first time.

I am leading the SDG 10 “Reduced Inequalities” track and have a group of 10 great young people to guide along the way, some are students, some are established human-centred design professionals.

We even have an aerospace engineer and a sustainable fashion designer. So much range and representation in such a small group of people.

We started the morning again by focusing on forging those connections, and I took them through our values-based onboarding tool which aims to unite people based on their shared values, strengths, areas for growth and expectations.

We set a group mission statement based on the values that we identified, and split off into three teams that will get to work on the first gate of the innovation process – crafting a problem statement.

The best advice I ever got when I was going through my camp experience was to “fall in love with the problem, not the solution”.

In the sustainable development space, it’s easy to tie yourself in knots trying to find the answer, or trying to be the saviour.

What’s more important, is really connecting with the problem that you want to solve, identifying what it is, where it exists and most importantly, the people it concerns. Once you have identified and resonated authentically with your problem, the solutions naturally start to present themselves.

That’s the message my team will be encouraged to take forward this week, and the real hard work starts this afternoon with our innovation process gate one.

We’ll maybe squeeze in the treetop assault course for a bit of camp-inspired team-building along the way, though.