Who owns ymca

The YMCA movement had been involved in character development from the beginning, but in an implicit and practical focus rather than an explicit one. George Williams stated this perfectly in his response to how he would respond to a young man who said that he had lost his belief in Jesus, by saying that his first act would be to see that the young man had dinner.

The YMCA movement studied the issue and emerged with four "core values" -- caring, honesty, respect and responsibility -- and promptly began to incorporate these in all programming in an explicit and conscious way. During the '90s, a tremendous change occurred in the field of youth development.

Previously, the focus had been on the "deficit model," in other words, what went wrong with the youth who got into trouble, and how could they be corrected. But the same way that prevention and development of health, rather than just the cure of disease pervaded the medical world, youth workers and academics started to look at what contributes to healthy development and prevents problems -- an "assets model.

The research showed 30 later increased to 40 developmental assets that positively correlated with pro-social and healthy behaviors in youth, and negatively correlated with anti-social and unhealthy behaviors. The more assets a youth has, the more likely he or she is to behave well, the less likely to engage in risky behaviors. This not only provided a "road map" for Ys to follow in creating healthy kids, families and communities, but also was an inherent proof of the effectiveness of youth programs.

It also showed a wider focus than had been thought possible. It doesn't matter if a program consists of sports, music, a teen center, mentoring or aerobics, or if it's aimed at reducing teen pregnancy, smoking or crime. If it provides one or more of the developmental assets, it will reduce the overall risk of any kind of negative behavior, and raise the likelihood of positive behavior. Ys have been so integral to their communities that organizations have been founded at meetings at YMCAs without being part of Y programs.

So we say that the Gideons was founded at a Y, but not that a Y started Gideons. It would be impossible to list all of the individuals and organizations contributing to this document. We received information from sources ranging from trade associations to university professors to current and retired YMCA employees. The only things they had in common were a deep respect for Y traditions, a love for what the YMCA stands for and a desire to help.

Their efforts and irreplaceable resources provided needed details when no one else knew where to look. The reason to look at what YMCAs did in the past is to inspire today's YMCA staff and volunteers to serve their communities with the same concern, dedication and courage.

They may not make a list of firsts, but they will keep YMCAs foremost with their accomplishments. Millions of people have been introduced to sports at YMCAs. Many of the sports people play were introduced at YMCAs, too. Volleyball was invented at the Holyoke Mass. Morgan blended elements of basketball, tennis and handball into the game and called it mintonette. In , YMCAs held their first national championship in the game. This became the U. Open in , when non-YMCA teams were permitted to compete.

Racquetball was invented in at the Greenwich Conn. YMCA by Joe Sobek, a member who couldn't find other squash players of his caliber and who did not care for handball. He tried paddleball and platform tennis and came up with the idea of using a strung racquet similar to a platform tennis paddle not a sawed-off tennis racquet, as some say to allow a greater variety of shots. After drawing up rules for the game, Sobek went to nearby Ys for approval by other players, and at the same time formed them into the Paddle Rackets Association to promote the sport.

The original balls Sobek used were half blue and half red. When he needed replacements, Sobek asked Spalding, the original manufacturer, to make the balls all blue, so they wouldn't mark the Y's courts. Softball had been played for many years prior to , under such names as kittenball, softball and even sissyball.

In , however, the YMCA state secretary, Homer Hoisington, noticed both the sport's popularity and its need for standardized rules. After a gathering of interested parties, the CASA was formed and Hakanson moved to settle on the name softball for the game. The motion carried, and the name softball became accepted nationwide. Shortly thereafter, the Denver YMCA adopted a declaration of principles for softball, adhering to noncommercialized recreation open to all ages and races and demanding good sportsmanship.

Professional football began at a YMCA. In , in Latrobe, Pa. Years later, however, Pudge Heffelfinger claimed that he was secretly paid to play for the Allegheny Athletic Association in The NFL elected to go with Pudge's version of events.

Gulick needed a game to occupy a class of incorrigibles -- 18 future YMCA directors who, more interested in rugby and football, didn't care for leapfrog, tumbling and other activities they were forced to do during the winter. Gulick, obviously out of patience with the group, gave Naismith two weeks to come up with a game to occupy them. Naismith decided that the new game had to be physically active and simple to understand.

It could not be rough, so no contact could be allowed. The ball could be passed but not carried. Goals at each end of the court would lend a degree of difficulty and give skill and science a role. Elevating the goal would eliminate rushes that could injure players, a problem in football and rugby. Introducing the game of basketball at the next gym class Naismith did meet Gulick's deadline , Naismith posted 13 rules on the wall and taught the game to the incorrigibles. The men loved it and proceeded to introduce basketball to their home towns over Christmas break.

Naismith's invention spread like wildfire. Not only was basketball invented by a YMCA institution, but the game's first professional team came from a Y. The Trenton N. YMCA had fielded a basketball team since and in its team claimed to be the national champions after beating various other YMCA and college teams. The team then severed its ties with the Y. It played the season out of a local Masonic temple, charging for admission and keeping the proceeds.

YMCAs run programs of all types, from activities for older adults to Zen aerobics. Some of the biggest are camping, swimming and child care. Here are some stories of their development. Camping has been a part of YMCA programming for more than a century. What YMCAs can claim is having founded the first continuously used camp.

The first school camp was started in by William Gunn, and Gunn camps became well known. A camp for weakly boys was organized in by Dr. Joseph Trimble Rothrock. The first church camp for boys was started in , and in the first private camp to meet special educational needs was established.

None of these camps was a YMCA camp, and none of them operates today. YMCAs became involved in camping in the s, with the earliest reference being that of the Vermont Y's boy's missionary who would now be the youth director taking a group of boys to Lake Champlain for a summer encampment. In , the Brooklyn N. YMCA reported taking 30 boys on a camping out. Many other YMCAs had camp experiences for youth as well, and in national records started recording camping programs under outings and excursions.

Dudley referred to the first camp as Camp Baldhead. After Dudley's death in , the camp was renamed Camp Dudley. It started because a camp director wanted to award athletic ability. Other camp leaders objected, noting that a boy with physical disabilities would then never be able to win. They settled on a program of personal counseling and seeking God's will for oneself. Walker, was inspired by the program's creed. It was not always this way, however, and for many years swimming was seen as a distraction from legitimate physical development.

By the end of the year, it was reported that 17 Ys had pools. Pools then bore scant resemblance to the pools of today: The Brooklyn Central pool was 14' x 45' and 5' deep.

Early pools, in addition to being small, had no filters or recirculation systems. The water in the pool just got dirtier and dirtier until the pool was drained and cleaned, which some Ys did on a weekly basis. No wonder the medical community saw them as a threat to health. Two developments helped change YMCA staff attitudes towards pools. What Corsan did was to teach swimming strokes on land, starting with the crawl stroke first, as a confidence builder. Prior to Corsan's methods, strokes were only taught in the pool and the crawl was not taught until later.

Corsan also came up with the ideas of the learn-to-swim campaign and using bronze buttons as rewards for swimming proficiency. He gave a button to boys who swam 50 feet.

Corsan's learn-to-swim campaigns resulted in in the first campaign to teach every boy in the United States and Canada how to swim. Perhaps Corsan's land drills for swimming came about as a result of how swimming had been taught. Early YMCA staff viewed swimming as a distraction from the real job of physical development, which meant exercise and gymnastics. Boys in San Francisco, for example, could not use the pool until after they had passed a proficiency test in gymnastics.

In the s, swimming was taught by using a rope and pulley system. The second development was the use of filtration systems for keeping the water clean. Ray L. Rayburn, a founder of what was the Building Bureau now BFS , came up with the ideas of building pools with roll-out rims and water recirculation systems.

Recirculation meant that the water could be filtered and impurities removed. The first roll-out rim was installed in in the Kansas City, Mo. In , a filtration system was added to the Kansas City pool. No more would pools be considered health menaces. The combination of these developments, Corsan's mass teaching techniques and Rayburn's filtration systems, came together to popularize swimming and swim instruction at YMCAs. In there were more than 1 million swimmers a year at YMCAs.

In , the national learn-to-swim campaigns became Learn to Swim Month. In , it was reported that YMCAs collectively were the largest operator of swimming pools in the world.

It is hard to overestimate the effect the YMCA movement has had on swimming and aquatics in general. A Springfield College student, George Goss, wrote the first American book on lifesaving in as a thesis.

The first mobile swimming pool was invented at the Eastern Union NJ Y in , enabling the Y to take instruction and swimming programs to people who could not go to the Y. A group of 20 national agencies, the Council was organized to expand cooperation in the field of aquatics.

Even the military used YMCA swim instruction techniques. In World War I, the Army used mass land drills to teach doughboys. In , Dr. Thomas K. He also developed the exercise classes that led to today's fitness workouts. Group child care was not started at a YMCA, but Ys moved swiftly to meet the needs of a changed and changing society. Today's YMCA movement is the largest not-for-profit provider of child care, and is larger than any for-profit chain in the country.

No one could have predicted that in the beginning. The origins of group child care are obscure and we will probably never know who had the first group care program. A strong possibility, however, is that group care grew out of gang prevention and teen intervention programs in the s. The Chicago YMCA had a strong youth outreach program in the s Ys had been working with youth gangs in one way or another since the s.

Workers noticed, however, that youths attending the program often brought their younger siblings along because they were providing care while their parents worked. Child care was organized so that the older kids could attend these programs without concern or distraction.

Root had returned from a trip to the Soviet Union, where he had observed firsthand the extensive child care programs offered by the government and how the availability of child care benefited both children and their families. The idea quickly spread to other cities. In the s, about half a million children received care at a YMCA each year. In , child care became the movement's second largest source of revenue, after membership dues. These solutions then spread throughout our society because they met the needs of others.

Often YMCAs set themselves up as models long before others even knew there was a problem. Many of the practices of colleges and universities in America, in fact, several colleges and universities themselves, can be traced back to YMCA involvement in higher education. Ys in the 19th and early 20th centuries placed much more emphasis on formal and informal classes and teaching than they do now.

This stemmed in part from the fact that free public education was not so widespread as it is today. That meant that there were large numbers of working teens who needed classes and instruction if they were to avoid the traps and pitfalls that George Williams so keenly observed in London decades earlier. YMCA classes and instruction also stemmed from the need for properly trained staff to run local Ys and carry on its programs.

Previously, academic training for YMCA employees was mostly summer institutes and training sessions, the first being held in at Lake Geneva, Wis.

These were insufficient, though, and at least since there had been calls for Ys in large metropolitan areas to set up training schools. The idea that large metropolitan associations should have classrooms for teen education and staff training was put into practice in San Francisco and Boston in the s and s. The school added additional subject areas and became Northeastern College in Today, the Y still harkens back to its roots in creating safe, enriching spaces for communities across the globe.

The formative years of the YMCA were ones of inspired growth. We saw the organization's mission spread to cities across the U.

Once again, the Y played an instrumental role in times of crises during the s, providing essential services and support when and where it was needed most. We also adapted to the evolving landscape of health and well-being with new programs and partnerships designed to support generational changes in young people and the definition of modern-day families. Of the total number of Ys in America, 1, are branches of the units that are formal members of the national organization.

The services and programs of YMCAs in America have an impressive range, appealing to all age groups, as is suggested by the current slogan of the Ys: 'We build strong kids, strong families, strong communities. Its prime mover was George Williams, a draper a cloth and dry goods salesman who had migrated to London from a rural section of the country to seek work.

At the time, the Industrial Revolution was still condemning many urban dwellers to abysmal working and slum-like living conditions, to lives, in short, of unrelieved gloom and despair.

Like all the working-class sections of the rapidly over-crowding industrialized cities of England in that era, much of London was a virtual cesspool, with streets overrun with pickpockets, thieves, murderous thugs, prostitutes, beggars, drunks, and destitute and abandoned children, the conditions that Charles Dickens exposed in such novels as Oliver Twist and Hard Times Williams and some fellow drapers sought to help alleviate the gloom of the city working class by providing Christian fellowship, prayer, and bible study as an alternative to the squalor of the streets.

Their efforts were very successful, and the movement quickly spread. By , there were 24 Ys in Great Britain, with a total membership of 27,, and by late in that same year the movement had spread to North America, first to Canada, and then to the United States, where, in Boston, the first YMCA was founded on December 29 th , under the tutelage of a lay missionary and retired sea captain named Thomas Sullivan.

In the first international convention was held in Paris. By that time there were almost Ys in seven countries, having a combined membership of 30, Because it cut across class, sex, race, and denominational barriers that usually segregated various social and ethnic groups during the Victorian Age, the movement was almost unique.

So was its social aim of ameliorating the plight of the destitute. Nevertheless, the Y's in the Union states played an important role as the U. Christian Commission, which was formed to assist both soldiers and prisoners of war. A necessary rebuilding took place after the war. The number of Ys at war's end had been reduced to 59, but four years later had grown by an additional In the aftermath of the war, the prestigious New York YMCA had proclaimed a fourfold mission: 'The improvement of the spiritual, mental, social, and physical condition of young men.

It was not until the s that the YMCAs began erecting buildings that needed full-time staff members, replacing the volunteers that had formerly run the Ys. By that time, large auditoriums, swimming pools, gymnasiums, and bowling alleys were included in the large urban Ys, as were dormitories or residences that allowed members to lodge in the Ys for one or more nights.

It was in the gyms of the YMCA that both basketball and volleyball began their evolution into important indoor sports. The residences remained until the late s, providing income for the various, proliferating YMCA activities, including boys' work programs, summer camps, special classes featuring such activities as exercise drills using dumbbells, medicine balls, and Indian clubs, and social activities for young adults. In George Williams was knighted by England's Queen Victoria for his great contributions to the welfare of his fellow citizens.

Before his death in , he had seen his YMCA grow into the premier, worldwide organization of its kind. A bit earlier, in , Dwight L. An influential lay evangelist and national leader, Moody oversaw the growth of both national and international voluntary and missionary work and was the dominant force in the organization.

By the end of the century, the fourfold purpose advanced by the New York Y had been revamped into a triangle: spirit, mind, and body. As Moody had, Mott served long periods as a staff member, paid for his professional services.