The path our careers take in youth development programming often comes through interest and passion. Many of us were going in another direction when we stumbled upon this field that impacts so many communities nationally. I didn’t understand the scope of the field until I went to my first work conference in 2000 with Carol James, former School-age Director at the West Haven Community House. We had received funding from Fleet Bank and had to go to a meeting in Needham, MA. 

We had a tutoring center and I was developing a multi-site newspaper written by the kids for the kids, similar to one I had developed for high-school youth in Central Jersey about 7 years earlier. The earlier version called, “What’s Up? News, this version being called the West Haven Community House News. Kindergartners writing about sharks, lifting the words right off the pages of books from the library, getting literacy skills without knowing it. Kids doing rudimentary desktop publishing to design the pages. After a start at the site where I was the Site Leader in the spring of 2000, in the 2000-01 school year we had all five afterschool sites contributing. We held monthly meetings and planned family events at the Fleet Tutoring Center in the main building monthly using the Community House van to get everyone there. 

After an amazing summer camp experience where I received the “Bee-Keeper Award” for rescuing staff and kids from a swarm while hiking at Chatfield Hollow State Park, I had to get full-time work after my daughter was born in the summer of 2001. I hadn’t made a plan to sustain the tutoring center effort and eventually the funding ran out and the room eventually became part of an early childhood program.  After a 10 month experience as a director for an infant, toddler, and preschool program for employees of a health care facility, which taught me a lot about the licensing process, my wife found a listing at a YMCA and encouraged me to apply. 

As the Child Care Services Director, I oversaw three school-age sites, a kindergarten wrap-around program, and a preschool program (ages 3-5). The community already had strong coalitions and established relationships with school district and town leaders. At the time I was working on my Masters at Springfield College, the place basketball was invented and the former YMCA Training School almost 150 years ago. I decided to implement the YMCA School-Age Curriculum Framework as my thesis project, developing more robust afterschool programming and including community stakeholders in addressing the needs that afterschool could provide the time and space for in a different way of learning. 

I collected data, met with the Superintendent for coffee regularly to discuss progress and program planning, revised staffing to allow for multi-site content specialists to count into ratios at all sites, and kept the project net-zero to the budget. In going to national YMCA conferences, attending and training in regional program schools, and connecting with the mission and core values I was able to build the project around the Y’s 4 core areas (at the time): Caring, Honesty, Respect, and Responsibility. All of this was documented in a 3-inch binder that I put on the shelf in my office. When I left the Y to get district experience over the next two years, I checked in on what was going on with the program from people I knew. My work was abandoned and the programming reverted back to what it was before, no sense of partnership between the school and the program existed.