My Love Note to YNPN.GR: The future is yours.

The air was crisp and the anticipation was great as we sat around a table in the back room of Wolfgang’s talking about the then ambiguous concept of “YNPN”. As a young professional I was craving a community of colleagues and couldn’t find one that fit my needs in Grand Rapids. After some research, I came across YNPN Chicago and thought it could work for us here. As we sat around the table that morning, YNPN sounded like a great idea to bring our community together.  Just four years later the community has become greater than anything we could have imagined.

There are only three of us left on the board of those who were sitting around that table in September 2007, and that truly gives me hope that the YNPN movement in Grand Rapids will live far beyond us. The movement has included close to 500 members of the Grand Rapids nonprofit community and surely will move beyond that in the coming years.

The future of YNPN is being solidified in Grand Rapids through the devotion of young professionals in the city and through the commitment of nonprofit organizations to develop strong professionals for the current life and future of their organizations.

My hope is that YNPN continues to develop it’s place in the city, to become the go to place for nonprofit professionals in their 20s and 30s for professional development and networking that fits
their needs. Our goal when we first started YNPN was to create a community for ourselves, but it has stretched far beyond that. YNPN.GR now strives to provide a community that keeps young professionals in Grand Rapids and satisfied with their sector.

Through events like the YNPN National Conference, the YNPN Leadership Awards, and this blog we have attempted to give young professionals a voice. To maintain their voice, true partnerships between all professionals, no matter their age, need to form, to allow all voices to be at the table. This is what I personally hope YNPN.GR can facilitate in the future. Those on the board now and in the future will decide this though, and YNPN will become what it needs to be to fit the changing needs of each young professional coming next.

Continual improvement and partnership building will move YNPN.GR further from an idea for a community and closer to a movement. The movement is what’s important. A movement can only be defined by those participating in it. For this reason, I want to give full permission (not that they need it from me anyways), for all future YNPN.GR board members and members to make the movement their own, and to continue to shape YNPN.GR so that it is makes sense for the Greater Grand Rapids community and for themselves. If I was to say here “It was my idea, you should keep it how I envisioned it,” the true spirit of what YNPN.GR has become would be completely lost. YNPN.GR would die as a movement, and to me that would be much worse then sticking to the original rendition of the organization.

YNPN of Greater Grand Rapids may have been an idea I had, but it would not be what it is today without the amazing board members who have pushed YNPN.GR beyond the idea and into fruition. I’m proud to have been a part of the movement that has already swelled, and know that the future of YNPN.GR is in the great hands of an amazing board of young professionals that rock GR!

YNPN.GR has been a large part of my life for the last four years and I hope to always be a part, but am truly excited to see where it goes from here. If there is one thing I know for certain, it is that YNPN.GR is going to continue to rock GR and provide outstanding professional development and networking opportunities to nonprofit professionals in their 20s and 30s in the city.

Tera Wozniak Qualls has been YNPN Co-chair and fearless leaders since the local chapter's inception 4 years ago. We have been honored to have her lead our group as an agressive champion for local nonprofiteers. This year marks the end of her time as co-chair and she will be attending meetings in the role of Emeritus chair and spending more time with her lovely husband Rob and their son Eli.