Summer Camps

Group of 60 caught tagging in Santa Cruz

Over the weekend, a large contingency of iD Tech Camps employees and their families ventured out to Santa Cruz to volunteer their time in our first major iD Greening event of the year.  iD Greening is an initiative we concretely formalized in the fall to tackle some of the social and environmental concerns we face in the communities where we conduct business.

Here is a press release covering the weekend.  I have interspersed some pictures that were taken by our employees:

Group of 60 caught tagging in Santa Cruz

Keeping Santa Cruz graffiti-free and a little bit greener

Something other than rain and clouds pounded the Santa Cruz coast this past weekend. But it wasn’t the typical hoard of tourists who come to relax on the beach, bike along the shore, or ride the Giant Dipper at the Boardwalk. Instead, a group of 60 volunteers, armed with paint brushes and rollers, stormed in on Santa Cruz to wash out what the taggers had started.

iD Tech Camps, a Campbell-based company, organized its employees and their family members to volunteer to paint over a thousand yards of graffiti, plant hundreds of plants, and pick up multiple truckloads of trash.

“We’re a small army out here,” said Pete Ingram-Cauchi, CEO of iD Tech Camps. “It’s pretty unusual to set a start time of 8 AM on a Saturday morning and have more people show up than expected. We ran out of donuts for our volunteers.” iD Tech Camps, the nation’s largest summer computer camp, has the goal of not only maintaining its status as the country’s largest computer camp, but “we also intend on making it the greenest,” said Ingram-Cauchi. Locally, iD Tech Camps operates its summer computer camp at UC Santa Cruz, Stanford University, Santa Clara University, and other prestigious universities nationwide. It even offers a unique hybrid camp where students spend half the day making video games and the other half of the day learning to surf at Cowell’s and other hot surf spots.

Working with the Volunteer Center of Santa Cruz County, iD Tech employees and their families carpooled to Santa Cruz early Saturday morning. The Volunteer Center has a Graffiti Free Santa Cruz program, sponsored by the City of Santa Cruz Redevelopment Agency. Its mission is to maintain the natural beauty of Santa Cruz by preventing and removing graffiti through community involvement, eradication, education, and enforcement. The ultimate goal is to have volunteers Adopt-a-spot to maintain a graffiti free area in a neighborhood or place of work.  Volunteers are provided with graffiti removal supplies and training to support their commitment.

In three hours the results were clearly visible as positive synergy extended beyond the iD Tech Camps volunteers. Neighbors south of 30^th Avenue and Brommer Street came out of their homes with wide smiles and kind words of thanks. “Two neighbors showed up and handed our volunteers Hershey’s kisses,” said Ingram-Cauchi. They were really excited. And even neighbor Marina Corcoran(below); a five-and-a half-year-old helped joined the group to plant ivy.

“This is truly wonderful,” said resident Chris Marc (pictured below, right) who peered over his fence to see what was going on. ”I’ve lived here a long time and have never seen a group this size out here to clean up.” Ingram-Cauchi hopes to leave some momentum for the neighbors to continue to clean up the area.

One neighbor who teaches middle school and wishes to remain anonymous stated, “Now that the graffiti is painted over, hopefully the neighborhood can adopt this area to keep it clean. It’s good that kids can express themselves, but schools need to re-channel this energy into more positive venues.”

Ingram-Cauchi and his sister and business partner, Alexa Ingram-Cauchi, set the goal of making iD Tech Camps the greenest computer camp in the country last year. That idea has turned into a full-fledged initiative, which is now being implemented throughout the entire company.  “There’s nothing more rewarding than getting your hands dirty and making a difference. It’s important to my sister and my family and our employees. In three hours, we accomplished an awful lot as a team. In the past, we have gone on company ski trips. I think those are a thing of the past. This was much more rewarding,” said Ingram-Cauchi.

The residents south of 30^th Avenue and Brommer Street are probably thinking the same thing.

To participate in the Graffiti Free Santa Cruz initiative, please visit http://www.ci.santa-cruz.ca.us/ra/Graffiti.html.

The above concludes the press release.  But, I wanted to thank all of our employees who showed up on Saturday.  We have a million pictures, I wish I could post them all so that each of you is personally recognized and celebrated.  You will find some more pictures below.  Nice work, team!  Who said a computer camp has to stay indoors all day?  We don’t exactly fit the mold now, do we?

Heading to the clean up site:

Even iD Babies showed up to do their part!

“Where do I start?”

iD’s CFO, Alexa, explaining the proper painting technique:

You missed a spot!

Until next time, iD Nation!

4 Responses to “Group of 60 caught tagging in Santa Cruz”

1. Kathy Schur, on March 26th, 2007 at 10:22 am Said:

   Hi there,

   I enjoyed reading your blog. I just have a question about your camp. My son Brandon cannot afford to attend camp. He is pretty much a computer geek and is quite intelligent. Due to birth defect involving his spine he can no longer play sports. Do you have any scholarship program? He is 14 years old. Is there any way he could work for you at the Rider College camp? Please let me know. Thanks.

   Sincerely,

   Kathy Schur

2. Pete, on March 26th, 2007 at 10:27 am Said:

   We do have a tuition assistance program. Please go to http://www.internalDrive.com and in the search box, type “tuition assistance.” Please follow the directions carefully. We will award over $150,000 in scholarships and tuition assistance this year, so the chances of getting some assistance are high. Thanks for your comment. Please tell Brandon that we hope he can attend camp.

3. Melba, on June 11th, 2008 at 4:59 pm Said:

   Pete, I hope you are still reading this blog. last entry was in 2007…
   I am a Californian transplanted to Atlanta. I would love to get something like this started here. I enjoyed reading this article. Do you have an email address?

4. Pete, on June 17th, 2008 at 9:55 am Said:

   Hi there Melba,

   I have been blogging frequently about our summer computer camps in California, and Atlanta. We do have summer camps at Emory University in GA.

   Thanks for your post!

Leave a Reply

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 10:14 am and is filed under Summer Camps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.