CHANGE AGENTS TRAINING BUILDING A GLOBAL STRATEGY

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E-LEARNING

03

You now know… that the YMCA is a big organisation and the role of the World YMCA is to coordinate the movement at a global level. To better understand what we are doing, it’s important to go deeper into 3 elements about Global Governance:

a) Our common challenges; b) Common and shared messaging; c) Common Strategy approved by the World Council

OUR COMMON CHALLENGE

In 2010, during the 17th World Council of YMCAs, the movement came together and discussed our main common challenges and concluded:

The YMCA do not have shared messaging, therefore we cannot achieve greater visibility and impact as a global movement. We are not telling our story.

THE PATHWAY TOWARDS VISIBILITY

The image below represents the pathway towards more visibility in the YMCA World Movement and where we are right now!  

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Good News! We are doing well with our mission. YMCA is a Christian Ecumenical movement and this is understood by all YMCAs. Our mission statment is the Paris Basis, further developed in the Kampala Principles and Challenge 21! We never have to start over with a new mission! Good News! The things we do well in the YMCA already exist. We have core competencies worldwide in the areas of health, employment, civic engagement and we have added the development of competencies on environmental issues as one of our new goals. Good News! We have thousands of programmes serving millions of people and they are good! Very good! Because they have real results and outcomes and are improving the lives of young people.

Mission

Core Competencies

Programmes

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Not so good news! As a world family we are not telling our collective story together or in a coordinated way. That’s why it is hard for the general public to understand what the YMCA is about! Not so good news again! Because we don’t tell our collective story together, we are not seen as a global player. Therefore, we have neither the public recognition of our work, nor are we touching all of the resources and developing the partnerships we need to in order to extend the reach of our mission!

Visibility

Shared Messaging {

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AS A RESPONSE TO OUR COMMON CHALLENGES, THE

WORLD YMCA IMPLEMENTED A STRATEGIC PLAN NAMED “NEW WAY (2011-2014)”

TO BRING THE MOVEMENT TOGETHER AND WORK ON THE CHALLENGES AGREED BY THE

2010 WORLD COUNCIL.

To start, we created a metaphor to help us understand some of our biggest challenges!

Awaken  the  sleeping  giant!    

The ‘Sleeping Giant’ is a metaphor that explains us as a ‘collective’, and not as individual YMCAs. It is about the hidden potential of our global impact given that YMCAs nationally and locally are already doing very good work. We understand this metaphor as a way to explain something that we had in the past as a global family but is weaker today: our ‘global coordination’. The return of global coordination at a greater scale is what will help the YMCA movement pursue its full potential and by doing this, the ‘giant’ will awaken and speak louder than ever before!

We also found our shared messaging!

In 2012 a group of YMCA stakeholders came together in Nairobi, Kenya to discuss the common message for the YMCA as a global movement, as well as the

existence of a “YMCA Change Model”.

The YMCA wants to achieve its full potential •  We therefore must be a stronger movement •  We therefore must attract greater resources •  We therefore must have more visibility •  We therefore must demonstrate greater impact •  We therefore must have a shared focus Relevant to the world, grounded in our mission, worthy of our aspiration, connected to our current work.

We therefore choose to collectively stand for youth empowerment.

THE NAIROBI STATEMENT

We started building and strengthening global initiatives to express our collective commitment to Youth

Empowerment, and to unleash our collective potential as a

global movement.

CHANGE AGENTS YMCA WORLD CHALLENGE ONE MILLION VOICES RESEARCH PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT ADVOCACY MOVEMENT STRENGHENING RESOURCE MOBILISATION GOVERNANCE

And finally in July 2014, after a broad consultation process, the World Council approved for the first time

a global strategy named “OUR WAY (2014-2018)”, which reinforces our collective focus on youth

empowerment and the basis for strengthening the YMCA movement in the next years.

www.ymca.int