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
