A team of safety professionals and parents have been quietly working behind the scenes to assist Hill Country summer camps improve their respective emergency safety plans through an organization that formed after the July 4, 2025 catastrophic flood that claimed 119 lives in Kerr County, including 25 young campers and two counselors from Camp Mystic.
The Safety Navigator offers camps free safety tools, training and expert guidance for local camps and has recently received $287,500 grant from the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, awarded through the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund, to launch a camp safety program dedicated to the region.
Safety Navigator co-founders and Houston residents Charlee Johnson, Marleyna Palin started and Ted Jarrett formed the organization October 2025 and launched it nationally in February 2026, according to the organization.
One of the nonprofit’s board members is a local camp leader. Tim Huchton, president and CEO of Mo-Ranch, serves on the newly formed board of directors.
Huchton said two of The Safety Navigator’s three founders are cousins. Both had daughters at Camp Mystic during the flood, and both girls survived.
Johnson and Palin work in safety and risk management for oil, gas and mining companies, Huchton said.
“They just kept thinking, ‘There’s got to be tools and resources that we have in this that could be beneficial and be implementable for summer camps as well,’” Huchton said.
Huchton said Johnson often repeats Mister Rogers’ advice to “look for the helpers” when disaster strikes.
“And she said, ‘We wanted to be some of the helpers.’ And that’s what really kind of started this,” Huchton said. “They were interested in being part of the solution, and how do we make camps better, stronger and safer in this process.”
Community Foundation CEO Austin Dickson said Johnson, a Houston resident, brought other professionals from Houston’s energy-sector safety field together to form the nonprofit. She also testified several times before the Texas Legislature and its committees as the parent of a child rescued from a camp, he said.
As lawmakers passed new youth camp safety legislation, the founders built The Safety Navigator to help camps turn the new laws into practical action so camps could open safely for the 2026 season and beyond, according to the organization.
“The Hill Country is where this started for us, and we’re grateful to be pioneering it here too, alongside the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country,” Johnson and Palin said in a news release. “This grant lets us build the industry’s best practice safety materials with a community that needs them, so Hill Country camps can lead the response for camps everywhere, not just the recovery.”
Hill Country camps
‘lead the charge’
The Safety Navigator began working with camps in fall 2025. Huchton said the organization now works with more than 600 camps nationwide.
“In their first year of working, they are now working with over 400 camps across the entire nation,” Huchton said. “One of their focuses has always been, we want the camps of the Texas Hill Country to be the ones that lead the charge.”
Huchton did not have an exact count of participating local camps, but said most Hill Country camps use the nonprofit’s resources.
“I would say the majority of the camps in the Texas Hill Country have been working or using the tools and templates and resources that Safety Navigator has,” he said.
The recent grant from the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country provides funds for the organization to build new tools with Hill Country camps and test them in the field. The nonprofit then makes those tools available free to camps across the country, Dickson said.
“By the Community Foundation coming to the table with this, it allowed resources to be developed specifically for the Texas Hill Country,” Huchton said. “They’ll scale to the rest of the country, but they wanted to unveil them here first.”
The grant funds:
• End-of-season after-action reviews with Hill Country camp leaders;
• Safety training for camp directors, leaders and seasonal staff that covers aquatics, transportation and emergency response;
• A Transportation Safety Toolkit that covers vehicle use, staff driving rules and vetting bus and charter companies;
• A Hill Country edition of the organization’s AI-assisted risk assessment tool, with region-specific risk categories and controls;
• A Hill Country Drill Package with new drills and facilitated tabletop exercises built around regional hazards;
• An AI-powered emergency action plan builder that coaches camps through writing a custom emergency response plan;
• A summer content series that documents safety work at Hill Country camps;
• A locally hired Hill Country program coordinator who will serve as a single point of contact for every camp in the region.
Participating camps receive every program free.
Local camp leader
joins the board
Huchton said he met The Safety Navigator’s team when he testified before the Texas Department of State Health Services.
“I was intrigued by what they were doing and why they were doing it,” Huchton said. He handed them his card and offered to help.
Huchton helped with the organization’s co-design workshop in December 2025 and encouraged camps he knew across the region and state to attend. Over several months, Huchton helped the nonprofit build relationships with additional camps.
“They called me and said, ‘Okay, now we’re at a point where we’ve created our EAPs (emergency action plans), we’ve created the things that we need. We’re starting to put together a board,’” Huchton said. “I was just honored to say yes, because of what they had been doing.”
Dickson said Huchton introduced the Community Foundation to The Safety Navigator, noting Huchton’s background in emergency and disaster response.
“Another vote of confidence is that the Safety Navigator has not only a Kerr County camp on its board, but a Kerr County resident who has a background in this kind of stuff, and that’s really important,” Dickson said.
Camps and safety experts
design together
Huchton said the December co-design workshop brought safety experts from oil, gas, mining and large first responder organizations together with camp directors from around Texas. Huchton said both groups learned from each other.
“The safety experts learned that camps are actually doing a lot of the things already,” he said. “It wasn’t starting from ground zero, that there was a ton of work that camps are already doing for safety.”
The workshop produced the organization’s emergency action plan template. Texas’ new regulations require camps to submit emergency action plans for state approval. The plans must address scenarios such as flooding, wildfire, lost campers, medical emergencies, active shooters and unauthorized visitors, Huchton said. The template lays out every requirement so camps can enter their own information in one clear format the state can review.
Huchton called the template the program’s biggest resource.
“That right there was something that we immediately started using,” he said.
The template also suggested camps use the same verbiage that emergency responders use, Huchton said.
“We would say the vice president’s gonna be in charge. Well, a safety person from the outside says, ‘Who’s your incident commander? Who’s your safety officer?’” Huchton said. “We had those roles already assigned.”
Huchton compared the shift to first responders abandoning 10-codes because the codes varied from region to region.
“It took it from tons of different vernacular into one common core vernacular (among all camps),” he said.
Huchton said the template does not force every camp into the same plan.
“It was a template designed to give us a starting point, but then we created with our own infrastructure in mind and in place,” he said.
In spring 2026, the Safety Navigator held a second workshop on training seasonal staff. Huchton said trainers showed camps how to teach a complex emergency plan to young summer employees and how to run the drills the new law requires soon after campers arrive.
“It gave us the ability to take a complex plan and break it down into easy actionable steps for our frontline and midline staff,” Huchton said.
In July 2026, The Safety Navigator toured seven Hill Country camps that use its platform. Huchton said the visits served mainly to teach the organization, not the camps.
“They wanted to see camps in operation,” he said. “They’re actually learning from us as much as we’re learning from them.”
Huchton said cost matters, especially for nonprofit camps. Safety Navigator charges nothing for its tools, templates or guidance.
“If we were to hire a company to come in and give us these resources that they’re creating for free, it would have cost us tens of thousands of dollars to do that,” Huchton said. “To have these tools given to us and the support given to us and access to safety experts to help walk us through it and none of it cost us anything. That was a huge blessing.”
Flood relief dollars
build ‘resilience’
Dickson said the Community Foundation organizes its disaster recovery work into three stages: immediate relief, rebuilding and resilience.
“This particular grant is in that resilience category,” Dickson said. “What we mean by resilience is preparing for the next disaster and strengthening aspects of the community, of households, of businesses, of nonprofits, of whole sectors of our economy to be safer, more prepared and resilient.”
The grant came from the Community and Culture Fund, a sub-fund of the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund. The sub-fund covers recovery needs other than mental health and housing, the fund’s other two categories. It has also supported LiftFund’s business assistance, tree planting by the San Antonio Botanical Garden and a $100,000 grant for swift-water rescue equipment for the Kerr County sheriff’s office.
“Camps in Kerr County are a cultural pillar of our community and have been for generations, and they’re also an economic pillar of our community,” Dickson said.
Before approving the grant, the foundation required letters of support from local camps, Dickson said.
“We never want to bring in an outside resource that our local community doesn’t need or want,” Dickson said. “We wouldn’t have made this grant if the local Kerr County camps hadn’t already signed on to work with Safety Navigator.”
The foundation awarded the grant in August, after camp season ended, to pay for off-season work. The Safety Navigator team had already worked with local camps all summer.
“These are not startup funds,” Dickson said.
Dickson said The Safety Navigator has statewide and national goals. The foundation cannot fund national efforts, but it can support the local work.
“It’s gonna start here in the Hill Country, and I think that’s very powerful and appropriate that it does,” Dickson said. “Everything Safety Navigator is doing to support our camps is free to them because of this grant.”
Huchton said the foundation’s role leaves the safety planning to the experts.
“The community foundation is not gonna influence the work as far as here’s a safety plan,” Huchton said. “But what they can do is come along with funding, which allows the Safety Navigator to create resources that are gonna be beneficial to us.”
A broader investment in camps
The safety grant adds to earlier foundation investments in Hill Country camps. The foundation paid about $10,000 for the Alliance for Camp Health to print 10,000 pocket-size mental health guides. Every counselor at every Hill Country camp carried one during the summer, Dickson said. In June, the foundation also gave the alliance $145,000 to provide around-the-clock telehealth support all summer for Hill Country camp staff dealing with a mental health crisis or trauma, their own or a camper’s. Both grants came from the foundation’s mental health fund.
“After a really challenging 2025, the Community Foundation wanted to support camps, and the way we feel like we could do that effectively was to support mental health and well-being for campers and the camping industry, and then also safety and preparedness,” Dickson said.
Asked what success would look like in five years, Dickson said the camps already have their own safety protocols. He hopes the grant leaves a larger legacy.
“Perhaps there is a new standard of safety that is a part of camping culture in America that started here in the Hill Country because of this grant,” Dickson said. “That could be really excellent, and protect more lives and make sure that more and more children get to experience camp in a safe way.”
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