Rolling River Day Camp Still Going Strong After 22 Years

If Hurricane Sandy couldn't stop Rolling River Day Camp, then nothing can at this point.

The camp in East Rockaway has faced a number of challenges over its 22 years in business, from economic recessions to the hurricane. With the help and support of family, friends and the community, the camp is back in full force, changing the lives of local children.

Patch recently sat down with Marissa Allaben, Associate Director at Rolling River Day Camp, to discuss how the camp has changed over time and some of the challenges they face as a family-owned and operated small business.

Can you tell readers a little bit about yourself and the camp?

We primarily work as a summer camp where we do premium summer programs for ages 2-15. It’s all-inclusive in sports, theatre, creative arts. Recently, we started utilizing our space in the offseason to host private events such as children’s birthday parties and school picnics and we’re becoming more of a birthday party and event venue as well. So we’ve been pretty busy, both during the summer and during the off-season.

I grew up coming here as a camper and then worked in advertising, and then came back to work at Rolling River in a management role in 2010. So, I’ve been working mostlyin management, marketing, recruitment, communications within the camp as associate director and I just completed my MBA in Small Business Management and Entrepreneurship at Baruch College and I graduated from Cornell in 2006. 

What is the one biggest thing that has changed over time?

I think that it’s been more challenging to attract consumers, you have to work a little bit harder. Because one, things are a lot more focused online. So from a marketing perspective, people are finding out about you in different ways, as opposed to the past where they just found out about you in the community. Now, they are kind of looking online to get recommendations. You have to be much more proactive and have a much larger online presence.

And I think also, economically, it has been tough with the recession. People may really want to do great things for their kids, but they may not be able to afford what they might have been able to afford in the 90’s.

Do you feel like that’s still the case?

I did feel like it was getting better until we got hit with the hurricane last year. So, I do think that over the last couple of years it has been getting a lot better, but obviously we had a little bit of a setback here in this community. But I think everyone has been really joining forces together and realizing that camp and these experiences are really great for their kids and they are willing to do what they can to make sure that they get to experience it.

How bad was damage during Sandy? 

We got hit pretty bad. We had over five feet of water on almost all the camp grounds and we were out of power for over a month. And it took all year to basically clean up. But we had a lot of support from the community, our family and our staff. 

To rebuild and be able to open for a regular summer for last summer, everything was great. But it has taken a toll I think on the families in this area, as far as people aren’t willing to necessarily spend as much right this moment because they are still recovering from the storm.

I think we have been finding that people are starting to move back to Long Island again, too. So we do have a lot of younger kids that are coming into the area, to both camp and birthday parties here. From that standpoint, we feel that the community has really been growing and is strong.

Even though the camp was badly damage from the storm, you said you still managed to give out over $200,000 in scholarships to local children. Can you talk a little bit about this?

It was just a matter of joining together, with our staff and everyone understood that the number one thing was to give the kids a stable environment for the summer. So, it was great to see everyone come together in such a difficult time and get through it, and be back on our feet now after that.

Basically, the $200,000 was in discounted tuition for our alumni families who couldn’t afford to come back because they were still waiting for insurance money to come in from the storm. So, instead of just saying ‘no, you can’t come’ we just made up as many scholarships as we could and we took a personally hit on that, but it was worth it for us to get everyone in.

What are you most proud of as a local business?

I think what we’re most proud of here is the ability of being able to change the lives of a lot of kids in the area. Now that we’ve been around for over two decades, we’ve watched a lot of these kids start out really young, like three and four years old, and grow up at Rolling River and watch them really turn into fantastic adults and go onto great jobs and great schools. 

So, I think that’s been our biggest accomplishment, just watching the kids grow up and really developing these skills they wouldn’t have gotten if they weren’t at camp. And it’s incredible to see them come back and now a lot of them are coming back with their own kids.