Do More, Be More, Try More

Dear Staff -

Your YMCA is almost 23 years old. We started in the basement of Robin Hendrick’s house with some legal pads and paper clips that I stole from the High Point YMCA when I left. We started in a basement with just a dream.

I know many of you are tired of hearing me say, “Do more” or “try this.” But that is how our YMCA has evolved. We have always challenged the status quo and tried to be innovators. It was about growing programs, starting new programs, leading our community and somewhere along the way it truly became about making our community better.

Doing more or doing bigger and greater work is part of our DNA. Mankind has always been about reaching and growing. We came out of the cave and we looked over the hill. We crossed an ocean that was supposed to be flat and we risked everything to explore the west. We took to the sky and we discovered the unimaginable. The history of man, as is the history of our YMCA, is hung on “what’s next.”

So when I talk about changing the work of our youth sports programs into a program that develops future leaders and helps create new adult leaders, don’t roll your eyes.

And when I talk about how we can change the declining trajectory of our families by building assets in our households, don’t feel anxiety.

Or even when we say wellness is not about the next big class or trendy program, it’s about changing the culture in our community to be one focused on healthier lifestyles, that’s not something new on the already busy to-do list.

Be it eradicating drownings in aquatics, creating the next great staff leader from our part time staff or even just creating joy in the lives of the physically and mentally handicapped that walk through our doors, our mission and our DNA says we need to do more. We need to find the challenge in front of us and take it “head on.”  

Several great employees prepared the way for you to be able to do what you do every day. And you should have a vision of preparing the way for that leader 23 years from now.

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. - Jacob Riis