ROY SORENSON

Roy Sorenson’s father enrolled him in the Milwaukee YMCA when he was 12 years old. After a brief stay in the Army, he attended the University of Wisconsin and graduated in 1922. Throughout college he worked for the Madison, Wisconsin, YMCA. In 1923, Sorenson joined the Milwaukee YMCA staff as the assistant Boys’ Work secretary. In 1927 he joined the National Council of YMCAs, first on the Boys’ Work staff and then with the National Program Services Department working out of the National Council Office in Chicago. During the Depression, he developed innovative new programs, including one that brought youth from all over the country to the 1932-1933 Chicago World’s Fair.

In 1936, Sorenson became associate general secretary of the National Council in charge of the Chicago office. In this position he advocated using schools and public land for leisure time activities and helped introduce non-facility-centered programs and community club programs into the YMCA. He frequently acted as troubleshooter for the National Council and, from 1931 on, traveled extensively by air at a time when few other executives did.

In September 1946, he became the managing director of the San Francisco YMCA which consisted of eleven local Ys, Golden Gate College, a summer camp in the Sierras, and a year-round camp in the Santa Cruz mountains. During his first years there, Sorenson was instrumental in establishing the San Francisco Master Plan for Youth, the Group Work and Recreation Council which later became the Social Welfare Council, and the Bay Area United Fund. He also renovated the Central Branch building, built four new branch buildings, and initiated the design of an important new youth program. Sorenson worked with Dr. Hedley Dimock, former dean of George Williams College, in the early 1950s to develop a program in collaboration with the Rosenberg Foundation. Together they tested and designed fourteen pilot projects in character education in the San Francisco YMCA branches. The program grew from Sorenson’s awareness of the impending decline in American values and, in his judgment, the need to resist that decline through “education in values.” This work is described in Designing Education in Values, co-authored by Dimock and Sorenson.

In addition to his YMCA work, Sorenson was a founder and long-time trustee of National Community Research Associates. Between 1931 and 1946, he conducted thirty surveys of health, welfare, and recreation for Community Chests and Councils from Boston to Honolulu. In 1952 he conducted a similar study in Caracas, Venezuela. He pioneered the systematic, qualitative, as well as quantitative investigation of total social systems.

Sorenson wrote two books: The Art of Board Membership and How to be a Board or Committee Member. Following Sorenson’s death in 1966, National Executive Director of the YMCA James F. Bunting wrote, “To the entire YMCA movement, Sorenson was a prophetic leader. It would be a gross understatement to declare that Roy served in the finest traditions of the YMCA secretaryship. More accurate would be the statement that by precept and example he led the YMCA secretaryship towards what we may devoutly hope will become the finest traditions of its future.”