EBOOK
About
In 1977, thirty-six people in Eugene, Oregon opened their checkbooks and built a tennis center on a handshake with the YMCA. No contract. No lawyers. Just a promise: we build it, you run it as a tennis center. For everybody.
For forty-five years, both sides kept that promise.
Then the YMCA stopped.
This is the story of what happens when an institution breaks faith with the community that built it - and what that community does next. Drawing on Orwell, Cervantes, Buber, and William James, Douglas McCarty makes the case for saving a place that matters, and offers a vision for what it could become.
Part history of the place, part love letter to tennis - and a battle plan for anyone who has ever watched a bureaucracy consume something irreplaceable.
For forty-five years, both sides kept that promise.
Then the YMCA stopped.
This is the story of what happens when an institution breaks faith with the community that built it - and what that community does next. Drawing on Orwell, Cervantes, Buber, and William James, Douglas McCarty makes the case for saving a place that matters, and offers a vision for what it could become.
Part history of the place, part love letter to tennis - and a battle plan for anyone who has ever watched a bureaucracy consume something irreplaceable.