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Rising Notes Camp Campus

Overview

Rising Notes Camp Campus is the flagship location of the Charlie Rivera Rising Notes Camp, a revolutionary music and arts program for queer, disabled, BIPOC, chronically ill, and neurodivergent youth. Located in the wooded hills near Woodstock, New York—a deliberate choice honoring the area's musical legacy—the campus was custom-built from the ground up beginning in 2037 and opened for its first session in the summer of 2038.

The campus is not a retrofitted summer camp or a repurposed school building. Every structure, pathway, rehearsal space, and resting area was designed with radical accessibility and disability justice at the foundation. The campus embodies Charlie Rivera's founding principle: "You shouldn't have to fight the space to be in it." It is soft, deliberate, affirming, and unapologetically centered on the needs of bodies and minds that traditional spaces exclude.

The atmosphere is one of intentional gentleness—quiet woods, wide shaded paths, birdsong instead of loudspeakers, cooling mist stations beside every building, the hum of rehearsal rooms blending with the sounds of rest. This is a place where a child can nap under a tree without shame, stim freely during a drum circle, use a feeding tube in the dining hall without stares, or recline in a tilt-in-space wheelchair mid-rehearsal and continue leading with their voice. It is, fundamentally, a sanctuary.

Physical Description

Architecture and Layout

The campus is designed as a series of interconnected zones radiating from a central gathering space. All buildings feature eco-conscious construction with sustainable materials, natural wood finishes, and large windows offering forest views. Roofs are gently sloped to manage snow in winter and provide shade in summer. No fluorescent lighting exists anywhere on campus—only warm LED bulbs with dimming capabilities and natural light.

The Heart Stone

At the campus center lies a smooth stone platform beneath a natural tree canopy—not a stage, just a circle. Etched into the stone are the words: "You are not too much. You are music."—Charlie Rivera. The Heart Stone serves as the site of opening and closing ceremonies, the place where spontaneous jam sessions emerge, and the gathering point where campers come together when words fail.

Cabins (Residential Zones)

The wooden cabins feature full wheelchair access, roll-in showers, adjustable-height counters, ceiling fans, individual climate control, dimmable lights, and blackout curtains. Each cabin houses eight to ten campers with full-size XL beds—never twins—along with privacy curtains, soft storage pockets, and grab bars. Cabins are designated as either "Quiet" or "Social" to honor different sensory and energy needs, and optional solo rooms are available for campers who need their own space without requiring any explanation or justification.

The Sol Room (Main Performance Hall)

The Sol Room is a dome-shaped acoustic performance space with tiered seating, full mobility access, customizable low-light settings, and sound engineering designed for warmth rather than harshness. The name honors both "sol"—sun in Spanish—and the musical note. Stage ramps allow wheelchair users to perform at the same level as standing musicians, eliminating the separation that conventional performance architecture imposes.

Open Grove Stage (Outdoor Amphitheater)

Shaded by trees, the outdoor amphitheater features soft grass, hammock zones, wheelchair ramps leading directly onto the stage, and zero pressure to perform. Some of the most profound performances at Rising Notes happen on this stage—not because they are technically perfect, but because they are truthful.

Jam Tents

Scattered across campus, these small fabric-draped structures are stocked with instruments, pillows, and beanbags, offering the freedom to make noise without an audience. No rules, no watchers—just sound.

The Nourishment Commons (Dining Hall)

The Nourishment Commons provides flexible dining spaces with quiet corners, low-stimulation lighting, and noise buffers. All meals are labeled with ingredients and sensory texture notes, and multiple seating options include tables, floor cushions, and wheelchair-accessible counters. Adapted utensils, blended diet options, and feeding tube accommodations are standard. A soundproof, low-light nap pod room opens directly off the dining hall—an acknowledgment that sometimes eating requires recovery time immediately afterward.

Rest Cabins and Recovery Spaces

Dedicated buildings house soft lights, bean bags, sensory kits, white noise machines, privacy curtains, and medical monitoring equipment. Staff presence is available but never intrusive. Cooling systems, adjustable beds, ice packs, and electrolyte stations equip these spaces for the full range of chronic illness management. These are not "sick rooms"—they are intentional spaces for energy conservation and nervous system regulation.

The Recovery Den

Run by trained counselors, therapists, and medical support staff, the Recovery Den features art therapy supplies, stim spaces, and soft music playing continuously. A standing rule governs the space: no forced conversation. Campers can sit, breathe, create, cry, or sleep. They are held, not managed.

The "No Pressure" Building

Built specifically for campers who want to attend camp without participating in structured activities, this building includes musical lounges, art tables, journaling spots, and gentle background music. Its existence validates the truth that sometimes presence is enough.

Infrastructure

Temperature control is paramount across the campus, with every building individually climate-adjustable. Outdoor cooling stations include mist tents and fan benches designed specifically for campers with POTS and other heat-sensitive conditions. Hydration is treated as essential infrastructure rather than individual responsibility—electrolyte drinks, water stations, and reminders appear everywhere without surveillance or shaming.

Power outlets are abundant for charging mobility aids, medical devices, and comfort technology. Wi-Fi is available but not required. Cell service is reliable for emergency contact but discouraged during sessions to preserve the sanctuary atmosphere.

Grounds and Outdoor Spaces

All pathways across the campus are wide, paved, shaded, and gently ramped with no steep inclines, and benches appear every hundred feet along every route. Cooling stations, hydration towers, and fog misters are positioned throughout the grounds, ensuring that movement between buildings never requires enduring heat or distance without support. The campus includes two distinct gardens—one floral, one evergreen—both with walking paths, hammocks, and quiet corners designed for solitude. Service animal relief zones feature cooling mats, and accessible picnic areas are distributed across the grounds.

A small lake is visible from several vantage points across the campus, though it is not used for swimming due to safety and sensory considerations. The lake functions instead as a visual anchor—a point of stillness within the campus's gentle landscape. The wooded Catskills setting provides natural shade, birdsong, and the particular quiet of forest land that forms the campus's acoustic baseline, a deliberate contrast to the urban environments many campers travel from.

Sensory Environment

The campus smells like pine, fresh grass, and whatever's cooking in the Nourishment Commons—often a blend of cultural foods honoring campers' diverse heritages. In the mornings, the scent of coffee and tea drifts from the staff lounge. In the evenings, lavender essential oil wafts from the rest cabins.

Sound is carefully curated. No loudspeakers. No jarring announcements. Communication happens through visual schedules, gentle chimes, and staff walking between buildings with quiet voices. Rehearsal sounds float through open windows—saxophone, drums, piano, laughter, sometimes crying. Birdsong and wind in the trees form the baseline. At night, cricket song and the distant hum of campers talking softly in cabins.

Light is always soft. Sunlight filters through trees. LED bulbs glow warm. Fairy lights and lanterns appear in the evenings. Headlamps and clip-on lights available for campers who need brighter task lighting, but never imposed on shared spaces.

Temperature varies by preference and need. Some campers bundle in hoodies even in July. Others strip down to tank tops and shorts. Cooling stations and heated blankets coexist without judgment.

Touch is consensual. Staff always ask before adjusting a wheelchair, offering a hand, or initiating contact. Campers are taught the same. Soft textures abound: blankets, pillows, rugs, hammocks. Stim-friendly materials everywhere.

Function and Daily Life

The Rising Notes Campus serves as a two-week residential summer music and arts camp for queer, disabled, BIPOC, chronically ill, and neurodivergent youth ages 12-18. The primary function is not technical music education (though that happens) but rather the creation of a space where marginalized young people can make art, rest without guilt, and exist loudly without apology.

Daily activities include music track sessions (percussion, vocals, ensemble, composition, production, lyric writing, experimental sound, advocacy), body breaks, rest hours, creative workshops, meals, and optional evening events like campfires and open mics. Schedules are visual, flexible, and opt-in. No one is required to participate in everything.

Medical care happens quietly and constantly. Feeding tubes, medications, vitals monitoring, POTS management, seizure protocols, sensory overload support—all handled by trained staff without fanfare. The campus functions as both artistic sanctuary and medical safe space.

Beyond summer sessions, the campus hosts winter retreats for alumni, staff training programs, and occasional benefit concerts. It has become a pilgrimage site for disability justice advocates and queer artists seeking to understand what radical accessibility looks like in practice.

History

Planning and Construction (2037)

Following the viral resurfacing of Charlie Rivera's assault video and the subsequent "Still Here: A Night for Charlie" tribute concert that raised $18.7 million, planning for the campus began immediately. Charlie, Logan, and the leadership council—Riley Mercer, Peter Liu, Ezra Cruz, Jacob Keller, and Reina Rivera—worked with LGBTQ+ architects, disability justice consultants, and indigenous land stewardship advisors to design the space.

The land near Woodstock was chosen for its musical legacy, natural beauty, and proximity to both New York City (where many campers would travel from) and the quieter, sensory-gentle environment of the Catskills region. Construction emphasized eco-conscious building, universal design, and indigenous land acknowledgment.

First Session (Summer 2038)

The campus opened in the summer of 2038 with sixty campers, fifteen staff, and a collective holding of breath to see if the dream would work. It did. Charlie cried during his opening speech. Campers cried during the closing showcase. Parents sobbed in the grass. The session ended with a lantern ceremony and the phrase that would become a global rallying cry: "We Begin Loud. We Don't Fade Out."

Refinement and Expansion (2039–2042)

Based on camper and staff feedback, the campus underwent continuous refinement—additional cooling stations, more rest spaces, expanded medical facilities, and improved sensory accommodations. A second West Coast satellite campus opened in 2042 (Year Five), but the Woodstock flagship remained the heart of the organization.

Charlie's Tilt-in-Space Era (2043–Ongoing)

By year six, with Charlie at age thirty-five, the campus became a living demonstration of adaptive leadership. Charlie's use of a tilt-in-space wheelchair full-time, his frequent CFS crashes requiring mid-rehearsal rest, and his occasional rejection of feeding tube feeds all happened visibly on campus. Campers witnessed that leadership did not disappear when bodies needed help—it adapted. The motto expanded: "We Begin Soft" for years when Charlie was in flare.

Relationship to Characters

Charlie Rivera

The campus represented Charlie's legacy made physical—everything he needed as a sick, queer, brown kid and never received. Every design choice reflected his lived experience: the cooling stations for his POTS, the rest cabins for his CFS, the feeding tube accommodations, the tilt-in-space chair-accessible rehearsal spaces. When Charlie was on campus—reclined under trees, leading rehearsals from his chair, or sleeping in the recovery tent while campers played nearby—the space held him as gently as he held them.

Logan Weston

Logan designed the medical infrastructure with obsessive care. He vetted every staff member, created protocols for complex conditions, and built remote monitoring systems. On campus, Logan moved between teaching health sessions, supporting Charlie through crashes, checking camper vitals, and modeling what ethical medical care looked like. He was present without hovering, knowledgeable without condescending, protective without infantilizing.

The Band

Each member of CRATB shaped different elements of the campus. Riley Mercer designed operational systems. Peter Liu managed finances to ensure sustainability. Ezra Cruz built mentorship pathways. Jacob Keller created mental health and sensory infrastructure. They rotated through as teaching artists, guest performers, and steady presences who reminded campers that chosen family was real and lasting.

Reina Rivera

Reina anchored the cultural partnerships that ensured Rising Notes honored its Latinx, Boricua, and BIPOC roots. She walked the campus ensuring that cultural identity was celebrated alongside disability and queerness, that multilingual support existed, that foods and music and language reflected the diversity of campers' heritages.

Campers

For many campers, the Rising Notes Campus was the first place they had felt safe—the first time stimming publicly, the first time using a mobility aid without apology, the first time having pronouns respected, the first time resting without shame. They arrived nervous, masked, and guarded. They left softer, louder, and more themselves. Alumni described the campus as "the place I learned I didn't have to earn belonging."

Community Context and Neighborhood

The campus sits in the wooded hills near Woodstock, New York, in the Catskills region—a location chosen deliberately for its musical legacy, natural beauty, and the sensory gentleness of the forested landscape. The proximity to New York City, where many campers travel from, made the site logistically accessible while providing the environmental contrast that the program's therapeutic and artistic goals required. The Catskills' history as a retreat destination—from the Borscht Belt resorts of the mid-twentieth century to the Woodstock music festival's cultural legacy—gave the campus a geographic lineage rooted in performance, gathering, and the idea that creative communities sometimes need to leave the city to find themselves.

The surrounding area offered the rural quiet and natural beauty that supported the camp's sensory design philosophy, while maintaining the infrastructure—road access, medical facilities within reach, reliable utilities—necessary for a program serving campers with complex medical needs. The relationship between the campus and its surrounding community reflected the broader pattern of arts organizations establishing roots in the Catskills region, contributing to the area's identity as a place where creative work and retreat coexist.

Cultural and Narrative Significance

The Rising Notes Campus represents the physical manifestation of disability justice, queer liberation, and radical care. It proves—irrefutably—that when spaces are designed for the most marginalized, everyone benefits. It demonstrates that rest is not laziness, softness is not weakness, and accessibility is not an accommodation but a baseline.

Narratively, the campus functions as a sanctuary in a hostile world. It is the place where broken kids learn they were never broken, where exhausted bodies learn rest is revolutionary, where silenced voices learn they are music. It is where Charlie—who survived a hate crime, medical dismissal, chronic illness, and public trauma—built a world that says "you are not too much."

The campus has become a pilgrimage site and a model. Other organizations study its design. Disability justice advocates cite it as proof of concept. Queer youth post TikToks filmed on campus with captions like "This is what care looks like."

The phrase etched into the Heart Stone—"You are not too much. You are music"—has been tattooed on bodies, painted on walls, and whispered in therapy sessions far beyond the campus borders.

Accessibility and Design

The Rising Notes Campus was designed from its foundation with universal accessibility as a baseline rather than an afterthought. Every building on campus was built fully wheelchair accessible from inception—not retrofitted—with ramps, elevators, push-to-open doors, roll-in showers, and adjustable-height counters throughout. All pathways are wide, paved, shaded, and ramped with no steep inclines, and benches appear every hundred feet across the campus grounds.

Temperature and climate control operate at an individual building level, allowing each space to be adjusted independently. Outdoor cooling stations—including mist tents, fog misters, and fan benches—address the needs of campers with POTS and other heat-sensitive conditions. Hydration towers stocked with electrolyte drinks stand at regular intervals across campus. Heated blankets are available for campers who run cold, and neither preference requires explanation.

Sensory accessibility shaped every design decision. No fluorescent lighting exists anywhere on campus—only warm LED bulbs with dimming capabilities and natural light. Cabins are clearly designated as "Quiet" or "Social" to honor different sensory and energy thresholds. Soundproof rest rooms provide spaces for sensory crashes, equipped with white noise machines, blackout curtains, and weighted blankets. Visual schedules throughout campus include noise level and energy demand indicators for each activity. Stim kits are available at every building.

The on-site medical infrastructure supports campers with complex chronic illness through a trained medical team that manages medications without surveillance, provides feeding tube accommodations in all food spaces, maintains POTS protocols including hydration, electrolytes, and tilt-in-space seating, and follows seizure safety protocols campus-wide. Select cabins feature Hoyer lift-equipped beds for campers who require transfer assistance.

Gender and identity inclusion permeates the campus design. All bathrooms and cabins are gender-inclusive, pronouns appear on name tags and intake forms throughout the program, a gender-affirming clothing closet offers options for campers exploring presentation, and multilingual signage reflects the diversity of the camper population.

Communication access operates through visual, digital, and plain-text materials rather than loudspeakers or PA systems. AAC devices are fully supported, and all participation is opt-in—no camper is required to attend or engage in any activity. Service animals are accommodated through dedicated relief zones with cooling mats, quiet boarding options when needed, and staff trained in service animal etiquette.

The overarching design philosophy is what the camp calls "No Explanations Required." Every accessibility feature is presented as default, not special. No camper ever has to justify needing rest, accommodations, or support—the infrastructure simply provides what bodies and minds need without requiring disclosure or defense.

Notable Events

The campus's most significant events are documented below:

  • First Opening Ceremony (Summer 2038)—Charlie's voice cracked during his speech: "Some of us weren't welcome at music camp growing up... But not here. Here? We begin loud." Sixty campers and staff cried together. The camp began not with fanfare but with the soft truth that they were finally safe.
  • First Closing Lantern Ceremony (Summer 2038)—Each camper received a lantern with the note: "You are not too much. You are music." They lit them together as darkness fell, creating a constellation of light in the woods. The final group performance of "Everything Loud and Tender" was sung with Charlie reclined in the grass, Logan beside him, both sobbing.
  • "We Begin Soft" Opening (Year Six, 2043)—Charlie, deep in a CFS crash, could barely speak. He rolled out in his tilt-in-space wheelchair and said: "Hey babies. I'm not loud today. But I'm still here... So this year? We begin soft." The campers stood and applauded for five minutes straight.
  • The Feed Rejection Rehearsal (Year Six, 2043)—During a vocal workshop, Charlie's feeding tube rejected, causing him to vomit mid-session. Staff calmly evacuated campers, cleaned up, and supported Charlie with dignity. The next day, a camper with a feeding tube whispered, "Thank you for not disappearing." Charlie responded, "I'm not going anywhere, nene. And neither are you." This moment became legend among campers—proof that bodies break without breaking worth.
  • The Morning After Charlie's Down Days (Ongoing)—On days when Charlie was too ill to appear, campers left drawings, bracelets, and notes outside the recovery cabin. Logan taped them to the door. The camp learned that holding the line for someone who was crashing was its own form of music.
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