How a family-owned commercial cleaning company thinks about community across MA, CT & RI.
On a warm evening this past June, our team was out on the water for the eleventh annual Jabberwocky Fishing Tournament, a benefit for one of the most remarkable camps in New England. Modular Concepts has sponsored this event for five years, and we show up for it in person every year. It is one of the best days on our calendar.
We do commercial cleaning and facility maintenance for offices, medical buildings, schools, and industrial sites across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Cleaning and a fishing tournament for a disability camp on Martha’s Vineyard do not seem connected on the surface. They are more connected than they look.
This post is about Camp Jabberwocky, the tournament that helps fund it, and why a family-owned cleaning company has backed it for five years running. If you have ever wondered what a company actually stands for behind the service pages, this is a fair place to look.
Table of Contents
- 1. What Camp Jabberwocky Is
- 2. The Woman Who Started It
- 3. Who the Camp Serves Today
- 4. The Jabberwocky Fishing Tournament
- 5. Five Years of Showing Up
- 6. Why a Cleaning Company Cares About This
- 7. What Commitment at Your Service Means
- 8. How Community Values Show Up in the Work
- 9. Ways You Can Get Involved
- 10. The Bottom Line
1. What Camp Jabberwocky Is
Camp Jabberwocky is the oldest sleepaway camp for people with disabilities in America. It sits on Martha’s Vineyard and has been running summer sessions since 1953. Campers come with Down syndrome, spina bifida, autism, brain injuries, blindness, deafness, and a long list of other physical and cognitive challenges. The camp does not screen for the easy cases.
The point of the place is simple and hard to pull off. It gives people with disabilities a real vacation, the kind most families are told is not possible, and it gives their caregivers a genuine break at the same time. Independence, adventure, and dignity are the whole design, not a tagline.
More than 170 volunteers make a season happen, working as counselors, doctors, nurses, cooks, and directors. The camp runs on donations and volunteer hours rather than large fees, which is why events like the fishing tournament matter to whether the lights stay on.
2. The Woman Who Started It
Camp Jabberwocky exists because of Helen Lamb, a speech therapist everyone knew as Hellcat. In 1953 she was on vacation with her own three children on Martha’s Vineyard and could not shake the guilt of it. The kids she worked with back in the city had no vacation coming, and no break in sight for their parents either.
So she brought sixteen campers to a small cottage and started. The next year a 4-H clubhouse took them in. By 1965 Grace Episcopal Church gave the camp eight acres in Vineyard Haven, and it finally had a permanent home. That was also the year her son John pulled the name Jabberwocky from Lewis Carroll, because the family loved the nonsense and the joy in it.
Hellcat left behind one line that still runs the place: there is a way, find it. That is a philosophy about disability, and it is also, if we are honest, a decent philosophy about work. The obstacle is real. You find the way through anyway.
3. Who the Camp Serves Today
Seventy years on, the mission has not drifted. Campers still arrive for residential sessions that most vacation programs would call too complex to staff. The medical needs are real, the mobility needs are real, and the camp meets them instead of turning them away.
What the camp produces is not pity and it is not therapy. It is a summer that looks like anyone else’s summer. Swimming, theater productions, campfires, friendships that pick back up year after year. Campers who have been coming for decades treat the place as home, and many former campers come back as volunteers.
For families, the respite is not a small thing. Caregiving for a person with a significant disability is around-the-clock work with no natural off switch. A camp session gives a parent or a sibling a stretch of time to rest, knowing their person is safe and, more than that, having a great week. That is the quiet half of the mission most people never see.
4. The Jabberwocky Fishing Tournament
The fishing tournament is one of the camp’s signature fundraisers, and this June marked the eleventh year. The format is generous by design. Boat captains donate their vessels and their time, take anglers out for the day, and everyone comes back for an awards celebration at the Cape Cod Maritime Museum.
There is more to it than the fishing. Sponsors underwrite the event, a silent auction runs alongside it, and the whole evening is built to turn a day on the water into real operating money for the camp. It is the kind of fundraiser that works because the people running it clearly love the cause, not because it is slick.
For a supporter, there are several ways in. You can sponsor the event, donate a boat and captain it for the day, contribute an item to the silent auction, or simply buy in and fish. Every one of those routes ends at the same place, which is a camp session that a family did not have to pay full freight for.
5. Five Years of Showing Up
Modular Concepts has sponsored the Jabberwocky Fishing Tournament for five years, and we have been there in person every one of them. Sponsoring a cause from a distance is easy. Showing up, year after year, on the same water, for the same camp, is a different kind of commitment.
Every year we go out on the boats, meet the captains who donate their day, and see the people the tournament supports. It is not an event we cut a check for and forget. It is a standing date on our calendar, and it has been for five years running.
We are saying this plainly on purpose. Community support is not a grand one-time gesture for us. It is a habit we keep, a commitment we renew every year because the camp’s need does not take a year off. Showing up again is the whole point.
6. Why a Cleaning Company Cares About This
The honest answer is that community involvement is not a marketing strategy for us, and we would be suspicious of any company that framed it that way. Modular Concepts has been family-owned since 2014 and serving clients since 2008. When a business stays in one family and one region that long, the line between company and community gets thin.
There is a values match too, and it is not forced. Camp Jabberwocky is built on doing hard, unglamorous work well, day after day, for people who are counting on it. That describes commercial cleaning more than most people would guess. Nobody notices a facility that is quietly kept right. They only notice when it slips.
We also like that the camp does not oversell itself. It states plainly what it is, it does the work, and it lets the results speak. That is the register we try to write in, run our crews in, and talk to clients in. Backing an organization that operates the same way is not a stretch. It is a fit.
7. What Commitment at Your Service Means
Our tagline is commitment at your service, and a tagline is only worth anything if it holds up when nobody is grading you. A five-year sponsorship of a camp several hours from our service area, with no client attached to it, is a fair test of whether we mean the word commitment or just like the sound of it.
Commitment is the ability to keep doing the right thing after the novelty wears off. In cleaning, that is the difference between a crew that is thorough in month one and a crew that is still thorough in month fourteen. In community work, it is the difference between a splashy one-time donation and showing up for the same camp five years running because the need did not go away.
We would rather be judged on the boring version of commitment than the flashy one. The boring version is what our clients actually buy, and it is what a camp like Jabberwocky actually needs. If the word means anything, it means showing up again after the applause stops.
8. How Community Values Show Up in the Work
The same instincts that put us at the tournament run through how we operate. Our owner, Luiz DaCosta, visits client sites personally as part of quality control. That is not a marketing flourish, it is how a family-owned company keeps standards from drifting once it grows past the point where the owner can clean every building himself.
It shows up in how we treat a client’s space, which is to say we treat it like it belongs to someone who cares about it, because it does. A building is where people spend a third of their lives. Keeping it clean, safe, and cared for is not a commodity task to us, even when the market treats it as one.
None of this is unique to Modular Concepts, and we are not claiming a monopoly on caring. Plenty of good operators think this way. What we can promise is that the company showing up for a disability camp five years running is the same company that will show up for your facility. There is not a different Modular behind the service pages.
9. Ways You Can Get Involved
If any of this landed, the camp makes it easy to help. The most direct route is a donation at campjabberwocky.org, which funds sessions for campers whose families could not otherwise swing it. Volunteering is the other big one, and the camp uses everyone from direct-care counselors to doctors, nurses, and cooks, with commitments that range from a single day to a full season.
The fishing tournament itself has a door for almost anyone. Sponsor next year’s event, donate a boat and captain it for the day, contribute to the silent auction, or come to the awards celebration and buy in. You do not need a boat or deep pockets to matter to the day.
You can also do the simplest thing, which is to tell people the camp exists. Camp Jabberwocky has been quietly changing summers since 1953, and word of mouth from people who have seen it is worth more than any ad. We are glad to be one of those voices now.
10. The Bottom Line
Camp Jabberwocky gives people with disabilities a real vacation and gives their caregivers a real break, and the fishing tournament is part of how that keeps happening. Five years in, we are proud to back it, and we come away from every tournament gladder that we do.
If you operate a commercial facility in Massachusetts, Connecticut, or Rhode Island and you want a cleaning partner whose word holds up over the long run, Modular Concepts can help. We are BSCAI verified, we work without long-term contracts, and our owner is on-site at client locations because that is how good work gets done.
Reach us at (508) 658-0303 for a no-obligation walkthrough and quote. We will tell you honestly what your facility needs, what it should cost, and how we would build the plan. The commitment we show a camp on Martha’s Vineyard is the same one we bring to your building.
