YMCA of Greater New York uses AWS to transform swim safety education and track life-saving skills

The YMCA of Greater New York serves more than 400,000 New Yorkers who learn, grow, and thrive through programs and services at 24 branches across the city. Among the YMCA’s most critical offerings are swim lessons that teach life-saving water safety skills to over 20,000 participants annually. Through the AWS Imagine Grant program—which provides both cash and Amazon Web Services (AWS) credit funding to registered nonprofit organizations using cloud technology to accelerate their missions—the YMCA developed an online application to digitize swim skill tracking and measure program impact at scale.

The new YMCA Swim Tracker app transforms how the organization understands and communicates the collective impact of its water safety education, moving beyond individual success stories to demonstrate program-wide effectiveness in building life-saving skills across New York City.

Overcoming paper-based limitations to understand true program impact

For years, the YMCA team tracked swim skill attainment for each of their 47,000 annual lessons on paper. While instructors could monitor individual student progress, this manual system created barriers to understanding the program’s broader impact. The organization could tell the story of one student’s journey but lacked visibility into collective achievements, skill progression patterns, and overall program effectiveness across the YMCA’s extensive network of branches.

This limitation was particularly challenging for an organization whose swim programs serve such a vital public safety function. Water safety education saves lives, and the YMCA needed comprehensive data to demonstrate impact, identify areas for improvement, and secure continued support for these essential services. The paper-based system also made it difficult to track attendance patterns, analyze skill progression rates, and provide meaningful feedback to both instructors and participants about their development.

Building a comprehensive digital platform with AWS

The YMCA Swim Tracker application is built entirely on AWS, prioritizing a serverless infrastructure with event-driven workflows. The platform is hosted on a robust architecture designed for scalability and security:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) hosts the static website and serves it through the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) for fast, secure access.
• Amazon Cognito handles authentication from Azure AD as a federated SAML identity provider (IdP) for secure user management with existing employee accounts.
• Amazon API Gateway serves APIs (application programming interfaces) backed by AWS Lambda functions to drive the business logic of file uploads and database operations.
• Amazon Aurora houses all application data with AWS Lambda orchestrating creates, reads, updates and deletes (CRUD) from the front end.
• CSV files of skill data can be uploaded to Amazon S3, where AWS Lambda kicks off event-driven workflows using AWS Glue to process and ingest data into Aurora for in-application analysis.
• Scheduled AWS Glue jobs mirror transactional data to a data warehouse for historical analytics and eventual machine learning development.

The YMCA leveraged a dedicated AWS solutions architect, an existing technology partner, Kearney Activate, and the AWS Imagine Grant funding to design and implement the swim tracking platform. Looking ahead to phase two of the project, the YMCA team plans to use Amazon SageMaker AI to train and deploy machine learning models on their aggregate data—enabling advanced insights into skill progression patterns, personalized instruction, and program optimization opportunities.

Demonstrating measurable impact across thousands of participants

The results from the YMCA’s pilot program demonstrate the transformative power of digital data collection. Through the initial implementation, the organization has successfully tracked 3,683 participants across 8,206 classes, generating an unprecedented dataset of swim skill development and program engagement. The pilot launched in summer 2025 across five branches within New York City, then expanded to 10 branches in fall 2025. The organization plans to implement the system across all 24 branches in 2026, scaling its data collection capabilities to capture the full scope of their swim education impact.

One of the most significant improvements was in data quality. Between the summer and fall sessions of the organization’s first cohort, the YMCA observed a 67% increase in data quality and conformance with organizational standards as instructors became more comfortable with the digital platform and refined their data entry processes. The YMCA Swim Tracker app enables every swim instructor to track individual student attendance and achievement through the online portal, which generates mid-session and end-of-session participant reports. More importantly, it creates an aggregated dataset that allows the YMCA to analyze trends, measure collective impact, and tell the comprehensive story of the organization’s water safety education programs.

This digital transformation allows the organization to move beyond anecdotal success stories to demonstrate quantifiable impact across its entire network. The YMCA team can now identify which teaching methods are most effective, track skill progression rates across different demographics, and optimize their programs based on data-driven insights.

Key insights for nonprofit technology implementation

The YMCA team offers three essential pieces of advice for nonprofit organizations embarking on similar technology projects. First, define and align on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) early in the process. The YMCA had approximately three months from initial refinement to pilot launch, requiring clear focus and shared goals among operators, functional leads, technical teams, and the Kearney Activate team.

Second, build in time and space for iteration. By committing to an MVP approach, the YMCA team gave themselves permission to launch knowing that improvements would be necessary. Their most valuable learnings emerged during the first few weeks of real-world implementation, highlighting the importance of planning for post-launch refinement.

Third, engage end users as co-creators throughout the development process. The project team involved cross-functional subject matter experts from the swim program who refined the platform features as they navigated the challenges of piloting new technology. This approach created shared ownership and trust, making post-launch iteration smoother and more collaborative.

How you can support the YMCA of Greater New York

Expanding access to swim instruction is a matter of public health and safety: One in four NYC high school students cannot swim, a gap that disproportionately affects communities of color. As a leader in aquatics, the YMCA is uniquely positioned to address this crisis by expanding access to swim safety through affordable lessons, school-based programs, and training lifeguards and swim instructors.

It is never too late to learn—the YMCA offers swimming classes for New Yorkers of all ages, starting at 6 months old. If you are already a swimmer, consider taking a free Lifeguard Training course to become a certified lifeguard and help address the lifeguard shortage.

You can also support the YMCA’s 175th Anniversary Campaign, helping strengthen these initiatives and build healthier, more engaged, and empowered communities across New York City.

To find your local YMCA, visit this webpage.