In my job, I get to speak at a lot of fancy places. But the most important presentation I’ve given in recent memory was not a commencement address at a major university or a panel discussion at a White House conference. It was as the featured guest at the annual fundraising event last month for the B.R. Ryall YMCA in Glen Ellyn, Ill.
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As I took the stage in the nondescript banquet hall in the nondescript suburb where I grew up — and shot a smile to my mom and two of my high school teachers in the audience — I realized that virtually every formative event of my formative years took place a short bike ride from where I stood. Between the ages of eight and 16, when I was not at school or at home, I spent roughly 90 percent of my waking hours at that Y.
During those years, if there was a Y activity for young people, I was part of it. After-school care, summer camp, winter camp, swim lessons, basketball, Leaders Club, teen nights. And when I aged out of this or that program, I stuck around to help others.
I played capture the flag as a kid in summer camp and then set it up for other kids when I was a teenager. I became an expert swimmer at the Y and then helped kids who had never been in a pool learn how to do the front crawl.
In the process, I came to learn one of the core lessons of life: When you can’t do for yourself, others do for you. And when you can, you do for others.
I don’t think anybody ever actually said that to me directly. At the Y, you learned life lessons through actions, not words. The one crucial exception was a sign above the front desk that read, “No Youth Turned Away for Inability to Pay.”
I had grown up comfortably middle class, and a Y membership was just one of the regular privileges of daily life for my friends and me. But looking at that sign each afternoon helped instill in me a consciousness that what I took for granted many others lacked and that it was the job of institutions to help level that playing field.
An institution is essentially a group of people who gather to create patterns of activity that benefit themselves and others. If you have enough such groups, and they are sufficiently networked together, you have a civil society. And civil society, as much as voting, free speech, separation of powers, and equal rights, is what makes a democracy.
Most of it does not take place in fancy rooms. Most of it is not run by famous people.
Rather, it’s plumbers and police officers, accountants and insurance agents who volunteer to coach their kids’ Y basketball team in a modest facility after work.
And when they are asked to organize the annual basketball tournament, they figure they have a stake because their kids play, so they say “yes.”
And when they are asked to chair the annual benefit, they figure they owe it to the parents of the kids who play on the team with their kids, so they say “yes.”
And when they are asked to serve on the board and be part of the campaign to upgrade that modest facility, they haven’t said “no” in so long that the word barely exists in their vocabulary anymore. So they say what they always say, which is “yes.”
Creating Community
And then they realize that their kids have grown up and are out of the house and haven’t stepped foot in that Y in years. What they are doing is now mostly for other people’s kids. That makes the “yes” even more meaningful.
We call that community.
Truth be told, I didn’t always appreciate that notion of community. As my high school friend, writer and editor Amanda Fortini, notes in a beautiful essay about our hometown, it could feel confining to the nonconformists and the ambitious.
I styled myself as both of those things and for a time, while in college, believed that entry into the club of ambitious nonconformists required open defiance of the place where I was formed and the teachers and counselors who helped form me.
I affected Jeff Tweedy’s snarl when he shouted the last line of the Wilco song Misunderstood: “I want to thank you all for nothin’ at all.”
Thankfully that was a temporary stage, and my adolescent rage came and went.
Most of my life since then has actually been about nurturing the seeds that were planted in me by the Y. So when I was asked to speak at its annual event, my answer was an enthusiastic “yes.”
Here is the gist of what I said that night: Kids who were mean to each other at school were nice to each other at the Y. Somehow, the Y created a space where it was easier for people to be good to one another. In so many ways, my whole career has been about trying to replicate those spaces. One of the projects through which my organization is attempting to do that is called Team Up, which is committed to cultivating cooperation across differences. Fittingly, one of our key partners is the Y.
Running high-profile national initiatives such as Team Up has brought me into lots of fancy rooms with lots of famous and influential people. But no place matters more than the place where you first learn those values. And no people are more important than those who first teach them to you.
