Thanks Ken for organising such a great Discovery India Visit

Got back safely tonight from the Discovery India Visit and wanted to post a thank you to Ken Montgomery for leading the group and making it such a great learning experience. Ken has been a brilliant leader throughout this whole experience and I wanted to put on record my appreciation of his hard work.

I first met Ken when he took over responsibility for managing the Club at Romford YMCA back sometime in the last Century!  He was a Youth Worker from Ireland with little experience of physical activity and he didn't fit the mould of Programme Directors at the time who were mainly fitness fanatics! Despite being a heavy smoker in those days he brought a breath of fresh air and soon took on the lead role in the group getting lots of collaborative initiatives off the ground.

Since then Ken has moved on to regional roles and is now YMCA England's Head of International Affairs.

As part of this role Ken is responsible for setting up two discovery visits each year, one to Europe and one to another continent.  India was always going to be an excellent destination as it is such a contrasting environment to the UK, plus there's lots of YMCA work going on. In fact over 1000 YMCAs!  The need in India is acute with high levels of poverty and millions of young people living in appalling conditions.  Despite this the links to the UK are not great especially since Y Care has stopped working in the country.   Plenty of scope therefore for developing new relationships and learning new ways of working.

The preparation for the visit was good with a number of meetings with each of the seven CEO's and senior managers who had volunteered to go.  Ken made sure everyone knew what to expect and from the first meeting he made it clear we would be roughing it and that there may well be times when we would be out of our comfort zone.

Having said that it wasn't until we were actually in India that I realised how much we relied on Ken's experience (10 visits to India!) and his leadership skills.

The first few days of our trip the programme was packed with lots of travelling and visits to YMCA projects and at each YMCA we were greeted with large groups of professional staff, lay members and young people. It was on these occasions that Ken really excelled making impromptu speeches and finding the right words and tone for each audience.  On one visit to a college he delivered an entertaining interactive lesson on the history of the YMCA to a group of about 60 students.

Ken has had some health issues in the past and he wasn't the quickest to get around however his energy levels were amazing.  He was always the last person to his bed and the first to rise in the morning.  Many of the group took advantage of the mini bus travel between appointments to catch up on their sleep but I don't think I saw Ken close his eyes once on the whole trip!

At each of the three main areas we visited we were hosted by different YMCAs and Ken quickly built a rapport with all the key people, in some cases diplomatically negotiating changes to the schedule to make sure the group benefitted fully from the programme.

Ken was keen to get everyone blogging about the trip so that learning could be captured and disseminated throughout the wider movement. There were some difficulties with the blogging software but Ken went out of his way to help individual members to access the site.

Seeing India is an assault on the senses and it was enough for most of the group to cope with the emotional, mental and physical strain of visiting projects and meeting children and young people in acute need. Ken had the added burden of dealing with the day to day organisation and looking after the finances etc. but he did this quietly and efficiently allowing the group to focus entirely on learning from their experiences.

One of the highlights for me was visiting the War Graves Cemetery in Madras where servicemen who died in the Second World War were buried.  Members of the group led by Kevin Wake were keen to do something to commemorate the 100 anniversary of the end of the Great War and it was Ken who helped facilitate this, organising a wreath and reciting 'For the Fallen' the famous poem by Laurence Binyon.

Ken's gentle banter, knowledgeable discussion and wicked sense of humour won everyone over within the first couple of days and by the end of the trip he had fostered a great team spirit within the group.

Thank you Ken for making this trip such a valuable experience for me. I am going away inspired and enthused, keen to build on what I have learnt to give young people from the UK an opportunity to visit India and to find ways to support the great work of the YMCA in India.