Dream Camp Foundation started, as many things do, with a little seed of inspiration. After a chance meeting, sitting next to each other on a short-haul west coast flight, Joe Patane was inspired by the entrepreneurial talent and enthusiastic passion of nine year old Janelle Ginestra, who sold the then-stranger a ticket to her school Peter Pan performance.
As Joe, Janelle, and her family became friends, Joe noticed that in the crowded dance classes Janelle and her friends attended, the kids learned more from each other then from the middle-aged instructor, so Joe used his newly-founded foundation to start a makeshift kids-teaching-kids production operation. With Joe's encouragement, Janelle and her friends created the only dance class in town with instructors under the age of ten!
The project spread like wildfire from there, however, Joe's father had been hospitalized back on the east coast and Joe himself experienced two injuries on the west coast that he needed years of physical therapy to recuperate from, so he returned to University in New York & New Jersey to complete a Masters in Social Work while spending time with his dad in the hospital and getting his own body back in the groove. During this time, he had the kids' hip-hop dance routines in LA filmed so he could keep up with what was going on. Those eventually turned into the first successful line of hip-hop videos for-kids-by-kids.
Joe took the lessons learned with Janelle and crew to create a program that could apply similar principles of working with youth and channeling their energy to positive outlets, to the kids most in need - the seeds of the very first Dream Camp were born. NOTE: ALL of our proceeds from any project, book, video, etc. linked on this site go directly back to the Dream Camp Foundation's activities.