Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Youth Villages provided yoga and aromatherapy. While Camp HEAL campers did participate in these activities, they weren’t provided by Youth Villages. This article has been updated with the correct information. CityView apologizes for this error.
At the end of June and under the hot North Carolina sun, 24 kids from Seventy-First Classical Middle School sat with pencils in hand.
In front of each student was an anonymous survey about their experience at Camp HEAL, a free day camp at Rockfish Camp and Retreat Center, a Christian ministry of the NC United Methodist Camp and Retreat Ministries nonprofit.
“I learned about how to overcome my stress,” one middle schooler wrote.
“I learned about trusting people,” wrote another.
“This is the first time someone got into my heart,” yet another wrote.
Camp HEAL is an early intervention strategy funded through Cumberland County’s share of national opioid settlements, and it completed its first year last month. The camp’s goal is to provide educational programming and outdoor recreation to Cumberland County kids at risk of substance use and mental health disorders.
“We want to give these kids skills as early as we can so that we can scaffold them and help them manage stress or manage things that we might call trauma, but they haven’t identified as trauma,” said Casey Perry, Rockfish Camp and Retreat Center’s camp director.
Across two week-long sessions, the 24 students from Seventy-First Classical and another 28 from Brentwood Elementary School received mentorship and stress management training, classes on suicide prevention and financial literacy, vaping prevention and body positivity education.
Mixed in with the early intervention programming were classic summer camp activities like building a fire, archery, swimming and crafts.
“This intermingling of lessons and practical fun and games lets kids be kids,” Perry said. “Because sometimes they’re coming from homes where they have to be adults, where they’re having to manage things that they wouldn’t need to if they had resources around them.”
Breaking down walls
Brentwood and Seventy-First Classical were selected for their proximity to Arran Lakes Baptist Church, which will continue early intervention services during the school year in partnership with Camp Rockfish and Retreat Center.
The schools’ social workers and counselors identified kids who could best benefit from Camp HEAL, selecting students with familial issues, mental health challenges or drug use.
Heather De Tar, Rockfish Camp and Retreat Center’s office manager, described many of the kids as guarded on their first day of Camp HEAL.
“They have this little wall in front of them, and they’re not gonna let it down,” De Tar said. “They’re too cool, or they’re too this, or they’re too that. They step carefully as they’re going along.”
By the end of the week, De Tar saw those walls lower, if not completely fall, thanks to the connections kids built with counselors and community volunteers. She recalled a female camper from the middle school group attempting all week to shoot and land a basket, her counselor and volunteers encouraging her every day to keep trying.
On the girl’s last day of camp, she managed to get the basketball into the hoop, her counselor pulling her into a hug in celebration as everyone around them cheered.
“It was so neat to watch her wall come down just a little bit to where she can trust an adult,” De Tar said. “They were celebrating her, and she was so excited. It was something so simple.”
Many of the camp’s volunteers were there thanks to connections made through the Cumberland-Fayetteville Opioid Response Team, Perry said. Rockfish Camp and Retreat Center joined C-FORT after receiving a little over $97,000 in funding from the county’s share of national opioid settlements.
Besides the schools, 18 organizations helped put on Camp HEAL, providing resources, lessons and therapies to kids. Samaritan’s Feet gave shoes to every camper. Other partners yoga classes and aromatherapy. The Fayetteville police and fire departments and Cape Fear Valley Health’s Community Paramedic Program taught kids how first response works and the importance of 988, the free suicide and crisis line.
Perry was especially appreciative of the city’s police officers, who showed up daily to offer lessons and play games with the kids.
“Everybody’s very concerned that these young ones get more tools and more support,” he said. “And to break that stigma that first responders are just for either punitive things or traumatic events.”
An idea out of Forsyth County
Cumberland County isn’t the first in North Carolina to hold a Camp HEAL. Perry said much of the idea for the camp came from Tara Tucker, Cape Fear Valley Health’s lead community paramedic.
In 2018, Tucker helped launch a version of Camp HEAL in Forsyth County in partnership with City Lights Ministry, a non-profit, evangelical Christian ministry. Tucker’s motivation stemmed from learning about an 8-year-old girl who found her mother dead of an opioid overdose on Christmas morning, and wanting to teach children like her how to cope with trauma.
In 2024, 144 Cumberland County residents died of an overdose, according to data from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. So far this year, 70 people have visited one of the county’s emergency rooms because of an overdose, the department’s latest county report shows.
The numbers are a significant improvement for the county, which once had one of the highest rates of overdose emergency department visits in North Carolina. Today, it’s among the counties with the lowest rates.
Cumberland County also saw a 24% decrease in its overdose death rate from 2023 to 2024, the largest one-year decrease since 2011, when NCDHHS began displaying the information publicly on its website.
Forsyth and Cumberland counties’ Camp HEALs aim to keep kids from becoming part of overdose statistics by equipping them with tools and resources that prevent the start of drug use.
With another year of Rockfish Camp and Retreat Center’s Camp HEAL already guaranteed thanks to the two-year county opioid settlement grant, Perry is excited to implement the lessons learned this year to make next summer’s camp even more successful.
Perry added that Rockfish Camp and Retreat Center still has plans to continue to support Camp HEAL’s first cohort of elementary and middle schoolers. He said there’s a reunion for campers, counselors and volunteers in the works.
“It was never about bringing the kids here for a one-week experience and then we don’t know them anymore,” Perry said. “It’s delivering on the promise of staying in contact.”
CityView Reporter Morgan Casey is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Morgan’s reporting focuses on health care issues in and around Cumberland County and can be supported through the News Foundation of Greater Fayetteville.
Read CityView Magazine’s “The Back To School Issue” August 2025 e-edition here.