Be A Resource

The Y has always played an important role in helping vulnerable communities. And when the pandemic hit, you stepped up even more, many YMCAs stepped in. They increased their food distribution tenfold, and they also cared for tens of thousands of children of essential workers, and provided so many other needed services as well along the way. How do you inspire your team to be creative with ideas, especially when confronted with new challenges?

Great question. I will tell you that I have never been prouder to work for this organization than what we were able to do under the COVID-19 environment. The Y stepped up and really showed that it was a vital community organization. But I will tell you this, part of who we've always been, we've been in these communities for over 160-70 years in many of them, and the Y has created this brand connection to people.

So when your staff stepped up during the pandemic, provided all these critically needed services, they had to be creative, innovative, come up with new ideas. And once these new ideas took root, what process do you and your team use to bring them to life?

We had some very creative folks on our team and we were able to provide using our tools to the web service of our link, which is one of the ways we communicate with our internal audiences. We provided templates and services. We also connect with one another, because if we see a YMCA group doing great work in, say, North Carolina, we're ensuring that those kinds of ideas get disseminated across the system, because we know that if it's worked here, it's possible it could work in other coordinate, other communities. So we connect with one another to do that, to ensure that best practices are shared across a spectrum, and that is the national organization's job, really. We're a resource to the organizations. We make sure that as we do this work, we're finding great ideas, great thoughts, great opportunities, and share them with network. More importantly, we provide templates, so they can follow them relatively easily. We created partnerships. We did one with the CDC to ensure that as we did this work, here's how you can do it safely. We partnered with the American Camping Association, as we talked about being able to do summer camp in a much more safer environment. So we use those partnerships to help create ideas and the leverage about organization to share those ideas across our platform. That's how we're able to create and sustain innovative ideas and innovative projects.