A Message from our Senior Advisor of Native Partnerships, Diana Cournoyer
Indigenous Peoples’ Day (October 12) is an opportunity to celebrate the strength, cultures, knowledge, and enduring presence of Native and Indigenous peoples. At Camp Fire, it is also a time to reflect on our responsibility to continue learning, repair harm, and build relationships with Native communities grounded in respect, reciprocity, and action.
Camp Fire has been on an intentional journey to address its history of cultural appropriation and change practices that caused harm to Native people. That work has included examining names, symbols, traditions, and materials; educating our network; listening to Native leaders; and developing reciprocal partnerships with Native organizations and Tribal communities.
There is still much work ahead. But this Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we also find ourselves at an important point of transition, where we ask not to simply improve what we have done before, but to reconsider how we work, who we work alongside, and what young people need from us now.
A pivotal moment and an opportunity for a paradigm shift
I am stepping into my role this year as Senior Advisor, Native Partnerships, at Camp Fire at a particularly meaningful point in the organization’s journey.
Camp Fire has already begun the difficult work of examining its history, acknowledging harm, and changing practices. My responsibility is not to start that work over or declare it complete. Rather, it is to help move us into the next phase: from acknowledgment to sustained action, from individual efforts to organizational practice, and from consultation to genuine reciprocal partnership.
I think of this transition as part of a larger paradigm shift.
The philosophy of a paradigm shift describes a pivotal moment in American education that requires more than another program or incremental reform. It calls for changes in policy, structures, and systems so that they support and serve students differently. It also challenges us to move beyond defining success primarily through academic measures and instead consider the emotional, mental, social, spiritual, and academic well-being of the whole child.
That idea resonates deeply with where Camp Fire is today.
A paradigm shift asks us to do more than improve an existing system. It asks us to examine the assumptions underneath it.
Who gets to define what young people need?
Whose knowledge counts?
Who has decision-making power?
Are communities recipients of programs, or are they partners in designing the environments their young people need to flourish?
For Native young people in particular, those questions cannot be separated from history. For generations, systems were designed to remove Native children from their families, languages, cultures, and communities. A paradigm shift traces a very different trajectory emerging over time: from removal and assimilation toward reclamation, sovereignty, and the return of educational authority to Native communities.
That history offers lessons that reach far beyond Native education.
From doing for communities to building with communities
One of the most important shifts I hope we can advance at Camp Fire is deceptively simple:
Moving from doing things for communities to building things with communities.
For too long, many institutions, including education and youth development organizations, have assumed that expertise resides primarily within the organization. Programs are designed, communities are invited to participate, and success is measured according to predetermined outcomes.
A different paradigm begins with the recognition that communities already possess knowledge, strengths, relationships, and solutions.
Education happens in community, and that meaningful change requires learning systems that meet young people where they are socially, emotionally, and mentally, with direct engagement from students and community members helping drive systems change.
For Camp Fire, that means asking how our programs and partnerships can be increasingly shaped alongside the people and communities they are intended to serve.
That is especially important in our relationships with Tribal Nations and Native communities. There is no single Native experience or culture. Tribal Nations are distinct sovereign nations with their own histories, languages, cultures, governments, and priorities.
Authentic partnership therefore cannot be one-size-fits-all.
It must be relational. It must be local. And it must recognize Native communities not simply as stakeholders, but as leaders and knowledge holders.
Native partnerships are growing across the Camp Fire network
Across the Camp Fire network, affiliates are building and deepening relationships with Native people, Tribes, organizations, educators, and Elders in their own communities.
Camp Fire Columbia has developed programming specifically for Native youth. Camp Fire Alaska has worked with Alaska Native Elders to inform learning about reciprocity in nature. Camp Fire Central Puget Sound’s relationship with the Puyallup Tribe helped create the connection that ultimately grew into our national partnership with Puyallup Tribal Enterprises.
Affiliates are also continuing to examine their own histories and practices, including camp and program names, songs, ceremonies, structures, educational materials, and traditions, and make changes where appropriation or harmful representations remain.
That work represents another important transition: from preserving traditions simply because they are traditions to asking whether those traditions reflect the organization we want to become.
Change can be uncomfortable, particularly in an organization with more than a century of history. But honoring our history cannot mean being bound by every part of it.
Sometimes honoring an organization’s mission requires having the courage to change how that mission is carried forward.
From changing programs to changing systems
This is where I believe the idea of a paradigm shift becomes especially important.
The goal cannot simply be to create a few new programs or partnerships while everything around them remains unchanged.
If we are serious about creating environments where every young person can thrive, we have to look at the systems surrounding our programs: how decisions are made, how resources are allocated, how partnerships are formed, whose expertise is valued, how success is measured, and how young people and communities participate in shaping the work.
A paradigm shift describes Native communities as already developing solutions rooted in Indigenous values that prioritize young people’s emotional, mental, social, spiritual, and academic well-being.
There is an important lesson there for the entire youth development field.
The future may not require us to invent an entirely new way of supporting young people. It may require us to recognize and learn from approaches communities have practiced for generations: relationships matter, identity matters, culture matters, place matters, belonging matters, and young people must be understood as whole human beings.
What I hope comes next
As Camp Fire moves forward with Flourish, our 2026–2030 strategic plan, I see an opportunity to connect this paradigm shift to our broader vision for the future.
I want Camp Fire to become an organization where reciprocal partnership is not a special project. It is simply how we work.
Where community voice enters at the beginning of the process, not after decisions have already been made.
Where Native young people and other young people whose voices have historically been marginalized can see their identities and communities treated as strengths.
Where our programs respond to young people as whole people.
And where our national reach gives us an opportunity not only to transform Camp Fire, but to contribute to change across youth development.
This is bigger than one organization.
Across the United States, we are asking young people to navigate extraordinary social, environmental, technological, and economic change. At the same time, many of the systems designed to support them were created for a different era.
That makes this a pivotal moment.
We can keep adapting old systems around the edges, or we can be courageous enough to ask whether some of those systems need to be reshaped altogether.
The paradigm shift philosophy offers a compelling vision of that possibility: creating space to shift, reshape, and even reinvent educational environments, so they become powerful allies for future generations.
I believe youth development has the same opportunity. We can simply become a newer version of what we have been. Or we can help create a new paradigm for what youth development can become. That is the opportunity ahead of us, at Camp Fire and beyond.
Introducing Native Partnerships at Camp Fire
When Native communities help shape the future of Camp Fire, Native youth thrive, relationships deepen, and all young people benefit from a more inclusive, culturally grounded, and connected world.
Our Native Partnerships work builds authentic, reciprocal relationships with tribal nations, native organizations, educators, youth leaders, and communities that honor tribal sovereignty and support cultural revitalization.
Join us in this work
Diana Cournoyer | Senior Advisor of Native Partnerships
