Our Goal

Our goal is to expose our youth to a variety of activities, locations, and cultures from cradle to career.  We encourage school readiness, especially in the areas of reading, math and social development and provide various programs to help with this endeavor.

Strategic Goals

  • Remove barriers and provide tools to assist our residents in becoming self sufficient
  • Provide programs for youth that will motivate learning, raise self-esteem and enable them to become productive members of the community

Summer Camp - Camp Ernst

Our goal is to expose our youth to a variety of activities, locations, and cultures from cradle to career.  We encourage school readiness, especially in the areas of reading, math and social development and provide various programs to help with this endeavor.

Summer Camp at Camp Ernst is our tested, best practice response to the well-known risk of learning loss and social dysfunction among low-income youth during the summer months. As an important component of our community-wide effort to help inner city youth succeed, HAC offers Summer Camp at Camp Ernst, during June and July, serving at-risk children, ages 7-13, who reside in Covington public housing.  The camp is a partnership between the Housing Authority of Covington and the YMCA/Camp Ernst. 

The Objectives of the Summer Camp Program Include:

  • Provide a supportive environment where learning is challenging, but fun
  • Strengthen communication and social skills
  • Reduce problem behaviors
  • Instill lifelong values of teamwork and individual responsibility
  • Model good behavior through positive mentorships

All youth are able to participate in an impressive array of recreational activities within three distinct camp areas: the lake (e.g. canoeing, kayaking, aquacycling), the ropes course (e.g. zipline, airwalk, Burma Bridge), and the valley (e.g. swimming, fishing, archery, horseback riding).

During the recreational component, good behavior is modeled through the effective mentoring of skilled camp counselors.  Emphasis is always placed on applying many YMCA core values and social skills, which include: caring, honesty, respect, responsibility, conflict resolution, friendship, trying new things, creativity, independence, teamwork, and much more!

Finally, in addition to all the aforementioned opportunities, the camp experience includes nutritious meals three times a day, healthy snacks, and transportation to and from this 7 day, overnight camp program.      

Teen Summer Work Program

We offer our young people ages 16-20 opportunities to experience work in public and private sectors. We believe real world experiences build character and responsibility. Our intention is to help youth gain skills and educational opportunities to prepare for a successful future!  In 2009, we launched the Teen Summer Work Program for youth to gain summer employment. 

Each teen resident comes away with over 80 hours of employment experience over the summer.

The vision of the Teen Summer Work Program is to ultimately allow each teen resident of public housing an opportunity to gain relevant community work experience. We believe this is the beginning of their road to self-sufficiency.

The Teen Summer WOrk Program Offers Each Teen Resident the Following:

  • Paid Employment
  • Social Skill Development
  • Job Readiness Training
  • Work Experience
  • Life Skills Training
For more information on the programs HAC offers, please contact the Director of Resident Services at
jadkins@hacov.org