This June, Rick’s Place will host a volunteer “Work Day” and start kids’ summer day camps to teach essential survival skills. Rick’s Place is a 50-acre reintegration park in Fayetteville for military families and contractors. Founded in 2014 by military families for soldiers and their families, the park provides fun, quality activities to help strengthen relationships around the deployment cycle. Rick’s Place’s Work Day will be held June 8 from 9 a.m.-12:30 p.m.

Work Day provides meaningful volunteer activities for teams and families to help build the park. Typical activities include carpentry, gardening, ditch-clearing and park beautification. A community meal is provided free of charge to all who register online by the deadline of June 3. The Rick’s Place staff asks that volunteers register for the event so that they prepare the right number of projects. To find the event online and register, search “June Work Day” on Eventbrite.com, with Fayetteville set as the location.

Parents must supervise their kids. Rick’s Place encourages parents and kids to work side-by-side to help build a park that is, in turn, a place that families can go to have fun and to relax.

Starting June 10, Rick’s Place hosts day camps for kids ages 8-14. This summer, a limited number of scholarships for military children are available courtesy of the Fayetteville Woodpecker’s Community Leaders Program. The day camp is called the Super Fun Quality Camp or SF Q-Camp, a play on the Special Forces Qualification Course, also known as The Q-Course. SFQC teaches kids skills that blend the best of living in nature with appreciation of key military survival skills such as land navigation, fire building, knot tying, and animal and plant threat identification. The camp also provides opportunities to let off steam with paintball battles, foam machine play and old-fashioned tale-telling.

One 23-year Army veteran and father of five said, “Rick’s Place provides my family with an environment where we can work together, play together and just be together, in a beautiful outdoor setting, no strings attached. It’s a place to unwind and disconnect from the pressures of everyday life, while forging bonds with other military families — and the community that supports us — that can sustain life long after we’ve left the grounds.

“I love the look on my kids’ faces when they pile out of the minivan and see the latest addition to the recreational scene at Rick’s Place: the trampoline in the trees, zip line, Nerf-gun battleground — there’s always a moment when they look back and me as if to say, ‘Dad, are you sure I’m allowed to do this?’ The answer, at Rick’s Place, is always yes.”

Rick’s Place is operated by the Rick Herrema Foundation to support family bonding and reintegration between deployments. The park is located at 5572 Shenandoah Drive, Fayetteville.

For more information about Work Day or day camps, visit rhfnow.org/events, email info@rhfnow.org, call the Rick’s Place team at 910-444-1743 or come for a visit. The park is open dawn to dusk every day to support war stress reduction for military families and contractors.