Water Cooler

YWCA Votes To Allow Male Leaders

(AP) The YWCA voted overwhelmingly Saturday to allow men to help direct its operations for the first time in its 148-year history, eliminating a policy that allowed only women to serve as leaders of its nearly 300 local affiliates.

Passed by 70 percent of its voting members, the decision marks a big change for the organization but comes as a compromise just five years after an unofficial vote to keep men out of leadership roles.

The new measure, passed at the organization's annual meeting, allows each chapter to decide whether to accept men through a proposal to the national board, which will develop a new policy later this year.

Men had previously been allowed as volunteers or staff or associate members but could not serve as voting members or directors.

Lifting the ban on male leadership for local affiliates also could lead to the nomination of men for national posts, said YWCA chief executive Peggy Sanchez-Mills.

The YWCA's women-focused programs — including shelters for domestic violence, child care centers and job training — would not change, Sanchez-Mills said. Its core mission remains eliminating racism and empowering women.

"It still is a female-driven organization and will remain that way," Sanchez-Mills said. "What it does do is welcome men onto those governance structures to support the women's agenda."

Allowing male members is one of the organization's biggest changes in the past 50 years, Sanchez-Mills said, "but we have a long history of change, and we're old."

Founded in 1858 as the Young Women's Christian Association, the YWCA's women-only membership policy was implemented to prove women were capable administrators.

The organization, which has assets of nearly $1 billion, is funded by government grants, public donations, membership and program service fees, according to its Web site.

Throughout the world, the YWCA works in 122 countries, serving 25 million women and their families, according to the group's Web site.

The U.S. chapters employee about 14,000 people and have 2.6 million members. They serve more than 5 million women and children through its domestic violence programs and shelters, and provide child care for nearly 350,000 children.

The YMCA, which has no formal ties to the women's organization, has included women in its leadership since the 1930s.

The YWCA's national convention voted in 2001 to reaffirm the women-only policy, though Sanchez-Mills said that vote was not official.

About 20 local affiliates already have started the process of including men on their governing boards, Sanchez-Mills said. Some changed their own bylaws in defiance of the national organization's policy.

In response, the YWCA's National Coordinating Board formed a task force in 2003 to study the issue, and its recommendation led to Saturday's vote at the organization's annual meeting.

Some leaders pushing the change found the exclusion of men discriminatory, and others wanted to comply with the nondiscrimination policies of local United Way chapters or other charitable funds. Those issues helped persuade affiliates to support the change, Sanchez-Mills said. But she said no affiliates had been denied funding because of the women-only policy.

"We are very committed to being as inclusive of an organization that we can possibly be," said Jean Carroll, executive director of the YWCA in Rochester, N.Y. "There's been so much back-and-forth dialogue on this that it's absorbed a lot of energy, which we really need to be devoting to women in the United States.

"I think it was a vote for unity as an organization."

Carroll said her chapter was already preparing to begin changing its bylaws to recruit the first men to its board.

Opponents of the change voiced concern that including men might pressure international affiliates to follow in areas where the YWCA provides safety in a rare women-only environment.

Sanchez-Mills said the bylaw change would not affect the independence of local affiliates. "That autonomy," she said, "is absolutely essential to our passion and our belief in our mission."

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