Claressa Winston, Founder & Executive Director

While the Youth Life Center is a lifelong dream I envisioned as a little girl, CampXpressions was birthed in 2011 and the center itself was established in 2013 to provide a safe place for children to come, dream, discover, develop, and Be free to Be. Compelled to create an environment where youth could find their voice, and discover their gifts, talents, and abilities to advance those attributes, became my mission.

Most importantly, we ensure responsible supervision and resources needed are in place to cultivate their new findings. As a latchkey kid and product of a single-parent home myself, a safe place where children could be free to be, where they would have support, and moreover create a place for adolescents, pre-teens, and teenagers to be able to navigate in this very critical transitional phase where we oftentimes leave them to figure things out on our own.

Google has become the guardian, the teacher, and the authority in our children’s lives. Anything they want to know is at their fingertips, even when they don’t have the capacity to dissect or to interpret the information as given, and don’t know what’s true, alternative facts, or just a flat-out lie.

As responsible adults and stewards of their lives, we must give them information so they can make informed decisions. We do not sugarcoat, nor blur the truth of life and its realities. Our responsibility is to equip our youth with the tools needed to succeed. They need unredacted information, raw, and real which they get from other influential platforms – meaning social media, reality TV, and every website that they have the liberty to access.

Our ultimate goal is that our youth go back into their academic environment with a stronger, wiser confidence, and more prepared; assured in their abilities to accomplish whatever they put their mind, energy, and efforts into.