Young Life leaders are more than caring adults serving as role models for kids. Young Life leaders are involved in kids' everyday lives. The following story shows how our leaders "just show up" in the lives of kids...

"John regularly attended basketball practice at the high school where he is a Young Life leader. Initially, John did not know any of the players on the team, but after weeks of watching practice he began to get to know some of them. One day, one of the players approached John. 'You come to watch us practice a lot don't you?' the young man asked John. 'Yes, I do,' John said. 'That's cool,' the young man said. 'No one does that.'"

• “pray, pray, pray”
• meet the community
• serve leaders and kids
• do “major” contact work
• see follow up as crucial
• network and fundraise in order
• see at least 10 percent of the school attend a club this year

1. Continue on course of growth with excellence – We opened 97 ministries and closed 81 for a growth rate of only two percent, but with some strong results particularly in growing and sustaining clubs in New England as well as great results in the North Atlantic region.
2. Grow deep and wide with increase in average club size – The average club size in the east continues to be addressed as we work as a team to ensure healthy sustainable ministries demonstrated by our reduced 9.3 percent club attrition rate. This is a drop for us from years past, but we would like to see a further decline toward the 6 percent level.
3. Help all areas become financially healthy – The areas in deficit average declined to 32 percent. This includes the significant correction of the old Newark Metro Region debt of $220,000 that is now erased by the property sale and significant progress under the Jubilee fund.
4. Be world class in discipleship – We had very encouraging results in our summer staff and work crew discipleship programs described below.
5. Recruit more kids to camp – By God’s grace we saw a seventh straight year of growth in summer camping from 9,065 in 1998 to 11,999 campers in 2005.  This represents 27.5 percent of our 2005 mission-wide summer camping from only 19 percent of the mission field staff being in the Eastern Division.
6. Care for our staff – We continue to be committed to “winning ourselves” before “winning others” as every region held committee/leadership training weekends. All three Eastern properties held Memorial Weekend and Labor Day weekend volunteer leadership and family camps. Senior staff (of 15 years or more) are processing through a marvelous career enhancement seminar at a rate of about 10 annually. RTD staff are involved in both one-on-one mentoring relationships and bi-weekly “fellowship learning groups” led by senior staff. A high percentage of our staff is enrolled in seminary course work. And we continue to work hard to ensure that each and every staff person is grounded in a local supportive church community.

• Nearly 50 percent of campers at some WyldLife camps responded to Christ.
• Senior leadership was on every assignment team to ensure both faithful outreach and nurture of staff and leaders.
• We had a summer staff/work crew initiative where we worked toward more intentional training and discipleship through meetings, small groups and practical training to ensure that all would go home being able to say that they love Jesus Christ more than ever before and are equipped to be laborers (end-of-month surveys indicated this was remarkably successful).
• We held a basketball camp that brought over 140 unreached inner-city kids together at Erie, Pa.