Hungary...

I'm currently sat playing poker with a 15 and 17 year old in south Hungary, both of whom are heavily involved in leading their local - small - YMCA. I met one of them - Peter - at the youth Unify in Poland last year, and we've kept in touch via Facebook ever since.

This is my 4th trip abroad with the YMCA, having been to Sweden, Poland and Germany; what's struck me every time I've been is the predominately voluntary nature of their local YMCAs in comparison to ours back in the UK. Now, I realise we live in different contexts and cultures and that they aren't purely fully voluntary based, and there's pros and cons to it,but I do wonder what I / we need to learn from this.

What drives our ymca - the funding, politics, the young people we work with, the young people we don't work with yet, our staff / volunteers, our history, our calling? A mixture of all of the above? If so, in what measures and are we happy about that?

Lots of questions for me to ponder about over the next few days and beyond whilst I'm here. And lots of digging around to try and find out what works well and what doesn't work well here for me to learn about for my own context back home.

God bless

Jon Buckley