Get Into Energy Camp

Thank to you to KCP&L and Gwen Weakley for creating this amazing summer camp curriculum for the energy industry!

For KCP&L and many other utilities over the course of the last decade, there’s been concern over the aging of the workforce population, insuring a qualified workforce replacement pipeline and a lack of career awareness in the energy industry. KCP&L undertook the development of the Get Into Energy Camp as one strategy to address those issues for our company. The purpose of the camp is twofold:

To build career awareness of energy jobs
To get students excited about math and science through practical experimentation

In addition to our primary purposes, it also created other benefits for KCP&L and our communities. First, these included opportunities to target under served, but high potential students with a summer enrichment camp that was fully funded by the partners and at no cost to the students. KCP&L is committed to making communities we work and live in better for everyone–especially at-risk children.

Second, we targeted rising 8th graders. As they rise into high school, many students don’t know to follow on with math and science either because they don’t like it, think they lack aptitude or don’t see how it will ever be used in the “real world.” By providing activities that are creative and fun as well as tangible, practical connection to career options, they have better information from which to make choices. And in the long term, more students with solid foundations in math and science will create a bigger and better qualified workforce pipeline for the utility.

Third, it provides an opportunity for these students and employees of the utility to interact and explore careers through demonstration/touching the “tools of the trade.” In Kansas City, we also have other resources locally such as the Metropolitan Energy C enter that we enlist. They have a home with demonstrations of energy efficiency and renewable systems so that students can learn ways to immediately conserve energy and see other career possibilities. The benefit is better consumers of energy and career awareness for the students.

Our hope is that this camp will help you address some or all the other reasons you are considering an Energy Camp in your community. We are pleased that others may benefit from our experience.