When Julie Tolan took over as President and CEO of the Milwaukee YMCA in 2013, she didn’t realize that the organization was one month away from a crisis. Soon after she started, 10 members of the YMCA’s management team quit, pursuing better offers elsewhere. The YMCA had spent the past years trimming benefits, salaries and budgets across the board to better handle the $30 million it carried in debt.
A Milwaukee native, Tolan had years of leadership experience. She had served as the President of the United Performing Arts Fund and spent 10 years as Vice President of University Advancement at Marquette before coming to the YMCA. She gathered a task force to examine the situation and concluded that if nothing in the organization changed, it would run out of cash within a year. “It isn’t easy to persuade people that change is really what needs to happen – unless there’s a crisis” Tolan says.
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She undertook a comprehensive revaluation of the YMCA’s programming, finding multiple areas where she believed it had overreached. For example, under her leadership, the YMCA sold a school it had started to Milwaukee College Prep; it transitioned a youth mentoring program to the Boys and Girls Club; and it sold several suburban branches to neighboring YMCAs, drawing its focus back to its core Milwaukee mission. At that same time, the YMCA filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The organization survived and emerged reinvented in 2015.
“If there ever was a definition of the ‘right leader at the right time,’ Julie was it,’ said Richard Canter, the YMCA’s chairman of the board of directors, in a statement afterward.
Tolan took many lessons from the experience shepherding the YMCA back to organizational health, one of the most important being the need to embrace change. “I like to say that the shadow side of passion for mission is resistance to change,” she says. “My real focus is on leading change.”
In 2016, Tolan left her position at the YMCA, and the next year she and her husband took ownership of Lauber Business Partners and its sub-organization Lauber Community Partners, where she now consults with nonprofits like the Florentine Opera and First Stage, sharing the hard-won wisdom she’s earned.
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