YMCA aims to promote their youth mission within the New Zealand community and internationally.
Their goals for youth of New Zealand are:
Youth Engagement
Actively engaging or involving young people into healthy mind, body and soul activities, through active recreation, education and community engagement.
Youth Development
Building, growing or improving young people’s internal assets, skills and abilities.
Youth Empowerment
Young people impact their communities in positive and intentional ways. As a YMCA network we deliberately design our programmes/activities/facilities as required by each community we work in. Young people are encouraged to move through the stages of engagement, development and empowerment with their communities.
The Y is a Recognised Activity Provider of The Duke of Edinburgh’s Hillary Award.
They offer the Adventurous Journey and Gold Residential components of the Award.
They cater for school groups with customised camps and individual Duke of Ed participants during their “open journey” holiday programmes and weekends programmes.
Vision | Te Whāinga Matua
At the YMCA we hold to the fundamental purpose of the YMCA movement - founded in enabling young people to thrive and take their place in our community – our purpose is to ‘build strong kids, strong families, strong communities'.
Put another way, we invest in the next generation. Education at YMCA creates new opportunity. Our philosophy is based on the understanding that education is about developing the whole person. We believe learning is socially constructed and that we learn from old and new experiences. We also learn from each other recognising the unique talents in each person. We value qualifications as a statement of competence and the opportunities qualifications open up for us.