|
A service of the West Shore YMCA and Northern York Co. School District
|
||||||||||||||
|
YMCA at Northern York 410 Fallowfield Road Camp Hill, PA 17011 (717) 502-1177
|
A Brief History of the YMCA Movement
Beginnings in London
The Young Men’s Christian Association was founded in London,
England,on June 6, 1844, in response to unhealthy social
conditions arising in the big cities at the end of the Industrial
Revolution (roughly 1750 to 1850). Growth of the railroads and
centralization of commerce and industry brought many rural young
men who needed jobs into cities like London. They worked 10 to 12
hours a day, six days a week. Far from home and family, these
young men often lived at the workplace. They slept crowded into
rooms over the company’s shop, a location thought to be safer
than London’s tenements and streets. Outside the shop things
were bad—open sewers, pickpockets, thugs, beggars, drunks,
lovers for hire and abandoned children running wild by the
thousands.
George Williams, born on a farm in 1821, came to London 20 years
later as a sales assistant in a draper’s shop, a forerunner of
today’s department store. He and a group of fellow drapers
organized the first YMCA to substitute Bible study and prayer for
life on the streets. By 1851 there were 24 YMCAs in Great Britain,
with a combined membership of 2,700. That same year the Y arrived
in North America, first in Montreal and then Boston.
The idea proved popular everywhere. In 1853, the first YMCA for
African Americans was founded in Washington, D.C., by Anthony
Bowen, a freed slave. The next year the first international
convention was held in Paris. At the time there were 397 separate
YMCAs in seven nations, with 30,369 members total.
The YMCA idea, which began among evangelicals, was unusual because
it crossed the rigid lines that separated all the different
churches and social classes in England in those days. This
openness was a trait that would lead eventually to including in
YMCAs all men, women and children, regardless of race, religion or
nationality. Also, its target of meeting social need in the
community was dear from the start. George Williams was knighted by
Queen Victoria in 1894 for his YMCA work and buried in 1905 under
the floor of St. Paul’s Cathedral among that nation’s heroes
and statesmen. A large stained glass window in Westminster Abbey,
complete with a red triangle, is dedicated to YMCAs, to Sir George
and to Y work during the first World War.
Civil War times In the United States during the Civil War, Y
membership shrunk to one-third its size as members marched off to
battle. Fifteen of the remaining Northern YMCAs formed the U.S.
Christian Commission to assist the troops and prisoners of war. It
was endorsed by President Abraham Lincoln, and its 4,859
volunteers included the American poet Walt Whitman. Among other
accomplishments, it gave more than 1 million Bibles to fighting
men. It was the beginning of a commitment to working with soldiers
and sailors that continues to this day through the Armed Services
YMCAs.
Only 59 YMCAs were left by war’s end, but a rapid rebuilding followed, and four years later there were 600 more. The focus was on saving souls, with saloon and street corner preaching, lists of Christian boarding houses, lectures, libraries and meeting halls, most of them in rented quarters. But seeds of future change were there. In 1866, the influential New York YMCA adopted a fourfold purpose: “The improvement of the spiritual, mental, social and physical condition of young men.” In those early days, YMCAs were run almost entirely by volunteers. There were a handful of paid staff members before the Civil War who kept the place clean, ran the library and served as corresponding secretaries. But it wasn’t until the 1880s, when YMCAs began putting up buildings in large numbers, that most associations thought they needed someone there full time. Gyms and swimming pools came in at that time, too, along with big auditoriums and bowling alleys. Hotel-like rooms with bathrooms down the hall, called dormitories or residences, were designed into every new YMCA building, and would continue to be until the late 1950s. Income from rented rooms was a great source of funds for YMCA activities of all kinds.
Residences would make a major financial contribution to the
movement for the next century. YMCAs took up boys work and
organized summer camps. They set up exercise drills in
classes—forerunners of today’s aerobics—using wooden
dumbbells, heavy medicine balls and so-called Indian clubs, which
resembled graceful, long-necked bowling pins. YMCAs organized
college students for social action, literally invented the games
of basketball and volleyball and served the special needs of
railroad men who had no place to stay when the train reached the
end of the line. By the 1890s, the fourfold purpose was
transformed into the triangle of spirit, mind and body. Moody and Mott
Through the influence of nationally known lay evangelists Dwight L.
Moody (1837-1899) and John Mott (1865-1955), who dominated the
movement in the last half of the 19th and first half of the 20th
centuries respectively, the American YMCAs sent workers by the
thousands overseas, both as missionary-like YMCA secretaries and
as war workers. The first foreign work secretaries, as they were
called, reflected the huge missionary outreach by Christian
churches near the turn of the century. But instead of churches,
they organized YMCAs that eventually were placed under local
control. Both Moody and Mott served for lengthy periods as paid
professional staff members of the YMCA movement. Both maintained
lifelong connections with it.
The United States entered World War I in April 1917. Mott, on his
own, involved the YMCA movement in running the military canteens,
called post exchanges today, in the United States and France. YMCAs
led fundraising campaigns that raised $235 million for those YMCA
operations and other wartime causes, and hired 25,926 Y
workers—5,145 of them women—to run the canteens. It also took on
war relief for both refugees and prisoners of war on both sides, and
worked to ease the path of African American soldiers returning to
the segregated South. Y secretaries from China supervised the
Chinese laborers brought to Europe to unload ships, dig trenches and
clear the battlefields after the war. Y.C. James Yen, a Yale
graduate working with YMCAs in France, developed a simple Chinese
alphabet of 100 characters that became a major weapon in wiping out
illiteracy in China. Funds left over from war work helped in the
1920s to spur a Y building boom, outreach to small towns and
counties, work with returning black troops, and blossoming of YMCA
trade schools and colleges.
Buddy, can you spare a dime? The Great Depression brought dramatic drops in Y income, some as high as 50 percent. A number of associations had taken up direct relief of the poor beginning in 1928, as employment mounted before the stock market crash of 1929. When direct relief was taken over by the federal government in 1933, it released YMCAs and other nonprofits from their welfare tasks. Forced to re-evaluate themselves by hard times and by pressure from militant student YMCAs, community YMCAs became aware of social problems as never before and accelerated their partnerships with other social welfare agencies. Programs and mission were reviewed as well. Some results were joint community projects, renewed emphasis on group work and more work through organized classes and lectures. YMCAs were forced to prove to their communities that both character-building agencies and welfare agencies were needed, especially in times of stress.
Between 1929 and 1933, Bible class enrollment fell by 60 percent
and residence use was down, but exercise and educational classes
were both up, along with vocational training and camping. A typical
Y program of the day was the Leisure Time League in Minneapolis. It
drew thousands to that YMCA in 1932 to “
unite unemployed young men who desire to maintain their physical and
mental vigor and wish to train themselves for greater usefulness and
service to themselves and the community,”
reported the association. The program offered a wide
range of free services such as medical assistance, physical
programs, school classes on a dozen subjects and recreation. As
conditions improved even slightly, they went back to work. A few
were left behind—in most cases, those considered unemployable. The
YMCA offered them vocational training. The idea spread widely and
YMCAs discovered they could survive handily if they served a large
number of people and had low building payments. In fact, the Chicago
Y was able to organize a new South Shore branch in the depths of the
Depression.
Wartime challenges During World War II, the National Council of
YMCAs (now the YMCA of the USA) joined with YMCAs around the world
to assist prisoners of war in 36 nations. It also helped form the
United Service Organization (USO), which ran drop-in centers for
service people and sent performers abroad to entertain the troops.
YMCAs worked with displaced persons and refugees as well, and sent
both workers and money abroad after the war to help rebuild damaged
YMCA buildings.
After more than two decades of study and trial YMCA youth
secretaries in 1944 agreed to put a national seal of approval on
what was already widespread in the movement to focus their energies
on four programs that involved work in small groups. They became
known as the “four fronts” or “four platforms” of Youth
Work: a father-son program called Y-Indian Guides, and three boy’s
clubs—Gra-Y for those in grade school, Junior Hi-Y and Hi-Y.
(There would eventually be all-female and coed models as well.)
Times of change
At the close of the war, YMCAs had changed. Sixty-two percent were admitting women, and other barriers began to fall one after the other, with families the new emphasis, and all races and religions included at all levels of the organization. The rapidly expanding suburbs drew the YMCAs with them, sometimes abandoning the old residences and downtown buildings that no longer were efficient or necessary.
In 1958, the U.S. and Canadian YMCAs launched Buildings for Brotherhood in which the two nations raised $55 million, which was matched by $6 million overseas. The result was 98 Y buildings renovated, improved or built new in 32 countries. In what could be called the Great Disillusion of 1965-1975, the nation was rocked by turmoil that included the Vietnam War, the forced resignation of a U.S. president, the outbreak of widespread drug abuse among the middle class, assassination of major political leaders, and a loss of confidence in institutions.
The YMCAs, in response,
were challenged by National General Secretary James Bunting to
change their ways. He said the choice was “either to keep learning
or to become 20th-century Pharisees clinging to forms and theories
that were once valid expressions of the best that was known, but
that today are outdated and irrelevant.” With national YMCA
support and federal aid, new outreach efforts were taken up by
community YMCAs in 150 cities. The Ys poured their own money and
talent into outreach as well. Outreach programs were not new to the
organization, but the size and scope involved were new. The
four-fronts youth programs withered for lack of attention, dying out
entirely in many major centers, but holding fast in YMCA camping and
in parts of the Midwest and much
of the South. When federal
aid dried up, money troubles began to reappear, as Ys struggled to
keep faith with those they were helping. An even more insidious
problem was in the mix. Long schooled in conciliation, Y people
found themselves being confronted aggressively both at home and
abroad. It was particularly hard to deal with and discouraging.
Beginning in 1970 the fraternal secretaries serving YMCAs overseas
were being called home. Some buildings in U.S. cities were shuttered
and residences dosed for lack of clientele and insufficient funds
for proper maintenance. Y leaders were urged to become more
businesslike in both their appearance and their operations, a topic
raised by Y boards since the 1920s. Trends
After 1975, the old physical programming featured by YMCAs for a
century began to perk up as interest in healthy lifestyles increased
nationwide. By 1980, pressure for up-to-date buildings and equipment
brought on a boom in construction that lasted through the decade.
Child care for working parents, an extension of what YMCAs had done
informally for years, came with a rush in 1983 and quickly joined
health and fitness, camping and residences as a major source of YMCA
income.
Character Development and Asset-Based Approach During the 1980s and
‘90s, the ideas of “values clarification” were slowly replaced
by ideas of “character.” The moral upbringing of children had
been considered the sole domain of the family, and enabling the
child to discover his or her own ethical system was the goal. But by
the mid to late ‘80s, this was seen as contributing to a morally
bankrupt society, in which there is no notion of virtue (or of
vice), just different points of view. The ideas of character
development and civic virtues became central, with Bennet’s The
Book of Virtues hitting the best-seller lists and organizations
such as Character Counts! being born. “Preach what you practice”
became as much a part of the ideal of youth development as
“practice what you preach,” and “it takes a village”
replaced “it’s the family’s job to develop morals.”
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.” YMCA of the USA collaborated with Search Institute on studying this issue in depth and coming up with practical results. 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 YMCAs 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.
|
YMCA Founder George Williams
Volleyball in 1911
John Mott receives Nobel Peace Prize in 1946
YMCA Camp in 1930s
First American YMCA building in Boston, 1850
YMCA Swim Team, 1930s
|
||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||
