A Message from the CEO
Mar 22, 2020A heartfelt thank you to all West Suburban YMCA members who have agreed to sustain your memberships, thereby enabling us to continue to serve you our members and our entire community.
As a “sustaining” member, you have made a conscious choice to retain your membership; paying the fees, even though your Y is closed – for that, we are forever grateful! We appreciate you for helping us to feed and care for our most vulnerable – low income families, LIVESTRONG cancer survivor program participants, and our senior groups. Because you chose to do so, we will send you a donation letter for tax purposes to reflect your membership dues during the closure.
As a result of your continued support, we were able to accomplish the following in just one week:
- Organize a volunteer effort to call our most vulnerable members (low income families, LIVESTRONG cancer survivor program participants, and our senior groups) to assess their needs and ways in which to support them.
- Deepen relationships with our preschool and elementary age students remotely through virtual learning activities and story times - keeping our children connected from afar.
- Compensate all full and part-time staff through March 28th – providing us with an opportunity to develop a staffing plan for the days and weeks to come.
- Create a task force to identify ways to procure benefits and resources for all of our employees.
- Provide to our 26 Single Room Occupancy residents the resources they need to stay healthy via food deliveries and supply drives for their daily needs.
- Teach group exercise classes, youth sports’ classes, and even mock swim lessons via livestream and videos, responding to everyone’s desire to maintain their physical and emotional well-being.
If you have not yet placed your membership on hold, we ask you to consider retaining and paying for your membership, as we continue to provide essential services to the community as described above.
If you are a member who can no longer afford to retain your membership, we ask you to put your membership on hold by completing a Membership Freeze Request Form. We respectfully request that you not cancel your membership, but instead you freeze it. There is no financial difference between the two options, both will defer your payments to the Y; however, placing a “freeze” on your membership signals to us that you are still “with us” and that matters to us. We are working very hard to be an organization that steps up, and we need to know we are not alone. We need to know that our members are with us. Please stay with us.
We have been here in Newton serving the community for 143 years, and plan to be here for 143 more doing the same. Thanks, in advance, for your continued support of our efforts during this trying time and for being part of our Y’s mission.
Yours in Health,
Jack Fucci
President and CEO
West Suburban YMCA