2020-06-06 Sat

YMCA, sometimes regionally called the Y, is a worldwide youth organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, with more than 64 million beneficiaries in 120 countries. It was founded on 6 June 1844 by Sir George Williams in London, originally as the Young Men's Christian Association, in response to unhealthy social conditions arising in the big cities at the end of the Industrial Revolution.

Growth of the railroads and centralization of commerce and industry brought many rural young men who needed jobs into cities like London. They worked 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week. Far from home and family, these young men often lived at the workplace. They slept crowded into rooms over the company's shop, a location thought to be safer than London's tenements and streets. Outside the shop things were bad -- open sewers, pickpockets, thugs, beggars, drunks, and abandoned children running wild by the thousands.

Twenty-two-year-old George Williams, a farmer-turned-department store worker, was troubled by what he saw. He joined 11 friends to organize the first Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), with the purpose of "the improving of the spiritual condition of young men engaged in the drapery, embroidery, and other trades." Over the next 10 years, YMCA movements also began to develop across Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and India.

In 1992, India Postal Department has issued a 100 Paise commemorative stamp on YMCA.

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