It seemed like a straightforward crisis management meeting at the time, but Koontz didn’t know the next two years would stretch the 167-year-old nonprofit’s community service mission to new heights.

Like many community spaces that March, Koontz’s team closed the doors of Atlanta’s YMCA 20 branches, 19 early learning centers, and 17 after-school child care sites shortly after that crisis meeting. But her team didn’t go home; they shifted into high gear.

“When COVID hit, what I didn’t realize at the time was I was going into basically being a wartime leader,” Koontz told a group of professionals at the UGA Institute for Leadership Advancement Leadership Dawgs Conference on Feb. 28.

“Every single day, I would get up and think to myself — literally, ‘Put on your armor, go to war, and make sure that there is a Y on the other side of this. I will not let this organization fail on my watch. I’m not trying to be overly dramatic, but it was possible we might not have a Y on the other side of it.”

She served as the kickoff speaker for the 2025 Leadership Dawgs program, sharing lessons she learned about balancing her family life and leadership roles, developing her team at the Metro Atlanta YMCA, and maintaining a focus on the Y’s mission during and after the COVID crisis.

Leadership Dawgs is ILA’s leadership development program for UGA alumni. It aims to develop their leadership skills through guided self-reflection, training and volunteer work.

For Koontz, guiding the Atlanta Y through the COVID pandemic as a new CEO was a trial by fire. Their decisions filled holes in the safety net that wouldn’t otherwise be filled.

“We said, ‘OK, we’re a nonprofit here to serve the community, what do we uniquely provide?” she told the Leadership Dawgs. “What skill sets or core competencies do we have that can help during this terrible time for the community?”

The first immediate need for nurses, police officers, EMTs and grocery store clerks was child care.

“We’ve been in the child care business since the 1920s … So we reopened all of our Ys as emergency child care centers for those working on the front lines of the pandemic.”

They shifted the commercial kitchens at their Early Head Start learning centers from making chicken nuggets and applesauce to packaging takeaway meals for low-income families relying on school lunches to ensure their children were fed. Together, with a coalition of 68 organizations in metro Atlanta, they served 600,000 takeout meals through the height of the pandemic.

The Y staff conducted wellness checks for its senior citizen clients, many of whom relied on the Y for daily or weekly social interactions.

“It became three months of child care, food distribution and supporting seniors in their homes so they felt connected and not alone,” Koontz said. “But this was the kicker — we’re doing all this work, but all our facilities are shut down, and 50% of our operating revenue comes from membership and program fees … We ended up losing 50% of our earned revenue in 2020. That’s a big blow.”

To keep the lights on, Koontz leaned into the fundraising skills and networks she developed working for Atlanta nonprofits before the YMCA of Metro Atlanta, but the tight-wire act was traumatic. Then came an unexpected call from a California mega-donor.

MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, donated $20 million so the Y could continue serving the community as the worst of the pandemic passed.

When the organization started to reemerge, Koontz recalibrated her leadership style to rebuild the organization.

“I have been CEO of three different organizations,” she said. “I was the CEO for eight months in a very healthy, working-well organization. I was the CEO of an organization in distress, and we didn’t know if it would be there the next year. And then, I was the CEO of an organization in recovery, right? We had to rebuild our membership. We had to rebuild our programs. We had to rebuild some of our staff. So, I went into a rebuilding phase.”

Getting through the pandemic and taking care of the community was the first challenge, she said. The second was learning how to be a “peacetime leader” — to trust her staff, foster their leadership skills and build a YMCA meeting the community’s needs. That took emotional honesty, self-awareness and a recommitment to a growth mindset.

“It wasn’t until I started being asked to speak about it that I understood there were some lessons I learned from going through that journey that needed to be shared,” she said. 

Today, the Atlanta YMCA is building its membership and working to become indispensable to even more families in the Atlanta area.

The 2025 class of Leadership Dawgs will draw on Koontz’s lessons of servant leadership and developing a growth mindset as it works over the next 12 months to develop community service projects with local nonprofit organizations.

Leadership Dawgs was launched in 2022 thanks to a historic donation from Chick-fil-A to the UGA Institute for Leadership Advancement.