Everybody Should Go Camping

Of all my work assignments, nothing gives me more joy than a visit to a YMCA Camp.  Maybe it's all the good memories I have of camp when I was a kid, but a camp visit leaves me smiling for days.
This week I was lucky enough to attend the board meeting at the YMCA of Greater Charlotte's Camp Harrison.

The venue was breathtaking, the food was fine, and the finances are impressive.  But when you have the opportunity to see the kids -- the ones we pay (staff) and the ones that pay us (campers) it almost brings a tear to the eye.  Of all the good, life-changing work the Y is a part of, nothing is easier to understand than our camp work.

I'm not saying it's more important than the rest of our work, but it's easy and fun.  I mean, who else gets to table dance at lunch?  At least in a context you can talk about at church on Sunday? 

A Roller Coaster Kind of Week

Some weeks fly by, others not so much.  This week I visited YMCA's in Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina and Kentucky.  I participated in a camp board meeting at Camp Harrison and started a new hospital partnership project for the Louisville YMCA.  All my work meetings were great, but the Louisville meeting was the best.  Not only a great group of volunteers, but they also had homemade strawberry cake, coffee and cookies for the occasion.  Reminded me of my first "real" job at Nashville Memorial Hospital when our cooks would bake special treats for our special meetings. 

In Charlotte I was a part of a planning meeting to work on how to take our membership development efforts to the next level.  Exciting stuff -- and part of the meeting took place while floating in a colleagues pool.  

This week has me thinking a lot about what we can really do to make strides in the member engagement arena.  I mean, how do we really move forward?  We are all talking, reading, working to better engage our members, but are we making any progress?  I visited a Y where I watched one front desk person try deal with 20 current or potential members while five management staff were holed up in a back room meeting.  Huh?  Leadership moment.

But even better than the strawberry cake was having my 15-year-old-permit-holding son Andrew chauffeur me around.  I could get used to that!  We managed to spend a few hours at Carowinds and braved The Intimidator ride.  Scary, fun stuff.  I screamed, closed my eyes, grabbed onto a friend for support. No different than most days at work, except I was buckled in.