Shortly before the pandemic, an advisory council member at a YMCA center in Washington state noticed the divisiveness in his community and throughout the entire country. He urged the Y’s leaders to find a way to address this divide.
In 2020, Janele Nelson, association mission director for the YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap County (PKC Y), reached out to Essential Partners (EP) to see if it could help. EP’s Reflective Structured Dialogue © (RSD) is a highly flexible approach to communication and culture change, especially when navigating differences of perspectives and identities.
It was just what the PKC Y needed.
The next year, EP led a two-day, online training on RSD for 18 PKC Y staff members and community volunteers, including the advisory council member who had initially noticed the problem. The PKC Y has since led issue-oriented community dialogues and has hosted internal dialogues to navigate difficult questions while also shifting the culture of the institution.
It wasn’t long before the collaboration between EP and the “Y movement” extended to the YMCA of the USA (Y-USA). Thanks to a 2024 grant from the AAA-ICDR Foundation, EP was able to begin working with 19 additional YMCAs over the following two years.
In each case, a cohort of stakeholders was trained in RSD design and implementation. The local Ys have subsequently received support and coaching as they adapt RSD to their unique needs and context. Nearly all the local Ys have identified an urgent need for healthier communication norms within their institutions, particularly for healthier conversations about operational and/or strategic questions that intersect with the shared values of the local Y community.
“RSD complements the way that we obviously want to support community and how we want to be looked at when there are issues that are coming into the community,” says Jenelle Balstra, Learning and Training Manager for the Alliance of Massachusetts YMCAs and Northeast Learning Center, who participated in an EP training in 2026.
“RSD seemed an obvious, helpful tool both for how our own organization talks within about hard things and also as controversial things happen in the community,” says Tim Hallman, association chaplain of The YMCA of Greater Fort Wayne (Fort Wayne Y).
This case study reflects the hopes and efforts of those YMCA partners, the qualitative and quantitative impact of EP's work with them, as well as a future vision for this collaboration.