Comedian and TV personality is hosting a camp for fatherless boys in Middle Georgia

Steve Harvey said when he left his father’s funeral, the first thing he wondered was what he was going to do without him.

“It’s gotta be daunting, especially for single mothers who don’t have a husband, and the boy don’t have a father,” Harvey said.

That was 17 years ago. For nine years now, Harvey has been hosting a camp for fatherless and at-risk boys, giving them the kind of help he didn’t have back then.

This year, the camp is being held at The Rock Ranch in Upson County. For a week, more than 220 boys are participating in fishing, rock climbing, teamwork and discipline activities and networking lessons.

“Father’s Day is a real bad day for a lot of these kids. They ain’t got nobody to give a card to,” Harvey said. “They can’t buy him a tie or nothing.”

He said his goal is to give the boys a lot of dads.

“I give them the engineers, the soldiers, the fraternity brothers and the college students in corporate America,” Harvey said. “I give them a father and I let them see what a man’s love feels like.”

The boys stay in a tent and receive three meals a day catered by the kitchen at The Rock Ranch. They have 1,500 acres to play on, including zip lines, said Katie Peeler, Communications Manager at The Rock Ranch.

The U.S. Army also helps out with the camp every year.

“They bring the thing that we have to instill first, discipline. A boy without discipline either goes to prison or he dies,” Harvey said.

Former students in the camp also return to be mentors or junior counselors.

Torren Calhoun came to the camp in 2014 and is now a junior counselor. He said it’s important for him to be there for the newer kids at the camp.

“Representation matters,” he said. “They see that it’s beneficial and we come back every year. They’ll see what keeps bringing us back.

On Saturday night at the camp, the boys will participate in a “Forgiving Your Father” activity. A speaker comes in and the boys write down on a piece of paper one word to describe their fathers. At the end, they throw the paper away and forgive them.

Calhoun said his word was “absent.”

A month ago, his dad messaged him on his birthday. They caught up and Calhoun visited his father the same weekend.

“I asked all of the questions that I had been planning to ask for 19 years,” Calhoun said.

Dantai Brown is a student at the camp this year. He is a tenth-grader at Tucker High School in DeKalb county. He said he had problems with lying, so his mom encouraged him to come to the camp.

“I’m not very rich or anything, so it’s really nice to be able to come out here and experience all of this stuff,” Brown said. “We wake up at five in the morning, we get to work and we just have fun for the rest of the day.”

There are four companies that help out with the camp, including Choice Hotels, which is the biggest sponsor. They provide rooms for all of the mothers while the boys are in camp.

“When Steve decided to do this, we knew we had to be apart of it,” said Steve Joyce, CEO of Choice Hotels.

“A lot of lives here are not on the right track, and Steve helps put them on the right track,” Joyce said. “Steve has professionals who also follow up with these kids at least until they get through college.”

Harvey said his goal next year is to host a camp with 500 boys.

“What we are producing here are top quality men,” he said. “This camp produces quality people who obey the law, love God, respect and honor women, go to work everyday and take care of their kids.”

This story was originally published June 16, 2017 at 4:40 PM with the headline "Comedian and TV personality is hosting a camp for fatherless boys in Middle Georgia."