Honolulu, HI -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/12/2013 -- What started out as a way to share magic, juggling and puppetry skills with children has grown into a life changing experience for thousands of children and young adults. The Fantastic Magic Camp officially opened in June of 1993 in Austin, Texas, and was an immediate success. Kids liked it because it was fun; parents liked it because they saw their children enthusiastically learning new skills. At the end of the third year, renowned magician Cody Fisher pointed out that the Magic Camp was much more than just a place to learn magic, juggling and puppetry. It was, in his words, “a Life-Skills Camp”.

Their Scholarship Fund program has allowed the Magic Camp to provide opportunities to hundreds of children who would otherwise not be able to attend, and so they are fundraising on CrowdFundEDU, a fundraising platform for education, to boost the number of scholarships they can offer this year. One of the greatest aspects of the camp is that everyone is welcome and everyone seems to fit in. The Fantastic Magic Camp is a mainstream camp that is extremely successful with special needs children. This is primarily due to the founders Kent Cummins (the original owner and creator of the Magic Camp) and Peter Hinrichs, who strongly believed that every child has special needs. For the last twenty-one years, this philosophy has been the backbone of the camp, which has become a summer home to thousands of children in Texas. There have even been a few campers who came from as far away as Japan.

On any given day during the summer, you are likely to find children with Down’s syndrome or Autism, juggling, playing and learning magic along with blind, deaf or wheelchair bound kids as well as dozens of children whose special needs do not fit a medical diagnosis. Sometimes the children viewed by society as “mainstream” need more care and attention than those with medically defined conditions. However, at the Magic Camp, none of that matters. Everyone is part of one big happy and somewhat nerdy family.

While the campers range in age from five to twelve, there is a second phase of the camp which is truly inspiring. When campers reach the age of thirteen they are allowed to join the camp’s Youth Leader Training Academy. Over the course of the year, they receive over 70 hours of intense life skills and management training. They are then allowed to attend the camp for free for one summer as they shadow one or more of the counselors. Over the course of the next few years, they will receive as many as 300 hours of training. Some of them have gone on to become staff members and even camp directors. Every single person who works there, was once a camper at the Fantastic Magic Camp.

One of the campers in the very first session of the Magic Camp had part of his tuition paid by a group of his neighbors and the rest was paid by the owner of the camp. He later on went on to become a counselor, a staff member, a camp director and eventually a member of the board of directors. Since then the scholarship has become more formalized and it has allowed hundreds of amazing children the opportunity to share in the joy of this amazing camp.

Many contributors to the scholarship fund once attended the camp themselves. Their generosity that enables a new generation of children to have fun and learn magic and life skills embodies the “pay it forward” spirit of Student Body of America Association’s Project Pay it Forward program. Project Pay it Forward, the second documentary film currently in pre-production, illustrates many examples of how implementing the pay it forward concept with education will pave the path towards a brighter future.

About Student Body of America Association
Student Body of America Association, (http://www.studentbodyofamerica.org), based in Honolulu, HI, is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization operated exclusively for educational purposes. Our mission is to provide easily accessible information and resources to educate and support students nationwide in achieving an education, and to guide individuals to apply their knowledge and skills to make the best decisions on an individual and societal basis.

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