YMCA

• 1. Introduction

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  The YMCA, formerly the Young Men's Christian Association, began on the 6th of June 1844 when a London draper named George Williams met with eleven friends. Many people know its four letters from a 1978 song by Village People. Far fewer know the organization behind them. Today it is a federation of independent local groups scattered across the globe. How did a circle of shop workers in one city end up shaping sport, schooling and wartime relief? What kept so many separate groups bound to a single idea? And what became of the building where it all started?

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• 2. Young Men, Big Cities

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  Taverns and brothels were the usual options for young men who had moved to major cities for work. That worry weighed on Williams and his friends, who saw few healthy ways to spend an evening. Williams was typical of the young men drawn to cities by the Industrial Revolution. His idea grew out of prayer and Bible-reading meetings among colleagues at a business in the City of London. The stated purpose of the first gathering was "the improving of the spiritual condition of young men engaged in the drapery, embroidery, and other trades."

  By 1845 the young association had launched a popular lecture series. From 1848 the talks were held at Exeter Hall in London. Publication of the lectures began the following year, and the series ran until 1865.

  Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, became the first president in 1851 and served until his death in 1885. Philanthropists of the time saw the YMCA as a place for wholesome recreation. They hoped it would keep young people away from alcohol, gambling and prostitution, and encourage good citizenship. Street preaching and the handing out of religious tracts sat alongside a social ministry.

  The Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, London, carried the idea abroad. It was the first in a series of World's Fairs. Before the year was out, YMCAs had appeared in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States. In Geneva, the local association's secretary was a man named Henry Dunant, who would soon try to join these scattered societies into one body.

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• 3. The Paris Basis

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  Ninety-nine young delegates from nine countries gathered in Paris in August 1855, ahead of the Exposition Universelle. The meeting was the work of Henry Dunant, who dreamed of a truly global movement with an international headquarters. He convinced the YMCA in Paris to organize it. The delegates discussed joining in a federation to strengthen cooperation among the local societies. That discussion marked the beginning of the World Alliance of YMCAs.

  The conference also adopted the Paris Basis, a common mission for every present and future national YMCA. Its motto came from the Bible: "That they all may be one," from John 17:21. The preamble, dated the 22nd of August 1855, balanced unity against freedom. It urged societies to recognize their shared unity while "preserving a complete independence as to their particular organization and modes of action." Local autonomy was one of two themes that resonated in the hall. The other was uniting young male Christians for the extension of the Kingdom of God.

  The World Alliance adopted its circular emblem in 1881 at the Ninth World Conference in London. The emblem has five segments, one for each continent. Small monograms of YMCA in different languages hold the segments together. At the centre sits a larger monogram of the Greek letters Chi and Rho, from Christ's name, topped by an open Bible showing John 17:21. Leaders already believed in 1881 that the movement could be truly international.

  Dunant had co-founded the Geneva YMCA in 1852. In 1863 he founded the International Committee of the Red Cross, which inspired the Geneva Conventions. In 1901 he shared the first Nobel Peace Prize with Frédéric Passy, founder and president of the first French peace society. Later ecumenical bodies, including the World YWCA and the World Council of Churches, echoed the Paris Basis in their founding statements.

  In 1946 the Nobel Peace Prize went to John R. Mott, an American and president of the World YMCA. The citation praised his "long and fruitful labors" in drawing together many nations, races and communions in "a common bond of spirituality." He had also helped found the World Student Christian Federation in 1895.

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• 4. How It Is Governed

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  By its own count, the YMCA reaches more than 64 million beneficiaries in 120 countries. It has nearly 90,000 staff, some 920,000 volunteers and 12,000 branches. Each independent local YMCA is affiliated with a national organization called a National Council. A National General Secretary leads each council, in a role similar to that of a chief executive.

  The national bodies belong to both an Area Alliance and the World YMCA, the highest affiliation body. The areas are Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Mexico, the United States and Canada. Local associations usually pay membership fees at each step. They also draw support from programme fees, membership dues, community chests, foundation grants, charitable contributions, sustaining memberships and corporate sponsors.

  The head office moved from Geneva to Vernier in 2020. The organization had been based in Geneva since 1878. From 1995 to 2020 it sat at 12 Clos Belmont, a villa listed as a historic site by the Canton of Geneva.

  In Germany, Austria and Switzerland the YMCA is called CVJM, and until 1985 the name meant Christian Association of Young Men. Sweden's YMCA merged with its YWCA in 1966. In 2011 the Swedish group began using the name KFUM Sverige, where the M now stands for people instead of men.

  Norway's YMCA became the first national organization to adopt a strict policy of equal gender representation on committees and boards, in 1880. Charles Dunbar Sherman of Liberia was elected the first black president of the World YMCA in 1955. At 37, he was also the youngest ever. In 1976 Violet King Henry became the first woman named to a senior management position with the American national YMCA. At the 2018 World Council in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Carlos Sanvee of Togo became the first African secretary general. Patricia Pelton of Canada became the first female president at the same meeting.

  The 1973 World Council in Kampala, the first held in Africa, adopted the Kampala Principles of justice, creativity and honesty. It accepted that national YMCAs would have to take political stands in international crises. In 1985 the World Council passed a resolution against apartheid. Lee Soo-Min of Korea, the first Asian secretary general, led the campaigns that followed. The 1998 council in Germany adopted Challenge 21, which pointed the movement toward gender equality, sustainable development, war and peace, fair distribution, globalization, racism and HIV/AIDS.

  Every three to four years the World YMCA convenes its highest decision-making forum, once called a World Conference and now a World Council. Each National Council sends a delegation whose number of votes depends on its financial turnover. The 2022 council in Aarhus, Denmark, adopted YMCA Vision 2030, the movement's first collective strategy. It is closely aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. By June 2023-75 YMCA movements were implementing it. The 21st World Council had been scheduled for July 2026 in Toronto.

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• 5. Invented Indoors

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  Two weeks was all the time Luther Gulick gave James Naismith to invent a game. Gulick headed the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts. Naismith, a Canadian American clergyman, educator and physician, was studying at its International Training School. The task was to occupy a particularly incorrigible group of young men through the cold New England winter. Naismith decided the game had to be physically active, simple to grasp and light on physical roughness.

  The first contest, played in December 1891, used a soccer ball and two peach baskets nailed to the balcony. The baskets still had bottoms, so the ball had to be retrieved after every score. The school's custodian, "whose antipathy to the students was well known," did the retrieving with a ladder. Play was mostly passing, since dribbling became a major part of the game only after the ball took its present form.

  Gulick helped spread the sport. He chaired the Basketball Committee of the Amateur Athletic Union from 1895 to 1905. He also represented the United States Olympic Committee at the 1908 Olympic Games. Naismith and his wife attended the 1936 Summer Olympics, the first to include basketball. Gulick entered the Basketball Hall of Fame as a contributor in 1959.

  Four years after basketball, in 1895, William G. Morgan of the YMCA in Holyoke, Massachusetts, wanted a game for older members with less physical contact. He borrowed a tennis net and raised it 6 feet 6 inches above the floor. He called his invention "mintonette". Alfred T Halsted suggested that "volleyball" would be a better name. In 1912 J. Howard Crocker introduced the game to schools and YMCA locations in China.

  In 1930 Juan Carlos Ceriani, a teacher in Montevideo, Uruguay, created an indoor version of football for YMCA recreation. It became known as futsal. It was first designed for basketball courts, and a rule book followed in September 1933. Football was already hugely popular in Uruguay, which had won the 1930 World Cup and gold medals at the 1924 and 1928 Summer Olympics. The YMCA spread the game across South America. A Brazilian named João Lotufo brought it home and adapted it for physical education.

  In 1950 Joseph Sobek, a tennis, handball and squash player who worked in a rubber manufacturing factory, grew dissatisfied with indoor sports in Greenwich, Connecticut. He designed a short, stringed racquet and borrowed a children's toy rubber ball. On handball courts he tried a new game he called "paddle rackets". Racquetball took off in the 1970s, and an estimated 15 million people play it worldwide today.

  The Fourth World Conference, held in Germany in 1865, had affirmed the importance of developing the whole individual in spirit, mind and body. Sport through physical work was a new idea for the time. It became part of what was called muscular Christianity. In 1891 Gulick gave the YMCA an emblem, an inverted red triangle. By his account it stood for "the whole man," with three aspects: mind, body and spirit. The triangle became a familiar symbol of the YMCA's work on the home front during both world wars.

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• 6. War Work

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  Within ten days of the declaration of World War I, the YMCA had set up 250 recreation centres in the United Kingdom, known as huts. It went on to build temporary huts across Europe to support soldiers and civilians alike, run by thousands of volunteers. Some staff, called field secretaries, went into war zones to support prisoners of war in Europe and Russia. Clementine Churchill, a supporter, was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1918. Oswald Chambers and Robert and Olave Baden-Powell were also among the notable volunteers. The YMCA Women's Auxiliary was formed within the first month, and Princess Helena Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein became chairman of its organizing committee.

  The YMCA raised and spent over $155 million on welfare efforts for American soldiers during that war. It deployed over 25,000 staff in military units and bases from Siberia to Egypt to France. It took over the military's morale and comfort operations worldwide. Irving Berlin wrote the revue Yip Yip Yaphank, which included a song titled "I Can Always Find a Little Sunshine in the YMCA." Frances Gulick, a YMCA worker stationed in France, received a United States Army citation for valour and courage on the field.

  In World War II the YMCA supported millions of prisoners of war. It also stood by Japanese Americans in internment camps, providing youth activities and helping young men leave the camps to attend Springfield College. It was one of seven organizations that helped found the USO.

  In Europe the YMCA helped refugees, particularly displaced Jews. Sometimes it took part in escape operations, though mostly its role was limited to handing out relief packages. Its War Prisoners Aid program sent sports equipment, musical instruments, art materials, radios, gramophones and eating utensils to prisoners of war. Donald A. Lowrie of the YMCA created and led the Committee of Nîmes, also called the Camps Committee. It gathered leaders from over twenty humanitarian organizations to coordinate advocacy for people in the internment camps. The work included helping children leave the camps for children's colonies, or eventually escape to freedom.

  In 1947 the World YMCA gained special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

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• 7. Beds, Camps, Classrooms

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  In 1940 YMCAs in the United States held about 100,000 rooms, more than any hotel chain. Until the late 1950s they were built with hotel-like residences, also called dormitories. The rooms were meant for young men arriving from rural America and from abroad. They became a well-known, inexpensive and safe place to stay in an unfamiliar city. By 2006 YMCAs with residences had become relatively rare in the United States, though many remain.

  Camp Baldhead, later known as Camp Dudley, opened in 1885 as the first residential camp in North America. George A. Sanford and Sumner F. Dudley, both YMCA workers, founded it. The camp moved to Lake Wawayanda in Sussex County, New Jersey, the following year. In 1891 it moved again, to the shore of Lake Champlain near Westport, New York. Canada's Big Cove YMCA Camp in Merigomish, Nova Scotia, followed in 1889.

  From 1907 the YMCA was organizing Boy Scout troops in the United Kingdom, before any central Scout organization existed. Some of the first recorded troops met in the Nottingham and Birkenhead YMCA buildings. When Robert Baden-Powell formed his own organization, a YMCA worker who had organized many troops became one of his first two travelling organizers. In the United States, YMCA organizers took over the Boy Scouts of America soon after William D. Boyce incorporated it, while it existed only on paper. Edgar M. Robinson, a Chicago-area YMCA organizer, became its first director.

  San Francisco's Golden Gate University traces its roots to a YMCA Night School founded on the 1st of November 1881. The YMCA pioneered the night school, giving people with full-time jobs a chance to study. Night courses at the Montreal YMCA grew into Sir George Williams College, one of the two schools that became Concordia University. Northeastern University began out of a YMCA in Boston. Franklin University began as the YMCA School of Commerce.

  Youngstown State University traces its roots to a law school the local YMCA established in 1908. The Nashville School of Law was the YMCA Night Law School until November 1986, having offered law classes since 1911. The Detroit College of Law held a 99-year lease on a YMCA site, and moved to East Lansing only when it expired. In Cleveland, the YMCA began offering day and evening courses in the 1880s. The program was reorganized in 1906 as the Association Institute and became Fenn College in 1929. In 1964 Fenn became Cleveland State University.

  In 1900 the YMCA founded YMCA Press in Russia. It moved to Paris after World War I to serve Russian émigrés, and published some of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's books while the Russian government imprisoned him. In 1923 Y. C. James Yen of YMCA China devised the "thousand character system" from pilot projects in education. Its popularity led to the founding of the Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement.

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• 8. Landmark Buildings

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  In 1924 Archibald Clinton Harte, General Secretary of the International YMCA, raised one million dollars toward a building in Jerusalem. Lord Plumer, the British High Commissioner for Palestine, laid the cornerstone in 1928. The plot in the West Nikephoria section of Jerusalem had been bought from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. The American architect Arthur Loomis Harmon of Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, who designed the Empire State Building, drew up the plans. The building held the city's first heated swimming pool and first gymnasium with a wooden floor. The first concert broadcasts of the Voice of Israel radio station came from its auditorium.

  General Lord Allenby dedicated the building in 1933. The dedication carried a hope for the place. "Here is a place whose atmosphere is peace, where political and religious jealousies can be forgotten and international unity be fostered and developed."

  In 1947 the building hosted the UNSCOP talks that led to the UN Partition Plan. At the end of April 1948 the International Red Cross took it over and sheltered around 80 refugees there. Two months later it was used by the United Nations Mediation Committee headed by Count Bernadotte, and then by the United States Consulate. It returned to the YMCA in April 1949.

  In 1952 the YMCA in Gaza City started with the support of the Egypt YMCA. It was a branch of the Egypt YMCA until 1967, when the Gaza Strip fell under Israel's control after the Six-Day War. Since then it has not been associated with any national organization. Most of its attendees are Muslim, and its staff includes both Muslims and Christians. Its elected board is entirely Christian, a balance meant to keep the group inclusive without losing its Christian identity. In 2021 it served 1,800 youth.

  In October, November and December of 2023 the Gaza YMCA served as a shelter for hundreds of people. On the 17th of December the building was bombarded and destroyed by Israel, with reports of wounded and killed civilians. The next day the World YMCA strongly condemned what it called a "horrific attack on civilians."

  In December 2024 the Central YMCA building at 112 Great Russell Street in London was sold. It is recognized as the first YMCA in the world since the founding in 1844, and it was the largest YMCA premises in London. Its facilities included a swimming pool, sauna, steam room, exercise studios and a cycling studio. The YMCA attributed the sale to high maintenance costs and demographic changes. A petition on Change.org gathered thousands of signatures, and an injunction application by a club member failed. The building closed on the 7th of February 2025.

  The YMCA said, "The Central YMCA has not shut down." It pointed out that club sites at Kings Cross and Moorgate would continue, along with its education services and programmes. The buyer was Criterion Capital, which already owned a Zedwell hotel in the basement. Conservation areas surround the building on all sides, but the building itself is excluded and may be demolished or redeveloped. Campaigners alleged that a commercial focus conflicted with the YMCA's mission of affordable and inclusive services. The Save the YMCA campaign called for a six-month pause to explore other solutions. Asif Azis said, "we did not acquire YMCA to close it down."

  A second group, the Save the ExCYMCA campaign, secured Asset of Community Value status for the building. In May 2025 it submitted a listing application to Historic England.

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