Fall is a beautiful season at Ferncliff. The weather has started to cool off and the leaves are starting to slowly change from fully green to gorgeous mix of green, red, orange, and yellow. It’s quiet, serene, and picturesque. Naturally, folks want to take advantage of it!

All of the permanent staff members at Ferncliff have been busy serving a lot of different guest groups in the past month or two. We’ve had corporate and nonprofit conferences, youth group retreats, school groups, mission teams, weddings, and more. I’ve been coordinating a lot of programming activities with some of these groups lately, and it’s been really fun!

Last week was a particularly busy one for programming. I led team-building initiatives with a group of professionals from UAMS, David Gill ran disaster assistance kit packaging in the DAC with a college-aged mission team, I created an orienteering compass course for employees of Entergy, and the entire program team led another round of team-building with folks from the nonprofit organization Our House.

It’s been a longtime goal of ours to increase year-round programming at Ferncliff. We want to attract new groups to come to Ferncliff specifically to do a certain camp activities, and we want the groups that already book retreats and conferences with us to consider adding programming activities to their schedules.

One part of that is to think of new program offerings. The orienteering activity with Entergy this past week was something fairly new for us, for instance – we don’t have a permanent orienteering course, and I’ve personally only done it once in a while with campers in the summer. But it was great fun and I can’t wait to recreate it with other groups. Our intern Adam is working on a new curriculum with nature study and outdoor education activities that are ideal for school groups and field trips. We’re thinking about how we can better use our farm and garden area for hands-on experiential activities that can be done with a variety of ages in all growing seasons.

Ferncliff has so many beautiful, unique spaces that we can use in many ways beyond what we already do, and our programming team has the creativity and experience to make really amazing stuff happen. What’s next for us? Stay tuned! We’re always trying new things.

Have you ever done any programming at Ferncliff? What kind of programming would you like to do, or would you find useful? Let us know! We’d love to hear from you. programs@ferncliff.org

Happy Fall!
-Emily