The YMCA and Public Good

For the purpose of this blog post I have chosen the YMCA of America. I’m not entirely sure if it was mentioned in class, but I believe it came up once or twice in conversation. The YMCA is a large US organization that has a presence in all major cities in the US, and in many small towns, too. The Y works to strengthen the community through education and programs designed to help people grow and thrive. The YMCA’s key social good initiative is to facilitate the development of America’s youth, promote healthy living, and social responsibility. Through camp, child care, mentoring and after school programs the YMCA has been achieving these three goals for 171 years.

The YMCA uses Big Data to address the social good by motoring its own community involvement and impact through Big Data. With an increase in pressure over the last several years for non-profit organizations to be completely transparent in their doings, Big Data based evidence can not only keep the skeptics at ease but also prove the company that their programs are effective. They are doing this now by logging grades of students enrolled in after school programs over many months and even years and comparing them to averages of students who don’t use the YMCA’s facilities. With 57 million beneficiaries worldwide, this makes this amount of data incredibly vast, and useful. Grades are not the only statistic that is being monitored as well. The company obtains the data by volunteer reporting. The data may be slightly skewed because of false reports. The data is coming directly from YMCA members and from program participants. The YMCA is not a startup. I’m sure everyone in this course is familiar with the organization. They have been around since 1844.

The YMCA is a non-profit and they are befitting by pursuing the public good because the employees still get paid to do so. The kind of employee that works at a non-profit likely receives a lot of intrinsic satisfaction from helping others and especially watching kids grow older and progress. This particular organization is originally Christian based too so I would imagine very spiritual individuals find the rewards of being in a Christian environment equally or more rewarding than knowing that their company is profiting.