Caleb Seney has spent most of his life at MedCamps, a summer camp experience for children with disabilities. He’ll tell you that he started as a volunteer in 1993 and never left. In his time with the organization, Caleb has worked as a camp counselor, a camp director, volunteered on the board of directors and, finally, became its executive director in 2003.

MedCamps are residential and run 24 hours a day, five days each week, 10 weeks each summer. Caleb works tirelessly with camp counselors and medical professionals to give a fun-filled, no-cost week of camp to children with all kinds of disabilities – orthopedic conditions, cerebral palsy, asthma, sickle cell anemia, autism, epilepsy, visual and hearing impairment, speech impairment and developmental disabilities.

In case you’re wondering, campers do everything you’d expect at summer camp. They go swimming, ride horses, shoot archery, ride a zip line, and have dances (DJ’d by Caleb). He spends part of every day getting to know and bonding with each camper, making them laugh. In some cases, campers’ disabilities are profound, but they still smile when Caleb comes to see them.

When the summer ends, Caleb spends the rest of the year raising the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to run a highly specialized camp. He also forges community partnerships to make MedCamps sustainable. He’s built relationships with dozens of civic clubs to raise funds for campers. He’s partnered with the Louisiana Tech School of Design to have third-year architecture students design and build fully accessible and barrier-free structures.

The campers don’t really know all of this. While they’re at camp, they’re busy having fun like anyone else. But of the 5,000 campers who have come through MedCamps over the last 20 years, each and every one of them knows Caleb’s name.

And his camp name – “Big Tuna.”