Discovery Visit Australia

Yesterday evening I arrived into Melbourne Australia for this year’s YMCA Discovery.

Within the Federation of YMCAs of England & Wales we have a Leadership Development Strategy which enables Staff and Trustees to improve and develop their leadership to become excellent leaders within YMCA.

Currently Discovery visits are focused on CEO’s and Strategic Leaders of local YMCAs in England & Wales. We are currently exploring this to Trustees but more on that another day.

As YMCA we seek to capitalise on being a Global organisation and create opportunities for staff to travel to YMCAs in difference geographical and cultural locations to ‘discover’ what YMCA is doing in those contexts to deliver what is in effect our basic global YMCA Mission and how we interpreted that mission and values into the local needs of their communities.

As you can imagine, an organisation which is 173 years old, working in 119 countries and reaching 58 million people, YMCA is a rich and vibrant tapestry when you consider it as a global ecumenical Christian youth organisation.

So this year, there are eight of us on this discovery visit which will last ten days. There are four CEO’s in the group and four strategic leaders.

We will spend time in Melbourne and Brisbane engaging in presentations, discussions and visits to services.

Each day one of the group will post a blog on the experience of the day to both help participants reflect on what they are hearing, seeing and learning and communicating that to other readers of the this blog.

From here I hope you will enjoy and find informative, what is written during the next ten days.