Freeport Community Services celebrates its 40th year of Connecting Neighbors, Enriching Lives, in 2014. As we lead up to our signature White Nights celebration on Jan. 25th, 2014, we’ll feature stories each week in the Tri-Town Weekly about what makes FCS so special and all of the people who have helped to make it one of the largest success stories in the state of Maine.

When Angela Ingerson was a student at Freeport Middle School in the 1980s, she went on a challenging, 18-day outdoor experience camp with Outward Bound.

She battled the elements, homesickness, and a major poison ivy outbreak, while tackling canoeing and hiking excursions. Angela describes the experience as having a profound effect on her. It “helped to shape my life,” she said, and developed her strong ability to handle adversity with confidence.

Flash forward to present day, where Angela and her husband Ryan are raising four children in their hometown of Freeport. When her sons became school age, Angela was encouraged by some of their teachers to look into summer camp as a way to keep up their progress and to build their sense of independence.

“There was no way we could afford to send two boys to camp, so we were encouraged to turn to FCS to help out,” she said.

Unbeknownst to Angela, the Freeport Community Services Camp scholarship program was the very same program that had helped her so many years ago.

Through their camp experience, Angela has seen her boys gain self-confidence. They are even starting to talk about wanting to be camp counselors themselves some day.

“My boys like to go to camp together and I really like that as they bond at camp. They will share these camp memories throughout their lives,” she said. She adds that “camp gives my boys something my husband and I cannot personally give them. I see them getting a sense of community and looking out for others. To me, I am paying toward a promise of something in their future. It is like paying for hope down the line.”

Angela continues, “The program gives parents a chance to give back.”

In fact, she baked 20 apple pies for an FCS fall fundraiser this past year, helping it to be one the most successful years ever. The apples were donated by Haskell’s Orchard and she and her husband peeled “buckets of apples until midnight.” Angela likes the idea of doing her share to raise money, not only for her own boys, but also for many other local children, as she feels the camp experience is invaluable.

This year the whole Ingerson family went to the final skits at the end of a week of Wolfe’s Neck Farm Camp and “we laughed hysterically at ‘Ninjas Hamster’ and the children’s version of TV commercials. It is so much better to be creating plays than sitting around playing video games all summer.”

She shares one of her favorite quotes from her younger child, who arrived home one afternoon from camp: “Mom, I got to lead the sheep in today.”

To Angela, that statement expressed the success and confidence gained by her son through a unique camp experience, which is the goal of campership support by Freeport Community Services for the children of Freeport and Pownal.

Many thanks to The White Nights sponsors for underwriting these stories: Bath Savings Bank, Curtis Thaxter, Brown Goldsmiths, Powers and French, Tri-Town Weekly, FreeportUSA, the Law Office of Mark Standen and Peter Warren. Visit fcsmaine.org to buy tickets to the Jan. 25, 2014, event.

Angela Ingerson poses with two of her sons., Hunter, left, and Conner.