At twenty-seven, Beth Warshaw-Duncan leads a busy life. She has a full-time job, is newly married, and in the summer of 2007 launched Girls Rock Philly--a rock and roll summer camp for girls.

As the camp’s website explains, GRP’s aim is “to bring the Philadelphia area a girls-only, week-long summer camp serving junior rockers ages 10-18. Led by a team of all female instructors and band coaches, girls learn how to play musical instruments, write songs, discover other women in rock, & finesse their on-stage jump kicks.”

Because Girls Rock Philly is an all-female environment, Warshaw-Duncan says, “Girls learn their drums from a female drum instructor; they learn guitar from a female guitar instructor. And the entire program is volunteer run. No one gets paid.”

Campers came from all over the area. “Girard College offered us their beautiful campus and we offered scholarships to their students.” Girard College is a boarding school in Philadelphia for children in grades one through twelve whose guardians or single-parent families have limited financial means to support them.

“The kids at the camp were from mixed backgrounds,” says Warshaw-Duncan. “We had a few pairs of sisters and offered a sisters’ scholarship. Some were suburban kids from two-parent families; some were kids from Girard College who have no parents or were sent to the school for a variety of other reasons.”

“We were asked the question a lot ‘I don’t know how to play an instrument, can I still come?’ And we said ‘Of course.’ The kids would ask ‘But I’m gonna mess up. Is that okay?’ My response was ‘Yeah. You’ll play the wrong note. You’ll break a string. You’ll break many strings. We have extra.’ We stress that you should learn to the best of your ability. And try out your own stuff as well.”

Girls Rock Philly’s parent organization, Girls Rock Camp Alliance, is based in Portland, Oregon. It provides administrative support and training for those wanting to start camps in new areas.
At the training sessions provided by the Alliance, says Warshaw-Duncan, “We learned how to talk about music, which mikes and which instruments to use. And all the information learned is shared among everyone.”


That kind of cooperative learning is a hallmark of GRP. “It’s hard to explain the feeling of the camp environment. Everyone really wants to be there. Everyone is respectful. ‘You listen to me and I will listen to you and we will work things out’. It’s great to be able to teach that positive interaction to the girls in a way that’s fun. They write their own songs, they form a band, they work together.”

The community helped support the creation of the summer camp. This support came, for example, from Wharton Community Consultants, a program of The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, who took on the camp as a community-service project. “They helped us obtain 501©(3) (Federal tax-exempt status) and to get a practice space.”

To make it all work, the camp utilized the talents of twenty-five female volunteers, several recruited at the last minute when others dropped out. Two of the last-minute additions, a bass instructor and guitar instructor, were so moved by their experiences at the camp that they signed up to teach the next year.

“We had a lot of volunteers who were professional musicians. A lot of our volunteers have their own bands or are teachers. We also had a lot of Moms, which was great. Things we hadn’t even begun to think about they were on top of. They’d say, ‘Oh, I brought toothpicks so the kids won’t get their hands sticky.’ And I’d say, ‘I love that you’re a Mom.’
“The way we set up the bands was pretty easy,” Warshaw-Duncan continues. “On the first day we did get-to-know-you-exercises, and each girl filled out a form with her name, age, and instrument. We observed how the girls were getting along. When the girls went to instrument practice, the counselors compared notes. We put the bands together based more on personality and interests than on skill level.”
A drummer was assigned to each band, which had four or five girls. When there was a more advanced guitarist, two guitarists were assigned to that band--a rhythm and a lead--so that the more inexperienced player didn’t feel pressure about being the only guitarist in the group.

In addition, every band had a coach to help the group come together successfully. “Some of the band coaches said ‘Let’s jam for awhile.’ Those who weren’t professional musicians said, ‘Let’s talk about who we are and what we like to listen to--what music we should write, what music we’d like to write.’ Everyone had her own approach to it, and every band turned our pretty differently.”

The entire GRP program cost only about $10,000, with camp T-shirts and insurance the big-ticket items. To raise the money needed to run the camp, Girls Rock Philly held fundraisers throughout the year. A dance party in early December 2006 helped raise both money and awareness of the program, as did a silent auction held in April 2007. Those events, along with camp tuition, brought in enough money to fund twenty campers.

Going forward Warshaw-Duncan would like to see the camp expand to two or three times its current size, accommodating more girls. “We had twenty campers this time. I’d like to see us with sixty.”

Securing a permanent space for the girls to practice in and having camp-owned equipment are next on the agenda. This would enable the bands to continue to play together after summer camp has ended. Warshaw-Duncan continues to receive emails from the band coaches that say their bands want to practice but have nowhere to go.