The worldwide YMCA explores how YMCAs in and around Toronto serve diverse community needs
Date: 22 July 2026
21st YMCA World Council, Toronto, Canada – Monday 20 July 2026
Straight after the Welcome Ceremony on the first full day of World Council, delegates received reports on the period 2022-2026 from World YMCA President Soheila Hayek, World YMCA Secretary-General Carlos Sanvee and World YMCA Treasurer Cici Rojas.
The President’s Report
World YMCA President Soheila Hayek set the context of ‘very interesting times – a world of breathtaking contradictions’. ‘We have, by any measure of capability, never been more powerful as a species. And yet … what we once knew as wrong is increasingly accepted as simply the way of things.’ She spoke of fracture, tribalism and xenophobia, and ‘a species that has mastered the universe and lost its soul’.
‘This is the exact time when the YMCA is needed the most — to build the human bridges that unite us with each other and within ourselves: our body, mind, and spirit.’ To assume that mantle, we need ‘the trust we have been earning for 182 years. We show up when the world looks away’.
She spoke of the challenges facing the worldwide YMCA in 2022: ‘we faced a season when our growth had outpaced our own governance … but a true governance challenge is … a shared learning opportunity. So we rebuilt our connections stronger than ever; we rebuilt the engine room of this movement’.
She pointed to the achievements of balanced budgets, and the raising and redistribution of record funds, along with other achievements like strengthened policies, a courageous conversation on YMCA Christian identity in the 21st century, a shared Membership Framework as a covenant of shared values, guidelines, and aspirations, and a robust new risk register.
She spoke of her own travels as President, seeing the YMCA in action, often in the most precarious situations in such places as São Paulo, Bogotá, Medellín, New Delhi, London, Houston, Campo Camomilla, Singapore, Japan. ‘Wherever I went, I saw the same thing: a YMCA that does not wait for the world to get better before it serves. It walks into the world as it is – broken, frightened, hungry, lost – and it says: ‘How can we help you?’ …. This is God’s work, done on earth, by human hands – yours.’
She cited the source of this shared Movement-wide direction: ‘Today, Vision 2030 is a living, breathing reality which is active in 80 countries and close to adoption in many more. From where I sit, I have watched all four Pillars of Vision 2030 and all four support functions take flight’.
She laid down challenges: to pursue our relationships ‘with love and curiosity’; to untap the ‘enormous, unclaimed opportunity’ of leveraging YMCA’s close association with basketball and many other sports; and to nurture young people in the face of artificial intelligence which ‘is changing what life looks like’.
Reflecting on her Presidency, she said: ‘I have had a front-row seat to human generosity at its absolute finest, in the most desperate of places. Serving as your President has been the highest honour and greatest blessing of my life.’
Read the full text of the President’s oral report 2022-2026 (20 July 2026) here
The Secretary General’s Report
World YMCA Secretary-General Carlos Sanvee confessed that when the worldwide Movement launched on Vision 2030 in July 2022, it had ‘no real budget or a plan, but a ‘covenant’ based on hope and faith ‘that – somehow – it would be ‘well’.’
He sketched the global context ‘of the hope, or espoir and of the despair, the désespoir which held and holds the upper hand. He sketched the YMCA challenges: ‘the pressure of raising funds, the tension of fragmented structures, the relentless demands for better governance’.
‘People reached out to me, just as they reached out to each other, and they asked: are we still together? Are we still walking? Every time, the answer was YES’.
He framed and illustrated his remarks around three inter-related stories.
The ‘story of me’ cited his visit to YMCA Hiroshima, seeing Vision 2030 alive and well in a kindergarten in Hiroshima, and sensing again the ‘ubuntu’ that holds up the global Movement: ‘I am because you are because we are’.
The ‘story of us’, he said, was one of major transformation, but incomplete transformation. ‘It was a deep and radical transformation that was not directed from Geneva, but which grew organically, individually and collectively. Across every region, in every language, in every context, National Movements, Area Alliances and local YMCAs began building, connecting and innovating around Vision 2030.’
‘The headlines are simple and striking: the four Vision 2030 Pillars airborne; the four Movement Support Functions airborne; record operational funds raised and, very importantly, redistributed across the Movement.’
He extracted three trends standing out beneath those headlines.
First, the clear evidence of a truly shared YMCA direction, witnessed in the practical unfolding of YMCA Vision 2030, reflecting ‘how diverse we are, and the diversity of the contexts in which we work’.
Second, the new and shared knowledge, learning, products and systems to make Vision 2030 happen. ‘At the last count, more than 80 groups across the Movement are working together, sharing, planning, creating and implementing Vision 2030, from the four Pillars to the four Movement Support Functions that support them , and in many other areas too’.
And third, the clear evidence of actual impact in responding to local needs, seen above all in ‘the stories and statistics of that success’.
He also highlighted three areas of ‘good business, but unfinished business’. Movement strengthening remains uneven; the worldwide YMCA’s global ‘architecture’ needs to be modernised; and the Movement is still debating not its Christian identity but the ‘expression and extent’ of that identity.
The ‘story of now’ was illustrated by the YMCA Global staff team being invited to meet the military junta in Madagascar in December 2025. ‘It happened because the YMCA in Madagascar is recognised as a youth mobilisation movement – and because young YMCA members had themselves been part of the Gen Z protests that brought that government to power. They were not bystanders to the rupture: they were inside it. … This is a story about trust. And trust is hard to find in the world right now.’
‘Friends, more and more, trust is moving local. Because people trust their community. Because they trust the organisation that was present before the crisis and that will be present after it. They trust the network that accompanied them rather than administered them. Because, in short, they trust people like the YMCA. … So please just imagine what that trust can mean when it’s multiplied ‘at scale’ by 120 National YMCA Movements, reaching more than 60 million lives each year. We are unique in holding trust at the local level, while exercising it at the global level. The world needs ‘trust brokers ’, and the YMCA is a trust broker: that is what we are, and it’s what we are becoming’.
Read the full text of the Secretary General’s oral report 2022-2026 (20 July 2026) here
Read the four supplementary documents here
Consolidated World YMCA report 2022-2026 (July 2026)
Compendium of nearly 90 worldwide Vision 2030 projects (June 2026)
The Global Impact Report (July 2026)
Voices of Transformation (July 2026)
The Treasurer’s Report
World YMCA Treasurer Cici Rojas said that: ‘The period 2022-2026 was defined by three intersecting realities: the post-Covid recovery of the global YMCA Movement; the launch of Vision 2030 as the new strategic framework without an accompanying dedicated budget; and a sustained effort to reduce an inherited operating deficit while growing the organisation’s programme footprint. The good news for this Council is that 2025 closed with a positive operating result, and management’s forecast for 2026 targets a positive operating result.’
By 2025, she said, ‘the combination of sustained fundraising effort, growth in restricted programme income, and disciplined cost management produced the first positive operating result in the quadrennial period: a surplus of some CHF 100,000 before financial results: a material turnaround from operating deficits of CHF 1.4 million in 2023 and CHF 640,000 in 2024.’
She set out the challenges of Membership fees (Fair Share) remaining ‘stable but structurally stagnant … for close to twenty years, while – despite record growth in restricted donations – ‘these funds cannot address the operating deficit directly, but they sustain and expand the World Alliance’s programme delivery capacity, which is the core of its mandate.’
Reviewing some of the World YMCA’s assets – notably Geneva property and an endowment fund – and its dramatically increased transfers to support Area Alliances and National Movements, she set four financial priorities for the period 2026-2030: securing a sustainable and growing unrestricted revenue base to reduce exposure to market volatility and the risks associated with the investment portfolio; addressing the structural stagnation of Fair Share / membership fees; and maintaining the 2026 positive operating result and building toward modest operating surpluses’.
Meanwhile …. delegates also approved the positive Audit report for the year ending 31 December 2025 from Swiss accountants Forvis Mazars, as well as the Report on the 20th YMCA World Council in Aarhus in July 2022.