Your Camp Director Just Quit. Here's What to Do Next.
- Jul 30
- 10 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Every August, camp ends. Staff scatter. Families head home. And somewhere across the country, a camp director makes a decision they've been sitting with all summer.
Sometimes they tell you they're not coming back. Sometimes they tell you they already have another job. Sometimes, if you're unlucky, they say nothing at all.
This post is for the board member, the executive committee chair, the camp owner who just got that call — the one who hasn't run a leadership search in fifteen years and is now staring at a calendar that says September is three weeks away.
Take a breath. This is fixable. Here's the playbook.
Why Camp Leadership Keeps Quitting
Leadership transitions in the nonprofit sector are not unusual — they're the norm. Annual voluntary turnover in the nonprofit workforce runs at roughly 19 percent, compared to approximately 12 percent across all U.S. industries, according to research from the Johnson Center for Philanthropy. For senior leaders specifically, the pressure has intensified: nonprofit CEO departures hit record highs in 2025, even as overall job resignation rates have stabilized elsewhere.
Camp is not immune to this. According to ACA's CampCounts 2022 research, the median overnight camp director has been in their current position for just five years. Boards that assume they have more runway than they do are often the ones who get caught flat-footed in August.
The harder truth is that most boards aren't ready when a departure happens. According to BoardSource's Leading with Intent 2024, only 34 percent of nonprofits have a written succession plan in place. At smaller-budget organizations — where most camps sit — that number is almost certainly lower. The playbook doesn't exist. That's what this post is for.
The Reality on the Ground
Not every departure looks the same. Sometimes it's graceful — a long-tenured director gives six months notice, wants to help find their successor, leaves with dignity. Those transitions exist and they're not the ones that keep boards up at night.
The harder situations arrive without warning. We worked with a camp recently whose director was let go during staff orientation, after it emerged they had done something unlawful. Immediate departure. No transition. Forty-eight hours before summer began. We've also worked with a camp whose director, in May, accepted a position at the camp they grew up working at — an opportunity they simply couldn't pass up. That one wasn't hostile, but the camp still had roughly a month to figure out what summer looked like. A month is not enough runway.
These situations happen. When they do, the first thing you have to do is resist the urge to react.
Step 1: Get Your Outgoing Leader to Help With the Transition
This is where most boards either get it right or get it badly wrong.
Your outgoing director carries an enormous amount of institutional knowledge. How camp actually runs. Vendor relationships. Staff dynamics. Financial nuances. Parent history. All of it lives in their head, and when they walk out the door, it walks out with them unless you act deliberately.
The moment you have the news, sit down with that person one-on-one. Make the ask directly: we need you to stick around as long as possible, and we need you to help us document everything. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes they have a new job starting next week. But even then, two to four weeks of availability — formal or informal — is worth asking for.
The way you make the ask matters. Tie it to the community, not to your inconvenience. "We support your decision. We're proud of what you've built here. And we're asking you to give us some grace in managing this transition for the people who love this place." That framing lands differently than a logistics conversation.
What you're hoping to get, in rough order of value:
A shared drive with every critical document, process, and contact organized and accessible.
An onboarding guide for whoever comes next.
Availability during the actual search — not just the first two weeks, but ideally through the interview process.
A willingness to spend time with the new hire once they're on board.
If you get genuine buy-in from the outgoing director, you've dramatically reduced your operational risk. Bridgespan's research on nonprofit leadership transitions documents what happens when you don't: fundraising disruption, senior staff attrition within 18 months of an unplanned transition, and program interruption that compounds over time. The exit, handled right, is also when you can prevent most of that.
Step 2: Do an Exit Interview — A Real One
Not a logistics meeting. A genuine conversation about why this person is leaving, what they experienced, and what they'd do differently if they ran the organization.
You're trying to surface things the board may not know. Burnout. Compensation frustration. A board dynamic that wasn't working. A structural problem that made the job harder than it needed to be. Some of those things will be uncomfortable to hear. Hear them anyway. They are the single most valuable input you have for designing a role that the next person can actually succeed in.
Done right, this conversation also deepens the relationship with the outgoing leader and makes them more likely to help with the transition. The exit interview is an act of empathy, and it signals that you value the whole person — not just the months of notice they're giving you.
Step 3: Communicate Before It Leaks
Camp is a small world. News travels fast and confidentiality has a very short shelf life. Get ahead of it.
Before any announcement goes out, align with your outgoing leader on when they're leaving, what the circumstances are, and how you're going to frame it publicly. A graceful retirement and a sudden resignation require very different language, and the board needs to own that framing rather than react to whatever gets out first.
The approach that works: co-craft the announcement with the outgoing director. Set a release date. Let them make the announcement — it's their news to share. Then have the board chair follow immediately with a message that reassures the community about the transition process, the timeline, and what comes next.
Sequencing of who gets told first:
Other board members and your executive committee — urgent meeting before anything goes wider.
Senior leadership staff — they're immediately impacted and deserve to hear it directly.
Key donors and parents — with messaging tailored to their relationship with the camp.
Broader community announcement.
Do this together with your outgoing leader, not around them. One coordinated voice, not competing narratives.
Step 4: Decide — Launch the Search or Appoint Interim Camp Leadership
This is the decision most boards delay, and delaying it costs them.
The camp leadership hiring market has a season. It opens in September, immediately after summer ends, and runs hot through December. That window is when serious candidates make their moves — they evaluate their summers, decide whether to stay or go, and either start looking or commit to returning. Miss it and you're working from a smaller, later-moving pool.
What that means practically: if your director quits in August and you are not ready to move immediately, you are not ready to compete. Boards that spend September getting organized are already losing to boards that spent the summer preparing.
The honest question for the board is this: are we ready to run a serious search right now, or do we need to put an interim plan in place and search properly through the fall?
What Is Interim Leadership at Camp?
Interim leadership means appointing a temporary leader — an internal team member, a board member, or an experienced outside professional — to run the organization while the board conducts a proper executive director search. It's a standard practice across the nonprofit world, and it is not a failure. For many camps it is the right call.
In practice, interim leadership at camp usually takes one of three forms: appoint an assistant director or senior team member to lead through the season, distribute the outgoing director's key responsibilities across the existing team, or bring in a board member to run camp for a defined stretch. We've worked with camps that have done all three. It works.
The Benefits of Interim Leadership
The biggest benefit of interim leadership is time: it buys you the most valuable thing in camp leadership hiring — the ability to run your search during the fall window and do it right, rather than rushing a hire to fill a seat.
There's a financial case too. According to SHRM, replacing a senior leader costs between 150 and 200 percent of their annual salary once you account for recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity, and the institutional knowledge that walks out the door. Rushing a hire — and getting it wrong — is significantly more expensive than going one summer with an interim solution and searching deliberately.
Step 5: Build Your Executive Search Committee for Hiring a New Camp Director
Once the immediate situation is stabilized — transition plan in motion, communication cascade done, go/no-go made — it's time to form the team that will run the search.
This is not the full board. Four to eight people, maximum, with real time to dedicate. You're looking for people with an eye for talent, people who understand what the future of the organization needs rather than what the past looked like, and people who can commit meaningfully to the work ahead.
Diversity of perspective matters here. The loudest voices on the board are not always the best evaluators of talent. Think about who brings genuine judgment about leadership and who has the bandwidth.
Step 6: Use the Transition as a Reset Moment for the Camp Director Role
The best boards we've worked with treat a leadership departure as an inflection point. They don't reach for the old job description and re-post it. They ask harder questions first.
What did the outgoing leader do exceptionally well? What got dropped? What does camp need in the next five years that it didn't need a decade ago?
We run a full organizational health assessment with every camp at this stage — going through enrollment, culture, programming, staff, fundraising, capital planning, and safety, and rating each area green, yellow, or red. That exercise tells you what the next hire actually needs to prioritize, and it becomes the foundation for a job description that reflects the future, not the past.
This is also the moment to ask honestly whether the board has the capacity to run this search on its own. The youth camp industry contributes $70 billion to the national economy, according to ACA's 2024 National Economic Impact Study conducted with the University of Michigan. These are not small organizations making inconsequential decisions. A leadership search for a camp serving hundreds of families is a serious undertaking, and volunteer boards frequently underestimate the sourcing effort, market knowledge, and candidate relationship management required to compete. That's exactly the gap an executive search partner exists to close.
Step 7: Prepare Your Camp Leadership Search Before September
You have the weeks between when camp ends in mid-August and when September begins. Use them to build everything that needs to exist before you talk to a single candidate.
A refreshed job description rooted in your organizational health assessment.
A defined compensation range backed by real market data.
An interview process with clear stages, defined criteria, and a scoring rubric.
Communication templates for candidates at every stage.
An applicant tracking system where candidates flow into a real pipeline.
If you are building this in October while your first strong candidates are already in play, you are already behind. In 2016, 32 percent of reporting camps indicated they had a director with 20-plus years of experience. By 2019, that number had dropped to 17 percent, according to ACA staffing research — meaning the market for experienced camp leadership has grown more competitive precisely as the supply of long-tenured leaders has thinned. The best candidates are evaluating multiple organizations simultaneously, and a disorganized process signals a disorganized organization.
The Camp Director Search Timeline, in Plain Terms
August: Transition plan with outgoing leader, exit interview, communication cascade, go/no-go decision.
September–December: Search committee formed, role reframed, compensation benchmarked, job description ready, search launched and in full swing. This is the window. Protect it.
January onward: The market slows. Candidates who haven't moved by February are largely committing to their current camps for the summer. If you haven't closed by then, you're either extending into a thinner pool or finalizing an interim plan for the coming season.
Spring: New leader onboards, transition activities continue with outgoing director where possible.
If you got the news in August and you're reading this now, you have time — but not unlimited time. The window is open. The question is whether you're ready to walk through it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should a board do first when a camp director resigns?
Before anything else, meet one-on-one with the outgoing director and ask them to help with the transition — documenting processes, organizing files, and staying available through the search if possible. Then conduct a genuine exit interview and align on how the departure will be communicated before the news spreads on its own.
How long does a camp executive director search take?
A well-run camp leadership search typically takes three to five months, and timing matters as much as duration. The strongest hiring window opens in September and runs through December, when serious candidates are actively evaluating their next move. Searches that extend past February face a thinner pool, because most camp leaders commit to their current organizations for the coming summer by then.
Who should serve as interim camp director?
Three models work: an assistant director or senior team member steps up, the outgoing director's responsibilities get distributed across the existing team, or a board member runs camp for a defined stretch. We've worked with camps that have done all three. The point of interim leadership isn't finding the perfect stand-in — it's buying the board the time to search deliberately instead of rushing a hire.
How much does it cost to replace a camp director?
Replacing a senior leader typically costs 150 to 200 percent of their annual salary, according to SHRM, once you account for recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity, and lost institutional knowledge. A rushed mis-hire costs far more than running one summer with an interim plan and searching properly.
Should our camp hire an executive search firm?
Most camp roles don't need one. The executive level is different. A serious leadership search is hundreds of hours of sourcing, screening, and candidate management inside a compressed fall window — and volunteer boards consistently underestimate that lift. If you have a natural candidate pool, a flexible timeline, and someone with real hiring experience to run the process, do it yourself. If you don't, an executive search partner runs the process while your board stays focused on the decision.
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CampHire specializes in executive search and HR advisory for camps and youth-serving nonprofits. If your camp is navigating a leadership transition, get in touch — we'd be glad to talk through your situation.