Reclaiming Our Letter of the Alphabet
As you’ve probably heard, MacKenzie Scott made one of the largest philanthropic donations in American history last week – $4.16 billion to 348 organizations, including the YMCA of the USA and 43 YMCA Associations around the country. So… what’s next?
It’s no secret that nonprofits have been devastated by this pandemic. Much of this generous gift will provide relief that many organizations, including our largest Ys, couldn’t access in the CARES Act, and fill a widening revenue gap from months of public health precautions.
But long before this pandemic, the sector that set out to empower voices that go unheard or suppressed in our communities has operated more and more like the institutional forces it claimed to counteract. Among the most glaring examples was our work with youth.
The Y in YMCA stands for Young. With each generation since our founding in 1844, the Y has widened our community beyond the M (Men’s) and C (Christian) of our A (Association), but through it all, our first and most recognizable letter has remained the core of our mission.
The earliest years of the Y were defined by youth, from our 22-year old founder to young leaders across Europe, North America, and the world. In a modern setting, our youthful founders wouldn’t look much different from disruptive entrepreneurs revolutionizing how we interact.
As any organization ages and expands, so do management and leadership. Qualifications and experience gradually take priority as assets, liabilities, and membership all grow in concert. Our movement became intergenerational, and with it came remarkable advancements.
With each year, the distance between youth and the rapidly professionalized leadership of the Y grew further. Every time the gap widened, their influence waned, limiting access to decision-making and their capacity to wield the Y’s substantial clout on community issues.
To compensate for this shift, the relationship between the Y and youth pivoted to an emphasis on programs and services – settings where the “power” afforded to young people could be safely contained and controlled, creating a buffer between them and professional leadership.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this dynamic – one that has played out in almost all legacy youth-serving organizations. Providing youth with safe spaces for development is, after all, kind of the point. The problem is we’ve confused it with actual youth empowerment.
Part of the problem with being professional storytellers (a key youth development skill) is that we can convince ourselves of almost anything. We spend so much time persuading colleagues, boards, and funders that we’re empowering youth that we forget to stop and ask - are we?
Can an organization that has relegated youth power to the confines of structured programs and settings – isolating them from institutional leadership that is older, whiter and more male – continue to claim a letter of the alphabet as its namesake on behalf of “youth?”
If we’re going to live up to our ownership of the letter “Y,” we need a dramatic shift in the power of our organization back into the hands of young people – a game-changing investment that gives decision-making, influence, and real authority to youth.
Collectively, the YMCA of the USA and the 43 YMCA Associations across the country selected by MacKenzie Scott represent a total of contribution of around $480 million to the Y – an unprecedented investment that presents us with an unprecedented opportunity.
Given the precarious financial circumstances of most nonprofits as we emerge from the pandemic, the majority of these funds will go a long way to building a strong foundation for both short and long-term recovery. But we can’t simply go back to “business as usual.”
It’s time to recommit ourselves to the “Y” in YMCA, and that starts by using this historic donation to invest in young people in a radical, fearless, and uncompromising manner that leaves no question as to whether our organization stands for youth empowerment.
1. 10% of this gift – around $50 mil. of the $480 mil. received by the Y nationwide – should be invested to establish a YMCA Youth Changemaker Fund. Each year, this fund would provide $5 million directly to youth in support of their efforts to create stronger communities.
While our numerous youth programs do provide life-changing opportunities and experiences for young people, there is no escaping the fact that our fees remove financial resources from youth and their families, and scholarships only act as a means to prevent that removal.
Despite the name, nonprofits are still businesses, and I’m not arguing that our programs should be devalued by removing all fees. But for all of the time and talent we invest in our youth, we must ensure that we invest treasure as well – now, more than ever.
This $5 million annual investment would not just provide funds to cover change-making project expenses, but also funds for youth changemakers themselves – members of two generations that, despite being the best educated in history, represent only 4.6% of all wealth.
2. Every YMCA that seeks to access the Youth Changemaker Fund should be required to have at least 2 full-voting youth members on their board of directors, each representing different dimensions of diversity. Not advisory or tokenized roles – full-fledged board members.
For an organization dedicated to youth, the lack of youth representation on local, state, and national YMCA boards is not only an insult to the young people we claim to serve, but a perpetuation of our years-long distancing between youth and actual power within our movement.
With board membership increasingly tied to fundraising, youth aren’t just locked-out while they are young. The widening prosperity gap all but ensures that most would never see the inside of a boardroom, regardless of age. Reversing this trend requires intentionality.
Collectively, these youth board members around the country would also work together to steward and allocate the $5 million from the Changemaker Fund each year, ensuring that youth wield a quantifiable amount of power in one of the nation’s largest youth-serving organizations.
3. Establish a YMCA Internship Fund to ensure that all 2,700 YMCAs pay their interns. If we only allocate an admittedly insufficient $1,000 per Y, that would be $2.7 million, or ~0.6% of $480 million – an amount that pales in comparison to the value of our interns nationwide.
Having seen firsthand the incredible advocacy of groups like Pay Our Interns, I know how far the Y has to go towards developing equitable access for internships. Over the last 3 years, I’ve worked with 10 interns – and they all deserved far more than I was able to give them.
Although nonprofits like the Y rely heavily on volunteers to carry out our mission, no youth intern should ever consider the hours they devote to our organization as “volunteering” their time without some form of compensation – or feel like they shouldn’t receive it.
Using volunteerism as a shield to avoid paying interns reinforces the very inequities and disparities we claim to combat. When internships are only viable for well-off connected youth, we undermine our commitment to operating an equitable, diverse, and inclusive movement.
4. Finally, hire and invest in more frontline youth workers with salaries that reflect their value to our organization, creating viable career pathways for under-represented youth and setting young employees up for long-term income growth that pushes back against disparities in wealth.
Like so many other sectors, nonprofits have seen executive compensation rise while frontline wages have remained stagnate. Our frontline youth workers are constantly asked to do more and more with less and less, and reminded “they’re in this for the mission, not the money.”
As this pandemic revealed, these employees – the vast majority women and persons of color – are first to be furloughed or let go when weighing “money or mission.” Burnout and turnover are only increasing, draining talent, representation, and passion essential to our mission.
Any effective youth empowerment strategy requires adult allies and co-creators who look like the communities we serve, get paid a salary that reflects their actual value to the organization, and serve as an example to young people of the type of employment they should aspire to attain.
Most organizations and movements – even those spanning multiple generations or centuries – won’t ever see the kind of investment we just received. Most nonprofit leaders won’t ever find themselves in a position to, as Seamus Heaney puts it, make “hope and history rhyme.”
In the years since our CEO Kevin Washington announced the Y’s commitment to develop new generations of changemakers, our nation and movement have endured historic and unprecedented challenges. This upheaval and reckoning will not be resolved by a single investment, no matter how large.
But if the Y is truly going to develop changemakers who “create communities we all want to live in,” we have to make that commitment more than just a promissory note to young people. We have to shift organizational power back into their hands, starting with historic funding.
I owe my voice and career to the Y. I know how transformational our organization can be when we remember why we own a letter of the alphabet. We may never fully realize that potential, but we’ll never have a greater opportunity to do so than we do now. I hope we seize it.
Agile learner
3 年Very well put Derek! There is a transformation taking place within the Y and in our communities. We need more leaders like you who can think out of the box.
Manager CRM Implementation @ YMCA of the USA | Builder of CX Operations and SOPs | B2B/B2C SaaS | Priority & Trend Spotter |
3 年This is really good. Empowerment + Equity are the keys to success!
American Express
3 年Really fantastic, Derek, and such a great way to start the year to remember the importance of this. Thank you!
Driving Membership Satisfaction and Family Units for YMCA's Through Custom-Built Play Spaces and Inflatables | 500 + Successful YMCA Projects
3 年Outstanding post. Simply outstanding.
Helping Nonprofits Thrive.
3 年Awesome read Derek!Thought provoking!