La Gaceta Newspaper

Bob Gilbertson

Bob Gilbertson knew from an early age exactly what he wanted to do for a living – he wanted to work for the YMCA. And that’s exactly what he went on to do, working to develop YMCA locations across the country.
He was recently honored by the Tampa Metropolitan Area YMCA at its annual Community Impact Celebration with its prestigious Red Triangle Award.
Growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee, he spent much of his time after school and during the summer at his local Y. “It’s maybe a little unusual … but I had developed relationships with these counselors and coaches,” Gilbertson said. “I developed this real affection for all the time and things that I did at the YMCA. I thought by the time I was 11, this is what I wanted my life to be about, coaching and teaching at the Y. The Y was always the place that I felt most at home and most supported.”
As a teenager, he was hired as a camp counselor and coach at his local Y, working with youth groups. After high school, he went on to the University of Tennessee, where he worked with the swim team.
After two years at UT, he was ready for something new and moved on to George Williams College in Chicago. The college, which was affiliated with the YMCA, offered an exercise science program that focused on topics such as anatomy, physiology and microbiology, and offered studying of human cadavers and live animal experiments. “It was a unique clinical experience that I couldn’t get in any other places,” he said.
Following his graduation from college in 1974, Gilbertson worked for the YMCA in Frankfort, Kentucky, for two years. There, he coached gymnastics and swimming, and ran other programs. He also continued his interest in exercise science through “exercise testing with an old boxing-style EKG machine.” This was around the time there was a push for running and aerobics. “It was a fascinating time when people were saying to exercise to prevent heart disease,” he said. “It was an exciting time to be part of the whole wellness movement. It was just as the stage of taking off. To incorporate that into the YMCA was an exciting time in terms of using education and the momentum to advance health and fitness.”
From Frankfort, Gilbertson moved on to Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he worked with “a bigger community and a bigger Y environment.” He continued to work in moving the wellness movement forward at the facility, including working with a local hospital physician who encouraged his patients in his cardiac rehab to continue their efforts at the local YMCA. “It was one of only a dozen places in the U.S. where people did that and we monitored it,” he said. “The hospital there didn’t have (a gym). This was their community clinic, if you will, at the YMCA.”
Gilbertson came to the Tampa YMCA in 1981, which at the time operated an older YMCA built in 1908 that had a hotel and a gym attached to it. “There hadn’t been a lot done to it since 1908 by the time I got there,” he said.
There were also satellite branches throughout the region. “The foundation of the Y was pretty shaky,” he said.
It was financially difficult to maintain and was only kept afloat because of a benefactor on Sanibel Island. The owner of Bailey’s General Store there owned multiple properties and after his death, left a dozen lots to the Tampa YMCA. Every time the organization needed money, it would sell off one of the properties.
“It’s completely different today,” said Gilbertson, who moved to Tampa as director of operations. “The idea was that I was an executive who would raise money and I would operate the Y. We had centers and the very beginnings of an after-school program, which grew to be quite large. The DNA for a good YMCA was there, but it just wasn’t there yet.”
Two years after moving to Tampa, his boss left and Gilbertson was tapped to take over the organization as CEO. Under his watch, they consolidated properties and before long they went from “losing $75,000 a year to making about $75,000 a year,” he said. “That was the beginning of getting things sort of going.”
During his time in Tampa, the organization “built an amazing board” and grew from serving about 5,000 people a year to more than 130,000 people. It grew into one of the 25 largest YMCA organizations in the country.
Similar to his previous YMCA locations, he also helped develop a cardiac rehab program at the Tampa YMCA and worked with the University of South Florida’s cardiology division.
His move to Florida also brought him several other “exciting opportunities,” including working with elected officials and about 30 other organizations to privatize child welfare and foster care in Tampa, which took about three years of work to accomplish. “At the time, it was viewed that the state was failing those kids,” he said. “Safety and permanency were the two key components.”
Once the program, Hillsborough Kids, launched, he served as its CEO for a period. “It became pretty well known for advancing adoption and the organization has had its ups and downs, but overall, the view of things, I think, is it’s better for kids,” he said. “That experience was absolutely phenomenal and it centered on what is the central mission of the Y, how to reach people who need services. It was an opportunity to do something completely out of our wheelhouse. It was an opportunity to learn and serve.”
Under his watch, the Central City YMCA on Palm Avenue was built. The goal was to bring together people from various sectors of the community at this location. “Our hope was to serve white, Latino and Black , and we also wanted to serve the full spectrum of economics,” Gilbertson said.
He added, “The idea was you would go in and work out one day and be on a treadmill next to a woman in a burka and on your other side you have a person who had been homeless at one point in time or you get a basketball game going up and you have a banker and maybe a young person who is unemployed. We saw equality in the way people treated each other and we just thought it was great and so did a lot of our members.”
The idea was people from various parts of the community would interact with each other at the YMCA. “Interactions they wouldn’t have in the course of their busy day,” he said. “It’s the essence of the best that YMCA can do – the intersection of different neighborhoods, different people, different backgrounds. It felt to me like when we were at our best.”
After several decades, Gilbertson left Florida in 2007 for Seattle, which was about 30 percent bigger than the organization he had been working for in Tampa and he felt had a lot of potential. “My job was to raise money to build new Ys and expand the service that the Y provides there,” he said.
Similar to the Central City YMCA, the new Ys being built in Seattle also brought together an intersection of the community with people of various economic backgrounds, races and cultures all coming together under one roof. “The real mission was to mix economic backgrounds,” Gilbertson said. “The term that we used (for it) was ‘YMCA on the scene.’ What that really meant was that on one side of the neighborhood were maybe people who could afford the YMCA and could afford to volunteer, and the other side was a neighborhood that didn’t have the same economic choices that the other neighborhood had.”
He was especially drawn to efforts made by the Seattle YMCA for emancipated foster kids, those in their late teens and early 20s who had aged out of the foster system. “When they turn 18, the state stops paying foster families and the kids’ belongings are placed in trash bags and it’s like, ok, you’re on your own,” Gilbertson said. “It’s horrible, absolutely horrible.”
In Seattle, the YMCA offers this community various services and support, including job training, education, mental health services and housing for emancipated foster kids. “The system there wasn’t privatized, but this was a step beyond,” he said. “We watched young people really begin to blossom and take off, even though they’ve had a tough life.”
After retiring in 2019, He joined the YMCA World Urban Network, a group of YMCA CEOs from large cities around the world that met to work on strategies to improve Y facilities and programming, for five years. He traveled the world for these meetings, visiting places like Shanghai, China, and Bogota, Colombia.
Now, he’s writing a book “on some of the great people in the YMCA who did things that are meaningful and left legacies,” he said. “I believe history is a really important thing and I felt like the history of some of the things people did could be lost in the next generation of the Y.”
As he reflects on his career with the YMCA, he’s proud of the work he put in for the organization and what he helped to accomplish. “I think people make choices to work in a career that brings them joy and makes them feel like they’re fulfilled in some fashion and so, for me, gosh, I helped and I gave as much as I got,” he said. “It’s been a great organization to work in and have a chance to lead and I can’t think of a better way to have spent my life.”