After a successful decade with the Tillamook YMCA, Chief Executive Officer Kaylan Sisco is preparing to depart for a position with the association in Spokane at the end of January.
Sisco said that the decision to leave had been incredibly difficult and was motivated by the opportunity to grow professionally but that Tillamook will always have a special place in his heart, as will the staff and community members who helped make his time here a success.
"I'm not good at taking compliments, you know," Sisco said, "I want to flip it so bad and just say thank you to everybody that has believed in me and given me the chance to lead and this staff team, the board and all the community partners."
Sisco arrived in Tillamook in June 2015, with 15 years of experience at YMCAs across the nation from Missouri to Colorado and Idaho.
When he arrived, Sisco said the Tillamook YMCA was struggling financially, having run at a $250,000 net loss in the year prior to his arrival. However, within eight months, Sisco was able to turn the ship around and over the past seven years, the organization has achieved surpluses in excess of $200,000 annually.
The turnaround was thanks to two primary factors, first an increase in revenues from $1 million annually when Sisco arrived to $3.3 million in the most recent fiscal year, and second, an increase in annual fundraising from $400,000 to $1.7 million, which has also allowed the YMCA's endowment to grow from $1 million to $4.8 million.
Successes in fundraising and growing revenue have paved the way for increases in programing, membership and visits, as well as projects to upgrade the YMCA's building, including the installation of a new roof and siding. During Sisco's tenure, membership increased from just under 3,200 to 4,000, with monthly visits growing from 6,800 to more than 10,000 for the 74 classes offered on a weekly basis.
In terms of programmatic growth, the largest accomplishment during Sisco's tenure was the 2023 acquisition of the Tillamook Bowling Lanes for $1.2 million, made possible by a $1 million gift from the Mario and Alma Pastega Family Foundation. The purchase has allowed the YMCA to offer free bowling leagues as well as open play to students in the Tillamook School District, in addition to keeping the lanes available for community use.
"That was a huge game changer, and it was just so far out there, and it was just kudos to our board for being super innovative and just being nimble enough to say, yeah this is something we can do," Sisco said, adding that though the donation request had been the largest of his career, that "it was the easiest because of that family."
The free programming facilitated by the acquisition of the center matched with a broader desire to increase the YMCA's impact by lowering financial barriers that is central to Sisco's ethos.
Sisco said that he deeply believed in the YMCA's function as a place of communal meeting for the community and that giving as many people access as possible was critical to fulfilling that role. He said that one of his proudest accomplishments was beginning free class offerings for senior citizens with grants before finding a way to sustain the offering with internal funding.
"Those are probably my favorite pieces because you can see just how someone's life is improving and not necessarily the fitness side of it," Sisco said. "It's just their life overall and it's just because they're surrounded by the people and the energy, and it's given them purpose."
Sisco said that he was also proud of expanding free class offerings for kids and that he held the idea of free membership for all community members as an ultimate objective.
"That's the goal, I've got it written down at home so I see it every single day and it just says 'free membership' because, ultimately, like how cool would it be if our entire community you could just walk into the y and it wasn't member, non-member, it was just like, you're part of the community, you're part of the Y," Sisco said, adding that if finances were a barrier to someone joining the YMCA, they should reach out to discuss options.
Another source of pride from Sisco's time in Tillamook was the YMCA's weathering of the Covid pandemic. During the pandemic, the YMCA asked members to continue their memberships so that staff would not have to be laid off and established a community hotline so that their help could be requested. The community responded and the YMCA saw less than 12% membership loss as staff devoted their time to driving for Meals on Wheels, staffing food banks, helping members move items, taking out trash and in one instance, pushing a car out of the mud.
"We did all these different needed services in our community that you typically wouldn't see us do but it opened up our staff to being more innovative and thinking how can we be game changers in our community," Sisco said.
The decision to leave was not an easy one for Sisco, but when a colleague sent him a job opening to lead the YMCA organization in Spokane, where there is a plan to build the community's fourth YMCA, he was drawn to apply. Sisco stressed that he was not excited to leave Tillamook and still plans to remain engaged with the community, but that the opportunity for professional advancement was too enticing to pass up.
"We started our family, and we've had three kids and never thought, you know, we would leave," Sisco said, "and this all happened in one month from November to December and so it was all really quick but super hard decision."
Tillamook's YMCA is working with the group's national office on the recruitment of a replacement, which Sisco said is expected to take several months.
"The Tillamook YMCA family is sad to hear we'll be losing our amazing CEO, Kaylan Sisco," Tillamook YMCA Board President Jeff Simpson said in a statement. "He has taken our organization to new levels and set us up for unlimited success in the years to come."