Twenty-four young women from Calgary high schools graduated from what has become one of Calgary’s most important camps of the summer season.

The July 19 ceremony, held at the City of Calgary’s Multi-Agency Training Centre, was the culmination of a week at Camp Courage—which saw young women between the ages of 15 and 18 take part in fitness training along with learning police, fire, and paramedic skills.

For the past three years, the camp has become one of the important ways that the City’s tri-services of police, fire and EMS, along with the RCMP, Canadian Armed Forces, and Canadian Border Services, have encouraged more female applicants to become first responders.

Constable Becky Squires, a patrol officer in 4 District for the Calgary Police Service, was one of the coaches and leaders for campers.

“As much as they’re here for some inspiration, it inspires me to be a better police officer, and to be a positive role model for them. I love seeing all the skills that I’ve learned over the years being taught to the younger generation, and it’s awesome to see how passionate they are about wanting to work in emergency services,” Squires said.

“It makes me proud to be CPS, it makes me proud of my partners with AHS and fire, and I hope to see the girls out here someday doing the same thing.”

Camp Courage provided two days with each of the services, letting the young women experience real-world techniques like handcuffing, verbal de-escalation, and arresting procedures from the Calgary Police Service; cardiac monitoring, CPR, bleeding control and wound packing, and psychological first-aid from Alberta Health Services; and self contained breathing apparatus and bunker gear familiarization, search and rescue techniques, and fire hose use for fire suppression from the Calgary Fire Department.

Leaders inspire campers, campers inspire leaders

Const. Squires called one participant in this year’s camp, Mary Ojo—a grade 12 student at All Saints High School—inspiring.

“She’s been very inspiring to watch throughout this process, and she’s already done so well I’d be happy to have her. We’ve exchanged emails so that we can communicate when she is a bit older, and hopefully set her up with the CPS one day,” Squires said.

“I think it’s very important, especially because some of these girls don’t have any family members or friends that have role models in these industries. My father was a firefighter so I was exposed to emergency services from a young age—I chose the better side—but I think it’s super important… to show that they are capable of doing anything including emergency services, and that actually, it’s very beneficial to have them in these industries as well.”

Ojo herself said that after the week, she was leaning towards a career at the Calgary Police Service. It was something that she hadn’t even considered before starting the camp.

“I was looking for what I wanted to do in the future, and I saw the poster on the wall at my school and I said ‘you know what, let’s try.’ I’m so happy I got accepted to join, and its definitely an experience that I’ll bring with me forever,” Ojo said.

She said that it was the CPS instructors that inspired her to consider a future career in policing, but it was the other campers that made the week for her.

“Everyone’s awesome. Everyone’s cheering each other on when we’re doing obstacle courses. They’re cheering you on to push further in fitness and everything, and I feel like I’ve definitely made some lifelong friendships here,” she said.

Breaking down misconceptions

One of the goals of 2024’s Camp Courage was to break down the perceptions that the public, and young women in particular have about careers as first responders.

“There’s a lot of misconceptions about what firefighters do, what CPS does, what EMS does. A lot of how people form those opinions is from TV and movies, and that is not always an accurate portrayal. A lot of people would be surprised to know that over 50 per cent of our call volume is critical medical interventions. Most people would probably assume that most of our call volume is fires, which is not the case,” said Carol Henke, Public Information Officer for the Calgary Fire Department.

“We do so much more to help the community in whatever emergency they have. So this is a really great way to see an authentic, pared-down version of all the work that emergency responders do in the community.”

One of the perceptions that camper Morgann Baron had was that emergency response careers were dominated by men.

“It’s just so cool to have an opportunity to see like a day in the life of all these first responders, and it’s just all so cool and super empowering to see women in like such male dominated areas,” Baron said.

“It shows you that you can do it, and it’s possible and many people have done it. And then it’s like, although maybe we’re not as strong as men, we can still do the job just as easy.”

Henke said that the CFD is working better to try and reflect the community they serve, and Camp Courage is a way to do just that.

“When people see themselves as a firefighter because they see someone who looks like them, who’s a firefighter or a police officer or paramedic, that opens that door to say ‘hey, maybe I can do that. Maybe I should look at that.’ That goes such a long way to just even starting that interest in emergency response as a profession,” Henke said.