It all started

in the Early 1880’s…

Mr. Robert J. Roberts, a young YMCA Physical Director in Boston, is credited with creating what is presently the Leaders Club Program. Mr. Roberts was known as an expert gymnast and a stimulating teacher who believed that all exercises should be short, safe, easy, beneficial and pleasing. Mr. Roberts’ exercise classes quickly grew to such extremes that he needed to recruit and train a number of helpers to assist him. An idea surfaced that would become a YMCA tradition.

Luther H. Gulick, the YMCA Director responsible for developing the triangle concept of Spirit, Mind and Body, and the emblem synonymous with it, took Robert’s concept further by developing and refining its basic structure. Gulick strongly believed that a Leaders Club should not be limited to the advantages which such a group provided the local YMCA.

He developed and popularized the educational and spiritual opportunities that the program could afford to the volunteer leader himself. He maintained the original YMCA goal of spiritual enrichment while mixing into the fabric of the program both educational and physical development. These objectives, as well as social adjustment, have remained paramount in Leaders Club programming to this very day. The training of our young volunteers to assist the YMCA director make programs more effective and of higher quality, while developing the leadership qualities of the volunteers themselves and making them more productive and valuable to the society they live in, are the basic concepts that inspired the birth of the Leaders Club Program.

The Leaders Club program is over 110 years old. During its first century, it has gone through many changes and many stages, but its basic ideals have survived to this day. Robert’s concept of better instruction for YMCA members through trained volunteers is still at the central core of the Leaders Club program. And Gulick’s vision that a Leaders Club Program could be just as beneficial to the club’s members as to the ‘Y’ Members it serves, is alive and very much at the center of the program today.