Our mission at HRF has evolved from the simple notion of providing youth with a fun camp experience to improving young lives and creating a positive impact across South LA. We invest in students, their families, their schools and their communities. We bring youth and parents from Watts and Compton out for a safe, nurturing, and enriching experience at no cost to them, and use that experience to foster positive discourse, provide tools for reflection, and help young men and women set goals to rewrite the future of their school and their community.

We leverage the camp experience as a vehicle for personal empowerment and social change. Through a diverse set of recreational programs, including arts, enrichment and athletics, we give our campers powerful lessons in community, character-building, leadership development, and healthy living. All the while, our campers experience nature or their own neighborhood in a way they never have before.

Our work is rooted in the South African philosophy of “Ubuntu,” which means that we rise and fall together as a community. The literal translation is, “I am, because we are” and it represents the respect, love, kindness, and connectedness we believe should exist between all people. Through Ubuntu, young people learn that we must rely on and support each other to ensure success as an individual, as a family, and as a community.