OUR FOUNDER
The Forever Experience
In the mid-1990s, at a Camp Discovery session held at Hermann Sons Camp outside San Antonio, a teenager named Renee was spending what she knew would be her last week at camp. One night that week, the oldest cabin slept out on the tennis courts under the stars. Joey was their cabin counselor.
Renee turned to him and said:
“Joey, thank you for giving me this forever experience.”
That line stayed with him for two decades.
When Discovery Camps became its own organization in 2013, Joey changed the logo. Today, Camp Discovery’s tagline reads: A forever experience.
It belongs to Renee.
The Man Who Built It
Joey Cavazos went to college as a forestry major. He picked it because he wanted to work in the woods and not be around people. Anyone who knew him later in life finds this funny — he ended up being one of the most relentlessly people-oriented humans his community had ever seen.
Camp changed that.
In the summer of 1984, the American Cancer Society approached YMCA Camp Flaming Arrow in Hunt, Texas and asked for help launching a summer camp for children facing cancer. The inaugural Camp Discovery was held that summer. Joey, then a college student working at Camp Flaming Arrow, helped put it together.
The kids he met that week became the focus of the rest of his life.
After graduating in 1985, Joey began his 25-year career with the Bexar County Juvenile Probation Department, eventually founding the Ropes Program and supervising the Gang Unit. Every year, without exception, he took a week off to come back to Camp Discovery. Cabin counselor. Ropes course coordinator. Volunteer camp director. Whatever the camp needed, he became.
When the American Cancer Society discontinued its national funding for pediatric oncology camps in 2013, Camp Discovery was in danger of shutting down. Joey’s response was simple:
“No. That is not going to happen. It is too important.”
VisionWorks — a nonprofit Joey and other volunteers had quietly built years earlier — was ready. Joey, recently retired from law enforcement, became its first Executive Director. What he built next was the organization that now operates eight programs:
- ☀Camp Discovery — week-long residential camp at Texas Lions Camp in Kerrville
- ☀Camp Brave Hearts — monthly in-hospital camps at three San Antonio children’s hospitals, funded and running in seven months after a camper asked Joey if he could bring camp to the hospital
- ☀Camp Ohana — family weekends for siblings and parents
- ☀Camp Firefly — for families who have lost a child to cancer
- ☀AYA in SA — for adolescents and young adults diagnosed in their teens or twenties
- ☀ARCH — leadership trips for older campers, including an annual visit to Give Kids the World Village in Orlando
- ☀Camp Common Ground — for families of children with disabilities who also have cancer
- ☀Wishes Granted — partnership with Give Kids the World to send families on wish trips
In 2022, VisionWorks changed its name to Discovery Camps to reflect everything Joey had built.
The Legacy Continues
Joey was diagnosed with Lynch Syndrome in 2013 — a genetic condition that made him susceptible to multiple types of cancer. Over the next eight years, he was diagnosed with five different cancers, caught early each time, treated surgically. He never went through chemotherapy or radiation. He used to tell his family he felt survivor’s guilt: he was called a cancer survivor, but he saw what his campers went through, and it didn’t feel like the same word should apply.
In April of 2021, a small seizure led to a different diagnosis. Glioblastoma. The family was told to expect about eighteen months.
Joey passed away six weeks later, on May 17, 2021.
In July of that year, Camp Discovery was held without him for the first time in 37 years.
Volunteers came back. Campers came back. New volunteers signed up — most of them, then and now, were former campers themselves. The hospital programs continued. The family weekends continued. The programs Joey dreamed of expanding kept expanding.
Discovery Camps exists today because Joey built something that didn’t depend on him being in the room. He built it to outlast him. And the community he gathered — campers, families, volunteers, donors, partners — chose to keep building.
Five years later, Camp Discovery is still a forever experience. Renee’s words still anchor the work.
That’s what we’re asking you to be part of.
Honor Joey’s Legacy
Discovery Camps offers eight programs to families facing pediatric cancer, every one of them at no cost to the family.
That’s only possible because of donors.
If Joey’s story moved you, or if you knew him personally, consider making a gift in his memory. Every donation supports the camps, families, and children he spent his life serving.
