2 Centuries of Leadership

The YMCA has been around more than 175 years. Wow, what a history.

I've worked every year of that.

I would imagine that over the years, it's worked with a lot of organizations and leaders over the years, including alliances to carry out its vision. So I'm curious, how would you describe alliances? And what point do they play in your effectiveness as a leader?

Couple of ways. When you think about our organization, one of the things and one of the highlights that we bring to any partnership or alliance is that scale, is very few if any organizations can match our scale. When you think about the fact that we're in 10,000 communities, we serve 21 million people, 8 million of those under the age of 18, that's a breath scope and scale that very few if any organizations can match. But what we look for in alliances and partnerships is while we may bring scale, what are the significant talents, traits, expertise that you bring to the table that can engage with us to help us do something even better? I give you a couple of examples. One, we were working with the University of Indianapolis, Indianapolis YMCA around this Diabetes Prevention Program. It was a CDC evidence-based particular program. They wanted to know if it could work in a non-medical environment. Subsequently, they worked with the Indianapolis YMCA to see if it could get the kinds of results they were getting in an evidence-based medical environment. They started working with us and they realized, one, it could get them results they wanted, in fact, they were better. Two, they recognize that we have some scale that could scale this thing across the country and save substantial amounts of money for Medicaiders. Those preventive program -- to support diabetes prevention was as a result of the work we did with the CDC, University of Indianapolis and Indianapolis YMCA, and we were able to spread that across the country, very -- partnerships that are helpful for us and helpful for the community.