Thank you, David, for that wonderful introduction and for everything you do for the YMCA. Please join me in giving David a big thank you!

I know all of you had a wonderful day of golf and fellowship today. Thank you for such a great turnout.

The YMCA is truly a treasure in Atlanta, and your decision to come out and support this event is a blessing – especially given the roller-coaster economy we're in.

But I'm not here today to talk about golf – or the economy. I'm not even here to talk about yesterday's fantastic Falcons-Packers game.

I'm here today to talk about cheeseburgers. (Pulls out a real McDonald's cheeseburger and hold it up.)

Since 2005, the Y has played a starring role in the Atlanta Falcons Youth Foundation's Signature Program – an initiative we call the Falcons Fitness Zones.

As with all great ideas, the premise behind the Falcons Fitness Zones is simple.

We believe physical activity is medicine. Not just good medicine, but medicine that is very nearly magical. For keeping kids fit, it's as close as you can get to a silver bullet.

It really doesn't matter what the physical activity is – so long they move their bodies. So long as they are not sedentary.

The mission of the Falcons Fitness Zones is straightforward -- to get more kids in our target neighborhoods to take more of this medicine.

Our goal is to get more kids moving for more minutes every day, adding up to more hours of physical activity every week.

As easy as this is to understand, it's awfully difficult to execute.

That's because so many forces in our world today – forces for which we adults are largely responsible– are keeping our children sedentary – literally stuck in their chairs.

It's making them sick. And it's ensuring they will be the first generation of young people not to live as long as their parents. The irony is – this is one medicine they're happy to take if they are just given the opportunity. In two Falcons Fitness Zone neighborhoods – one around the Georgia Dome and one right here at East Lake – the Metro YMCA has taken up our challenge and figured out ways to get more kids to increase their physical activity.

This is where the cheeseburger comes in. All of you know, it's tough work to burn off cheeseburgers.

For every two hours a child spends in organized physical activity, she'll burn off about one of these cheeseburgers.

Given how little time schools devote to physical education, and how tough it is to take after-school programs to scale… this can seem like an overwhelming challenge.

But this year in the Falcons Fitness Zones, we estimate the YMCA will help nearly 5,000 kids burn off more than 190,000 McDonald's cheeseburgers through organized physical activity during the school year.

That's 5,000 kids this year … before the Fitness Zone initiative the Centennial and East Lake Y's were reaching a few hundred children.

Overall, across all of our Falcons Fitness Zones and considering all of our grant partners, we expect more than 10,000 kids will burn more than 144 million calories through organized physical activity this school year …

… translating to about 480,000 cheeseburgers burned.

In the first year of Fitness Zone programming, it was costing us a little more than $8 for every cheeseburger burned. After three years of implementation, cut that to about $2.90. And here's the really good news: With the foundation's current grant support to the YMCA, it's costing us about $2.43 to burn off every cheeseburger.

That means the Y is more efficient than the Fitness Zone partners, overall!

We still have a ways to go, since this burger cost 99 cents and it's costing us $2.43 to burn it off. But thanks to your team's effectiveness, we're moving in the right direction.

As much fun as the numbers can be (and I know all of us love to quantify the R-O-I we get from our investments in the Y) ….

I want to draw attention to the real reason the YMCA has been such a Fitness Zone star from our point of view.

It's wonderful that you have a strong culture of measurement and you don't need an outside funder to challenge you to improve performance. You care about it because it's part of your organization's DNA.

But those attributes alone, as great as they are, are not the reason the YMCA has been so successful at getting more kids to take more of the AFYF "medicine."

The reason for the success is that that the YMCA staff – your staff – view the kids as the customers.

I use the terms "medicine" and "dosage" because the metaphor works. We don't have to invent a new medicine to improve youth fitness. We just have to figure out how to get more kids to take more of the medicine that already exists – that medicine being physical activity.

The magic of the YMCA's staff – men and women like Kaamel Nuri, Joseph Hayden, R.C. Pruit, Franklin Hamilton, and Robyn Furness-Fallin, who has been with the Fitness Zones from Day-one --

is that all of these folks treat the kids as customers … They figure out what the kids want and give it to them.

They don't try to force the kids through routine drills of exercise "just because it's good for them."

The YMCA staff members provide the magic we need to improve youth fitness because they listen to and respond to what kids actually want to do.

In our Georgia Dome Fitness Zone, Joe Hayden has kids playing games from all over the world, including cricket, team handball and tennis polo – where the kids are on foot, not on horseback, and use tennis racquets for mallets. He's introduced the kids to an Argentinean version of jai alai and to a Swiss game called Tchouk Ball that's getting international recognition because it's a team sport with low potential for injuries.

And therein lies the magic of the Falcons Fitness Zone initiative. We are stubbornly and unequivocally wedded to the endgame, which is getting more kids to spend more time in physical activity.

We are amazingly flexible on how to get there. You should be proud of your YMCA staff for taking advantage of this flexibility and showing real entrepreneurial spirit, real creativity.

Far and away our first choice in getting to the goal is to enable the kids to move their bodies doing whatever it is they want to do – whether it's flag football or dance or fencing or rock climbing or HOPSports.

When this happens, we are certain that the kids benefit not only from the time spent under the Y's direction … but we know they are more likely to build on that habit in how they choose to spend their own free time.

For the Atlanta Falcons Youth Foundation, it's been a remarkable partnership. The entire Y team is focused on success, focused on outcomes, focused on continuous improvement, focused on kids.

From the CEO's office to every branch, there's a culture of creativity and commitment. We at the Atlanta Falcons Youth Foundation and The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation are proud of our partnership with the YMCA. We look forward to continuing to work together to help young people develop into happy, healthy, productive adults.