Carrie Wall, president and CEO of YMCA of Metropolitan Milwaukee
Carrie Wall plans to end her career where she began it: at the Milwaukee YMCA, where she first began working 32 years ago. “I wasn’t planning on staying there,” says Wall, who continued working there for two decades. “It was just a part-time job while my littlest one was in kindergarten, but that’s the great thing about the YMCA: It helps people.”
After positions with the Y in Chicago and Madison, Wall returned to Milwaukee to serve as the YMCA of Metropolitan Milwaukee’s president and CEO this summer. She takes the reins after a tumultuous period that saw the organization undergoing bankruptcy in 2014 and selling some of its suburban branches to surrounding YMCAs. The Milwaukee YMCA now has a smaller footprint, Wall says, but also a renewed focus. “This happened during all the great reinvestments that we’ve seen going on in the City of Milwaukee and Downtown Milwaukee,” she says. “Everybody’s trying to get engaged and trying to figure out how we’re going to make sure that Milwaukee is a thriving community, and the Y wants to be part of that.”
You mention that Milwaukee is experiencing a revitalization. What role does the YMCA hope to play in that?
I will tell you why we don’t have the vision really clear yet—we’re still going through a strategic planning process—but I do know the pieces that we’re going to focus on, and here are a couple of them: Number one is early childhood education. We have to be part of the solution for what happens to children 0 to 5, because we serve so many children 0 to 5, and I don’t mean just in licensed care. We serve kids who come to us for tumbling, learning to swim and small sports. We have families who come to the YMCA and put their kids in babysitting, so we are touching these kids and families every single day. We need to be part of the solution in addressing some health disparities and some of the educational gaps, and making sure kids are ready for kindergarten, so we’re going to dig into that. We already are doing it, but we need to do it in a more impactful way, and we need to do it in partnership with other organizations that are trying to do the same thing.
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Where we are now, we currently have our branches, but we also have a lot of other childcare centers where we do partnerships with schools and school districts, and we’re running school-age child care and early childcare education in other places, too, outside of our typical walls. So that’s a big piece of it. I know that will be part of our clear priorities and vision. Another one is diversity and inclusion. That needs to be part of the emphasis. We serve such a diverse market already, and we need to resemble that in our staff and in our board members. We need to make sure that we’re partnering with others to move the needle related to social injustice and inequity, because that’s going to be a huge focus for us, too.
Is social justice a tricky area for an organization like the Y to get involved with?
No, not at all. Actually, the YMCA has always been engaged with that. We’re not shying away from who we are and our Christian principles. But for us to have impact on the lives of people, we need to be a bridge. This isn’t about playing one side of the aisle or another. This is about doing what’s right for kids and families that need us in the community.
How has the organization’s mission changed over the decades?
The mission has never changed. Our mission is to put Christian principles into practice through programs that build healthy spirit, mind and body for all. That never changes. The vision based on the needs of the community might change, though. The Milwaukee YMCA was pretty big, but now we’re pretty much clear on what our footprint is, so that changes your priorities based on what the priorities of the City of Milwaukee are right now. Honestly, there are so many needs out there, and we can’t continue to do our work unless we’re removing barriers and filling gaps. It’s not that we haven’t done partnerships, but we’re doing them in a whole new way moving forward.
What can people expect from the Y in the next year or two?
We’re going to have a clear vision of where we are moving forward. We’re going to have that by the end of the first quarter of 2018. You know, next year we’re going to be 160 years old. There aren’t many institutions that old in Milwaukee. That means I and our entire team and the board have a big responsibility to make sure we have a clear vision, and that it fits with what’s going on in Milwaukee, and that we’re identifying partners to make sure we’re here for the next 160 years. So you’ll see vision, you’ll see clarity and we’ll look a little bit different than we have in the past. It’s not about the buildings; it’s about the people that we serve.
For information about the YMCA’s upcoming Martin Luther King Day breakfast, visit ymcamke.org.
