Camp Quest North
Welcome to Camp Quest North!
2025 Dates:
Minnesota Camp Week 1: July 13-19, 2025 in Mound, MN
Minnesota Camp Week 2: July 20-26, 2025 in Mound, MN
Iowa Camp: August 3-9, 2025 in Central City, IA
Fun, Friends, and Freethought
Camp Quest is an overnight secular summer camp aimed towards critical thinking, skepticism, and open discussion. While campers partake in traditional camp activities, such as field games, swimming, archery, crafts, and campfires, what sets Camp Quest apart from traditional summer camps is our focus on humanist values and ethics. Our unique activities encourage rational inquiry, free speech, active citizenship, and respect. Camp Quest envisions a world in which children grow up exploring, thinking for themselves, connecting with their communities, and acting to make the most of life for themselves and others.
Camp Quest Humanist Principles
Camp Quest fulfills its mission by following these principles and we require parents and campers to agree and adhere to these principles.
We work to learn about and from both personal and world histories.
We help others and practice service within our communities.
We use a secular basis as a starting point in conversing and connecting with others.
We are committed to scientific discovery and technology as contributions to the betterment of human life.
We are committed to the arts as a form of human expression.
We strive to protect and sustain the earth, its resources, and other species.
We use reason and science to seek natural explanations to events in the universe and to solve problems.
We hold to the principle of the separation of church and state.
We aim to be honest, responsible, compassionate, and empathetic.
We recognize human rights, justice, fairness, and diversity as essential elements of society.
We strive to experience lift and develop as individuals.
We ask questions and are open-minded, critical thinkers.
We negotiate and seek compromise to solve conflicts.
12
109
Number of Campers 2004
Number of Campers 2024
In alignment with our humanist values, Camp Quest believes that we are all made better by celebrating difference, cooperatively learning from one another, practicing empathy, and questioning cultural constructions which define and venerate “normality” as means to deny some people social value and community belonging. For these reasons, Camp Quest is committed to providing youth with a safe, non-judgmental, bully-free environment that embraces human diversity and makes every reasonable effort to be inclusive.
Camp Quest affirms the right of all people to be treated with respect and encouraged to understand and accept others regardless of their religious affiliation, race, class, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, ability or any other characteristic that makes them unique.
Camp Quest’s respectful, inclusive environment does not, however, prohibit disagreements, critiques, and debates over ideas as these are essential aspects of human discovery through the scientific method. People should be respected. Ideas should be questioned and debated using evidence. With those with whom one disagrees, Camp Quest values constructive, respectful engagement about ideas, evidence-based conclusions, empathy, and engaged coexistence.
While driven by our philosophical desire to accommodate all youth, Camp Quest remains a small non-profit in which factors such as supervision ratios, host camp facilities, financial resources, or available medical support may practically limit our Affiliates’ ability to accommodate every potential camper. We encourage parents and leaders to work together to find out whether Camp Quest can provide a positive and safe camp experience for their child.