Rock and a Hard Place

An innovative music camp for girls wins applause but has trouble raising money

As she stumbles out of bed at 6 on a Friday morning, Misty McElroy slips on a camp T-shirt and fires up her CD player, filling it with what she calls “her morning cup of coffee”: a bracing blast of Nirvana and the equally clamorous strains of Sleater-Kinney, an all-female rock group from nearby Olympia, Wash.

Fortified by heavy noise and a light breakfast, Ms. McElroy turns over the engine of the battered camp van, then fills the back with items donated from bakeries, coffee shops, and grocery stores, which will feed 80 campers today. She puts the camp lanyard around her neck, then goes shopping for what’s missing — cream cheese, ice — driving slowly to avoid the bumps that could trigger pain, the remnant of recent surgery.

By 7:30 she’s pulling into the tiny parking lot of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, a four-year-old institution that Ms. McElroy, its executive director, founded as part of her senior thesis in women’s studies at Portland State University. Situated in a former sewing factory opposite a trailer park, on the cusp of a crumbling industrial area in north Portland, the camp teaches girls 8 to 18 the higher arts of rock (playing instruments, singing, songwriting, staging) while filling them in on its practical aspects (transporting and setting up equipment). Ms. McElroy’s school of rock isn’t about creating stars: It’s about self-expression and independence.

“I want to let girls know that they can start their own music culture, and that they don’t have to be a Britney Spears type to do it,” she says.

But like many of its participants, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls suffers from growing pains. While Ms. McElroy’s endeavor has been lauded by the news media, Portland’s leaders, and well-known bands such as Pearl Jam, the camp runs on a meager budget. Its founder has endured personal financial sacrifices to keep it afloat, bolstering its budget with her own credit card and working other jobs to make a living. The camp’s lack of donors and its leaders’ dearth of fund-raising acumen threaten the young charity’s survival.

A Practical Education

After spending nine years as a roadie, instrument tech (the person who tunes guitars and drums), sound engineer, and tour manager for a dozen or more rock groups, — everything from local bands to Grammy Award winners — Ms. McElroy is one of the few women who have been so immersed in the practical side of rock ‘n’ roll. She also has the motivation to teach girls how to navigate their way through the male-dominated pop-music industry. The only woman among several tour crews, she says she was subjected to harassment and misogyny by her workmates.

“When you’re the only girl on a men’s crew for three months, it’s like walking into a men’s prison,” says Ms. McElroy, 34, a small, slight woman with highlighted dirty blonde hair and mismatched T-shirt and shorts.

‘I Like It Real Loud’

Her travails, along with her degree requirements, led her to start the camp, which this year was expanded from one to two sessions, during which the camp’s bands are required to write and perform their own songs at the end of an intensive week of coaching and rehearsing.

To help girls develop enough confidence to do that, the camp’s curriculum includes workshops on self-esteem, sexism, and body image. And boys aren’t allowed.

“There are plenty of rock camps that are coed, but only two girls show up, and the whole dynamic is different,” Ms. McElroy says. “I’m not a militant feminazi. I’m aware there are boys who could use this type of encouragement and direction, but if we had boys here, we’d have to worry about girls becoming distracted while making plays for them, and boys taking over because they’re already encouraged by society to play amplified instruments and be loud.”

A native of Pensacola, Fla., Ms. McElroy grew up on a steady diet of amplification, typically provided by mega-decibel artists such as Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Patti Smith. “I like it real loud,” she says. “I was this loser surf chick who wanted to get involved in rock ‘n’ roll in any way I could.”

This morning — the last day of this summer’s camp sessions — she parks in one of the camp’s two spaces, and walks past a sign next to the front door that hints of the charity’s desperate financial straits: “Donations of toilet paper ACCEPTED.”

The early morning is spent welcoming campers. For two weeks in July, Ms. McElroy and her 150 volunteers — each of whom typically works a few days as counselors, helpers, and teachers — will greet 160 girls. Because of a lack of space and money, 322 applicants have been turned down.

“What’s your name, honey?” Ms. McElroy asks a girl with Medusa-like hair dyed red, as the girl searches for a lanyard with her name and picture on it. Many of the girls have decorated their lanyards with baubles and doodlings, or with fatalistic adolescent mottos, such as “Am I dead yet?” Some campers flash tattoos and body piercings; one complements her tall black jackboots with fishnets.

“You’ll have to shout it out,” Ms. McElroy tells the girl. “My ears are gone after a week of you guys rocking out.” (Ms. McElroy urges the campers to wear earplugs during their practices, “but I set a pretty bad example,” she admits.)

The Rock Room

Camp days are planned months in advance, Ms. McElroy says, because they have to be. “There’s no way to plan each day once camp gets rolling,” she says. “Once I’m here, all I do is troubleshoot.” As do counselors, she adds: “One of them is off fixing the toilet. We all multi-task constantly here.”

Donated instruments and other equipment are lined up year-round, usually after Ms. McElroy receives a phone call or an e-mail message from an intrigued guitarist or drummer. In the months before camp opens, she courts store owners, begging donations of food, drinks, cups, and plates. She organizes workshops, such as the “size oppression” one — designed to show campers that one body size does not fit all — planned for later today. She contacts volunteers, tapping a 650-name database that includes people from Brazil, Germany, Ireland, and several countries in Africa. Like Ms. McElroy, none of the camp’s counselors is paid. “I’ve got people who plan their vacations to be here,” she says, shaking her head.

After greeting the campers, she heads to what she calls “the rock room,” a large, low-ceilinged space with a stage in a corner that houses the girls’ first activity of the day. The morning assembly is usually a sing-along or a game, and is led today by two counselors, Chelsey Johnson, a journalist and songwriter, and Carrie Brownstein, a guitarist and singer for Sleater-Kinney.

Ms. Johnson takes the stage and helps each band “practice” receiving applause on stage. During the camp’s culmination, the bands will play their new songs Saturday night before a packed house of 650 at a movie theater in southeast Portland.

As the girls bow, strut, and blush, Ms. McElroy — in between troubleshooting trips outside the rock room — documents the event with a video recorder. Ms. Brownstein wrote the camp song’s grungy blues backdrop; the girls wrote the lyrics. She starts plunking out chunky chords as the girls sing with a combination of sweetness and swagger:

I got a guitar and the strings
all broke
My brother says I can’t carry a
tune
I don’t know who I’m
supposed to be
But when I get to rock camp,
I’ll find my destiny.
Ms. Brownstein has made the camp her destination for three straight summers.

“It restores my faith in music as a pure expression of emotion,” she says. “I know from experience that it’s hard for girls to get to a place where they can get loud, especially this early in the morning.”

Girls change as the week progresses, she adds, often starting out shy and developing into hear-me-roar types by the end of camp.

“It’s great seeing that metamorphosis,” she says. “A lot of the lyrics they write are intense. This is a really safe and positive way for them to let out their anger and frustration. It’s scary to think of where all that goes when they’re not doing this.”

Money Woes

After the assembly, the girls take instrument lessons and vocal classes, or learn deejaying and rapping. Ms. McElroy uses the time to go to her office and write up tax receipts for donors, put together a bank deposit, sort through mail and e-mail, and process DVD orders for those who want a record of their daughters’ performances on Saturday. “I’m basically the staff when it comes to this kind of stuff,” she says.

The chairwoman of the camp’s board sends Ms. McElroy an e-mail message and suggests that the camp hire someone outside to handle the accounting — yet another of her duties. She agrees that it would be a good idea, but says that hiring a fund raiser would be even better. “One of our biggest problems is that I’m involved in fund raising,” she says.

Although the camp has been imitated in places as far-flung as Goshen, Mass., and Murfreesboro, Tenn., and has garnered coverage from major newspapers, National Public Radio, and Sally Jesse Raphael’s TV talk show, the organization operates on a shoestring. Its $280,000 annual budget is a “joke,” says Ms. McElroy, because she ends up putting much of the camp’s regularly occurring deficit on her credit card each year.

After the camp’s first year, she charged the overrun cost of $10,000. A donor heard about the camp on National Public Radio and paid her back. But that was a one-time-only windfall, she says. Ms. McElroy, who cleans houses and serves as nanny to the 3-year-old son of Corin Tucker, a Sleater-Kinney member, when the band tours, is hardly independently wealthy.

“I’ve been named one of the top 40 under-40 entrepreneurs by the Business Journal of Portland and one of the top 50 entrepreneurs by Oregon Business magazine,” says Ms. McElroy, chuckling. “It totally cracks me up, because I don’t get paid a cent. There’s this false assumption that we have money.”

The camp costs nearly $1,000 per girl, and more than 70 percent of the girls either get in free or pay on a sliding scale. “Most are on need-based scholarships,” says Ms. McElroy, “and we’d like to keep it that way.”

‘The Unsexy Stuff’

This year, an after-school adjunct to the summer rock camp (called the Girls Rock Institute, which shares the same budget as the camp) will be on hiatus from September to December because of a lack of money and a lack of planning, says Patricia L. McGuire, the camp’s board chairwoman.

“I’m actually relieved there won’t be a Rock Institute until the end of the year,” says Ms. McGuire, a Portland lawyer. “We need to do some of the unsexy stuff — form a new board, implement a plan, engage donors — before we take another step. We need that time.”

Ms. McGuire says that the organization’s six board members aren’t good fund raisers. “They’re musicians, for the most part, and they tend to be long on talk and short on action,” she says.

The same goes for rock stars who have pledged support to the camp, but come up short on donations. “We’ve contacted people like Sheryl Crow, Courtney Love, and Gwen Stefani [a singer for the band No Doubt] and all we get back are some crappy CD’s and signed posters,” she says.

“I’ve completely lost interest in female musicians,” she says. “They’re a bunch of talk.”

Ms. McGuire says the camp and after-school program will benefit from a three-point plan she has developed with Ms. McElroy. The plan includes:

• Recruiting trustees who will commit to bringing in a certain amount of money each year.
• Applying to more major foundations for grants. Currently, the camp receives only a few grants, most from foundations in the Northwest. “We need to do better at engaging foundations here and elsewhere,” says Ms. McGuire. “You can’t just apply to these local foundations if you don’t have board members with connections to the people there.”
• Hiring a development director. “Misty can’t ask anyone for a dollar,” says Ms. McGuire. “We need to find someone who can raise their salary as well as raise the profile of the organization.”

Ms. McGuire says she doesn’t know if the camp can survive “if a stable plan isn’t in place by the end of the year. I don’t know if I can remain chair if it isn’t.”

No Time for Planning

Ms. McElroy has sought advice elsewhere as well. The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, in Seattle, which provided $5,000 to the camp in 2003 (and whose grant for this year is pending), has met with Ms. McElroy to offer encouragement and fund-raising tips.

“We’ve told her she needs to develop a three- to five-year strategic plan, so everyone is clear on what her goals are,” says Huong T. Vu, a program officer at the Allen fund, which supports groups that encourage people to play and sing popular music. “We see the camp as an innovative business model for delivering art and empowerment to young people, but they haven’t looked far enough into the future.”

Ms. McElroy, who says her ultimate goal is to start a rock ‘n roll high school — and who would love to see the camp move from its cramped, 5,000-square-foot site to something twice as large — agrees that her organization has been cavalier about developing a long-range plan. “We haven’t had the time or the money,” she says. “The Allen Foundation tells me that before we start a capital campaign, we need to be able to support a paid staff. It’s been impossible for us to develop any financial momentum to do that.”

In January, several professional fund raisers volunteered to show the camp’s board members how to write personal solicitation letters to wealthy people — but the campaign brought in only one-third of its goal of $13,000.

Such concerns hardly trouble her as she works to treat scrapes, take campers to the one bathroom on site, visit the bank, and hand out copies of the camp’s newsletter, which was created by the girls. “I’m too busy running all day to think about it,” she says. “It’s at the end of the day that I start to get bummed out and have to be talked down from the ledge.”

Curtain Call

Right now, there’s no time for despair. The lunchtime entertainment, The Decemberists, a national folk-rock act based in Portland, needs to load in their equipment, and only Ms. McElroy can tell them how to maneuver their truck into the back. The size-oppression workshop leaders — a trio of egg-shaped women — are performing an unconventional cheerleading routine that encourages girls to work with the bodies they have instead of dieting down to fit a celebrity culture’s ideal of thinness, and Ms. McElroy is there with the video camera.

After a lunch of donated pizza and salads, she helps the girls set up their bands for an afternoon of practice. Groups with names like the Semi-Autobiographicals, Two Eyes Down, and the Electric Screws split their four-hour practices into “quiet time,” during which they sing parts or talk them out, and “loud time,” when they plug in and thrash.

Not surprisingly, campers say Ms. McElroy’s operation is different from the camps where they have spent other summers. Cheyanne Steele, a 13-year-old drummer for Purple Explosion, says, “It’s easier to make friends here, where you have something to do together.”

As practice winds down, Ms. McElroy takes center stage in the rock room, and asks girls to pick up trash and move chairs. She salutes the counselors and helpers.

“We didn’t think we could make it through two whole weeks of rock camp, but we did it!” she says. Girls take the stage to thank their counselors and bandmates. The last one to speak shyly grasps the microphone. “I know everyone here says how their band is cool and all, but nobody would be here if it weren’t for Misty,” she says, as hollers and applause ring out.

Unlike other camp days — during which Ms. McElroy leads a staff meeting at 5 p.m., then eats dinner in the van as she picks up donations well past 9 — today’s will end right as the whistle blows at nearby factories and warehouses. For Saturday’s show, Ms. McElroy will gather and deliver equipment, but only after sleeping in a bit for the first time in two weeks.

Her last act for today is directing traffic in and out of the parking lot as parents pick up their kids. Like every aspect of her job, she enjoys it.

Well, almost every aspect. “Not getting paid is pretty demoralizing at this point, especially with our high visibility,” she says, straightening her shoulders into a defiant pose. “This is the last time I want to be an unpaid director of this camp. I’m giving the world a year to pay me a salary — or else.”

Then, after a sigh, she adds: “But I’ve found a niche, and I don’t know what else I would do with my life.”