CAMP Rehoboth, the Rehoboth Beach LGBTQ community services center, was scheduled to officially announce on Monday, Oct. 17, that it is seeking bids from executive search firms to retain such a firm to help the group conduct a national search for a new executive director, according to Wesley Combs, president of the CAMP Rehoboth Board of Directors.

Combs told the Washington Blade the announcement seeking a search firm, known as an RFP or Request for Proposal to undertake the search process, comes about a month after CAMP Rehoboth retained nationally acclaimed strategic planning consultant Michela Perrone of Georgetown University to help the nonprofit group update its strategic plan for providing services and support for a diverse and growing LGBTQ community in Rehoboth and surrounding areas.

Perrone, a faculty member at Georgetown University’s Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership, has provided support for strategic planning and other services for many nonprofit organizations through her consulting firm MMP Associates, including for LGBTQ nonprofits.
The need for a new CAMP Rehoboth executive director surfaced this past May when then executive director David Mariner resigned to start a new Delaware LGBTQ advocacy group called Sussex Pride. The CAMP Rehoboth board a short time later named Lisa Evans, a longtime administrator at nonprofit organizations in Baltimore, as CAMP Rehoboth’s interim executive director.

Combs has said Evans was appointed to serve as the group’s acting manager in an “advisory role” as soon as the board learned of Mariner’s plans to leave the organization. After conducting a search for an interim director, the board selected Evans from a group of four finalist candidates as the best fit for that role, Combs said.

Now, according to Combs, CAMP Rehoboth is beginning the process for the first phase of its strategic plan development and its search for a new executive director. He said after considerable deliberation, the board decided it would be important to retain a strategic planning expert and begin the first phase of the strategic planning process at this time.

He said the board was hopeful that a national search firm can be retained within the next 30 days and the nationwide search for a new executive director would begin at that time.

The first phase of the strategic plan development, which began at the time Perrone was retained last month, includes data collection and community engagement, including community surveys and focus groups, Combs said.

He said the strategic planning process will then be put on hold until the new executive director is hired and takes office for a short time to become acclimated with CAMP Rehoboth’s operations. It is the board’s belief that the new executive director should take part in the second phase of the development of the updated strategic plan, Combs said.

“We’re not going to begin the work to determine what the priorities of CAMP will be until the new executive director has been hired,” said Combs. “So, it’s a two-phase strategy – start, gap, start,” he said.

“Our hope is we will have identified a candidate by mid-January and that person can hopefully be on board by March 1, 2023,” Combs said in referring to the hiring process for the new executive director. “That’s our hope.”

Combs noted that CAMP Rehoboth, which was co-founded in 1991 by LGBTQ rights advocates Steve Elkins and his then partner and subsequent husband Murray Archibald, has grown tremendously over the years and has developed and updated strategic plans during those years.

Elkins, a beloved figure in Rehoboth for many years, served as CAMP Rehoboth’s executive director until he passed away in 2018.

Combs said plans began to update the strategic plan shortly after David Mariner began as executive director in 2019 and continued through early 2020. But with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the sweeping restrictions it brought about for all public spaces later that year, CAMP Rehoboth under Mariner’s leadership had to dramatically “pivot” to a virtual operation, Combs said. Nearly all its in-person operations and programs had to be suspended or switched to online operations.

All of that meant the strategic planning process had to be put on hold, Combs said. And while it resumed earlier this year, Mariner’s decision to resign prompted the board to reassess how to move forward with the strategic planning process.

“The thought was, we have a lot of the work that was done,” Combs said. “But it was four years ago, three years actually, when the outreach to the community was done,” he said. “We had focus groups, we had surveys done. So, some of that information may still be relevant. But some of it obviously needs to be revisited because the demographics of Delaware and our community have changed in that three-year period.”

Added Combs, “Plus, Rehoboth and the surrounding area has become a much bigger retirement community for a lot of LGBTQ people…We want to make sure we understand what the needs are of the various stakeholder groups that CAMP Rehoboth serves,” he said. “And that also includes the increased visibility of transgender people in lower Delaware. And, the increased visibility of LGBTQ youth who are coming out,” Combs told the Blade.

“So, the plan is designed to ensure that we understand who the demographics of this community are, what support they need, and what role will CAMP play in helping to address them,” he said. “Every nonprofit does this every three to five years.”

Below is a list of CAMP Rehoboth’s numerous programs and activities that it has carried out in recent years, as shown on its website: