My journey with the YMCAs started during the early Nineties, when I was inducted as a board member of my local YMCA in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Then I realized that I was the only youth in the Board with all the elders along with me. I knew YMCA as a youth organization but in those days I hardly saw any youths in the YMCA. This intrigued me towards my passion to make the YMCA, a truly youth oriented organization by engaging more youths in the YMCA especially at the policy making level. From that time onwards I left no stone unturned to promote youth empowerment in the YMCA all through my journey from the local level through the national, regional and now at the global level.
As I aspire to serve the YMCA movement at the global level in the position of the President of the World Alliance of YMCAs, I will continue my endeavour for youth empowerment in the YMCA. My passion is to put the youth in the driving seat of the YMCAs.
Youth empowerment agenda is a faithful response to the call of our mission. It is an attempt to address the holistic development of young people. The conscious creation of opportunities for young people brings life to the movement. That is to participate in and contribute to the sustainable development of communities around the world. As a community-based organization with a special focus on young people, YMCA must embark on a deeper engagement in community and social organizing and development. This calls for creation of spaces where young people are given opportunities and power to learn, to re-learn and to tackle the complex and challenging situations faced by our communities – the untold story of injustices against young people.
When we talk about youth empowerment for sustainable development, we understand that we are an organizational with its vast global network with enormous human resource. The YMCA can play an important role to accomplishment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals to achieve a better living standards for the people of this planet in an sustainable way. YMCA being a socially relevant organization should put the SDGs in their own agenda to fulfil its mission. In fact, basically, there was not much difference between the Challenge 21 and Millennium Development Goals and now the Sustainable Development Goals. The only difference in the case of Challenge 21 is the Christian character of the YMCA.
According to the analysis by UN agencies, over a third of the 169 SDG targets highlight the role of young people. Therefore, we need to boldly explore a strategy to connect our Youth Empowerment Initiatives with SDGs process in close collaboration with the UN and its agencies. Global YMCA’s worldwide network comprised of over 110 national YMCAs that share a common focus and priority will surely serve as a unique strength and potential that can be highly recognized by the UN and position YMCA as a trustworthy co-working partner on SDGs and beyond. Furthermore, we also need to find out ways of how the on-going four pillars of youth empowerment, namely, health, environment, employment and civic engagement can be linked closely to the SDG goals and targets.
Another area of work I want to emphasize is that the foresaid advocacy work in connection with SDGs will create a favorable condition for resource mobilization, particularly external fund-raising. We definitely need to enhance the fund-raising capabilities of the World Alliance. In this regard, the world movement, while being faithful to our long-standing legacy and identity, should be able to design our programs so as to attract potential donors and partners to support our programs centered on Youth Empowerment. I believe there is high potential for our global movement to tap into resources from the corporate world through the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives of or a joint philanthropy venture with globally recognized multi-national corporations that are willing to support global common cause such as SDGs. .
The universal mission statement of the YMCA formulated during its initial stage still guides the core values of the YMCAs even after 170 after its formulation. The basic elements of the Paris Basis is the empowerment of youth, the discipleship of Christ and working for the extension of his Kingdom.
We quite often forget in the YMCA, that we have a prophetic role to work for the extension of the Kingdom of God. Generally ‘Extension of Kingdom’ is related to evangelization, but in the YMCAs it has a more deeper meaning, to work for just peace, to bring peace, prosperity and happiness for the people of the world, especially in a pluralistic world we live in. In order to accomplish the mission of the YMCA, today we have to work acknowledging the diversity of various religion, cultures, traditions and races, in an inclusive society. This calls the YMCAs to come out from the comfort zone and work proactively for the genuine and sustainable development of the people, especially who are in marginal communities.
But we too, have to retain our Christian principles in all spheres of our activities. In order to nurture this, we need to spent more time in search of our contemporary YMCA mission to respond to the needs of the time in our communities based on Christian principles.
Another issue is the issue of gender equity, though this does not apply equally in all countries where YMCA exists, still in some cultures the issue is more important to make the YMCA a more people oriented than ‘Man’ oriented. National movements need to work more attentively in their local YMCAs to ensure equitable participation of women in their respective YMCAs at all levels and their communities at large.
In my journey in the YMCA I had felt the need of upholding good governance in the YMCAs. This might be true in some cases of national and local YMCAs. We need to work on a mechanism to strengthen the YMCA boards so that they maintain high standards of governance and more effectively function for the betterment of the communities.
We need sustainable YMCAs with strong institutional base to be capacitated to serve more people than before and also need an effective policy in place to extend new YMCAs in places there are no YMCAs, be it a country with potentiality of having more YMCAs or be it a country where YMCA does not exists so far. At the same time we also need to strengthen our negotiation capacities where there are prohibitions for establishing YMCAs like communist countries or countries with religious regulations. (Vatican has recently succeeded to establish churches in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through negotiations).
These are some of my focus areas where I think the global YMCA should work with more impetus.
Finally I reiterate my passion for Youth Empowerment in the YMCA. I had the opportunity to serve in the YMCA in the past three decades playing pivotal role to induce youths into the YMCA governance structure with gender balance and making YMCAs youth-centred. I strongly believe that these youths being mission-oriented, will transform the YMCA and the world now and in the future in the days to come.