For Corbel Capital Partners CEO Jeff Schwartz, Happy Trails for Kids Taste of Camp is the Best of Investments
Corbel Capital Partners, a Los Angeles-based investment firm that specializes in lower-middle market investments, is known for providing a strong business partner to its portfolio investment companies. It is also known as being a strong business partner for another type of entity, one a bit less concerned with profit.
For several years the private equity firm has invested time and resources with a program called Happy Trails for Kids, which provides camping experiences and other like-minded activities for children in the foster system in Los Angeles County.
“The Los Angeles community is such a deserving population,” Kathryn Langner of Corbel Capital Partners said. “And this program gives the kids a high touch of normalcy and the gift of the outdoors, something I think that resonates with all of us.”
A Taste of Camp
While Corbel’s support for Happy Trails for Kids is ongoing, there are of course specific fundraisers and activities that allow for more direct participation with the kids. One of those is a program called Taste of Camp.
Corbel, along with the Salter Family Foundation, LighBay Capital, Abrams Brown Law Offices, Vital Findings, Daley Strategies, Merritt Loughran, and many more, hosted and sponsored the sixth annual Happy Trails for Kids Taste of Camp in Los Angeles.
The event was held at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica and funded via sponsorships from entities like Corbel and its CEO Jeff Schwartz as well as a fundraising auction (more on that below). The program has served 424 kids over its six years of operation.
The lion’s share of the program’s counselors are former foster youth themselves.
Happy Trails has also produced 42 reunion events, workshops, and other events for the foster children of Los Angeles. Those include Happy Camper Hangouts, Tails to Success (for older youth), the aforementioned reunions as well as full family events.
“We want to continue our commitment to support those in foster care,” Langner said. “We want to provide for them the same opportunities that kids out of the system have. We want to normalize these experiences for them.”
Lindsay Elliott, executive director for Happy Trails for Kids, said the event raised over $325,000 for the program.
“Fifteen years of laughter, friendship, new adventures and building a community of support every child deserves,” Elliott said in a press release regarding the event. “For our campers, Happy Trails is more than a summer camp. It is a place to build back some of the most important pieces of childhood — a sense of belonging, hope, joy and love.”
An Act of Love
Happy Trails was born from the efforts of a woman by the name of Pepper Edmiston. Edmiston had a son, David, who was afflicted with childhood leukemia in 1976. He was able to survive the cancer, but the treatments left him epileptic and with intellectual disabilities.
Due to these impediments, going away to camp with friends wasn’t a real possibility. Until Edmiston made it one.
With the help of her parents, Max and Janet Salter, Camp Good Times was founded. In 1993, the program expanded and was renamed Happy Trails.
For almost a decade and a half, the camp focused on hosting families of children who were seriously ill or incapacitated.
One of David’s younger siblings, his sister Susan, would attend law school and eventually help lead Happy Trails. Her work as an attorney put her in the sphere of the foster care system, and she redirected the primary mission of the camp to focus on children from the foster system.
David passed away in 2009. It was the first year he didn’t attend camp since 1982.
But the mission of Happy Trails lives on. The unique learning opportunities and extracurricular activities the camp provides help the children develop a sense of community and normalcy while also helping their self-esteem.
An example of that continuing effect was illustrated in a thank you letter that Elliott, the executive director, sent to sponsors of the most recent Happy Trails for Kids event.
Elliott recounts the story of “Vicky” (not her real name), who started attending Happy Trails for Kids when she was seven years old and had just experienced a devastating change in her life.
“My little world had just been shattered, and everything I knew about my life just kept changing,” “Vicky” wrote. I remember being so scared to go to a camp where I didn’t know anybody but my sister. But once we started chanting campo songs and doing our activities, I was hooked.”
“Vicky” eventually aged out of the program, but that was not the end of her involvement with it.
“The years went by so fast,” she wrote. “When I was too old to stay a camper, I became a counselor and tried to make the same memories and impact on my campers that my counselors had on my life.”
That might be the greatest contribution that Happy Trails for Kids makes. It not only provides opportunity for the children that attend, but instills in them a sense of community and responsibility, like “Vicky” felt, to those that come after. And that is by design.
“Each year, we invest in hundreds of children like Vicky, bringing them cost-free camps, once-in-a-lifetime adventures and workshops that help youth prepare for life after foster care.”
Over the years, those hundreds of children who were assisted each year have added up to thousands. It would be hard to even measure the impact on the children and the community, but one can measure the opportunities.
“There are thousands of children in our community who need the gift of childhood, the gift of consistency and the gift of community,” Elliott wrote.
Corbel Capital Partners and the other sponsors of Taste of Camp are on the right track in trying to provide more experiences and community to children in the foster care system in Los Angeles. With more and consistent assistance, many of these children will have an opportunity at a life that may have been out of reach without it.
Originally published at https://www.dailycal.org on February 3, 2024.
