Dear YMCA Friends,

Each year we take a moment to reflect on the progress of our YMCA over the past twelve months.  This written report and our celebration of volunteers at our Annual Meeting allows us to pause and recognize how far we have come together.

• Our Urban Swim program at Park South, Moorland, Lakewest and Oak Cliff showed record growth again.  Last year these YMCAs provided swim instruction and water safety to 3,300 children.  Summer programs were offered in each of the branches.  During the school year, with support from Dallas Independent School District, we transported kids from their elementary schools to the Park South YMCA.
  
• Our 2008 Partners Campaign for annual support reported $3.9M in pledges from nearly 14,000 people in our community.  Their personal gifts are indicative of their faith in the work we do for kids and families.  This pledge total was an 11% increase from the previous year - really an amazing show of support.
  
• Our Strong Kids Capital Campaign, under the leadership of Garrett Boone and Gail Madden, moved ever closer to our expanded goal of $31M. We ended the year at $26M or 84% of the goal.  During the year we were thrilled to announce the largest gift ever received by this YMCA.  T. Boone Pickens announced his support of the renovation of the Downtown YMCA with a $5M gift.   The newly-named T. Boone Pickens YMCA renovation should be complete in the fall of 2009.
  
• YMCA communities continue to benefit from the work of the Strong Kids Capital Campaign.  The Moorland YMCA conducted a community celebration in June as they completed their renovation with a generous gift from the Rees-Jones Foundation.  Camp Grady Spruce completed construction of five new duplex cabins in May with generous support from the Constantin Foundation.  And in September the Frisco community enthusiastically showed their support of the opening of the new Frisco Family YMCA as we sold nearly 900 memberships to increase the size and reach of the Frisco YMCA family.

But our real measure of success continues to be the immense accumulation of “moments of truth”...those times when a YMCA kid or adult feels the real impact of the YMCA mission through the action of other people.  Sometimes these moments are like lightening bolts that shift their life path.  Sometimes they are just little glimmers of light that show them the right way to behave or believe.  But they are all important and are life-changing.

And after 124 years of service in Dallas, just think of all those lives we have shaped and the futures we have changed.  We really do build strong kids, strong families and strong communities

Click here to view 2008 Annual Meeting photos

2008 Annual Report in PDF format