It was a Monday afternoon in the fall of 2010. I was on Young Life staff in Littleton, CO and prepping for club that night. As usual, I did what most “good” Young Life leaders did three hours before every club - jumped online and Googled “Young Life games” and “Young Life songs.” I had already used everything on Sean McGever’s YLHelp.com and didn’t find anything new or usable on Google, so I went to the Staff Resources site. Same result. I got frustrated and emailed my YL boss’s boss’s boss and asked if we could figure out a solution to this problem. I drove down to Colorado Springs and we met and I presented an idea. He said, “That sounds awesome. We can’t pay you for that, but if you want to start it as a volunteer, go for it.” A month later, The Young Life Leader Blog was born.
I Googled “How to start a website” and created a blog on Blogger. I started spending an hour or so each night after club or after Campaigners or after doing contact work - just writing up the details of what we’d done and what we’d learned. I shared it with our area, our region and a few YL friends back in NC and GA. It slowly grew. Over the past 10 years, I wrote over 1500 articles and more and more leaders started sharing content. Along the way, a ton of other folks started doing similar things - the WyldLife blog, the Capernaum blog, YL College podcast, etc… And there were all the great training resources and videos being shared on YL Access.
In 2019 we had the idea: “What if we brought all of these great resources into one, easy-to-use resource for staff and leaders?!” At YL2020 we pitched the idea of “The Storehouse” on stage during “The Next Big Thing.” It got funded and we’re moving forward!
We are currently working with the IT department at the Service Center to create a one-stop-shop for all the best resources in Young Life. Stay tuned!