Although the sign outside of the Evanston/North Shore YWCA, 1215 Church St., identifies the old brick building as the “Home of the Flying Fish,” Executive Director Christie Dailey said the organization’s mission focuses more on social change than the resident swim team.

But Weinberg freshmen Monica Wyant and Lisa Brockway associate the YWCA with basketball, life guarding, treadmills and the YMCA.

“I’ve heard of the YWCA, but I’ve never had one around me,” Wyant said. “I’d probably say it has things like the YMCA for different age groups, but catered more toward women, because of the ‘W.'”

Dailey said misunderstandings such as Wyant’s and Brockway’s are not uncomMonday, and that the YWCA is trying to distinguish itself as a non-profit group devoted to empowering women and eliminating racism.

During the organization’s annual membership meeting in Arlington, Va., on April 17, Dailey said, the YWCA unveiled a new logo to help accomplish the more socially-minded goals.

“There were really two goals with the rebranding effort,” Dailey said. “The first was to differentiate us in the non-profit marketplace. More specifically, we wanted to clearly differentiate ourselves from the YMCA. Our (second) goal is to communicate what makes the YWCA unique.”

The new brand will be publicly unveiled in January of next year, but Dailey said the Evanston YWCA already has begun printing the logo on new letterhead and publications. Leaders plan to change their exterior sign next year.

Dailey said the previous logo was too similar to the YMCA’s. The new brand replaces the giant “Y” in the previous logo with the slogan “eliminating racism/empowering women.”

“They’re strong, they’re verbs — they’re about social change,” Dailey said.

Dailey said the Evanston branch has focused a majority of its resources on multiple services for women and girls, including housing options for battered women. The programs fall in line with the YWCA’s reaffirmed mission, Dailey said.

“With our domestic violence programs, we’d really like to expand in two ways,” Dailey said. “We’d like to expand our transitional housing. We also want to expand our educational/prevention program — that’s where the solution lies.”

Dailey said the YWCA also is interested in increasing its presence on Northwestern’s campus.

“We’d also like to do more work than we currently do on the Northwestern campus with dating violence,” she said. “I think there are a lot of services that we could offer to the Northwestern community. We just haven’t had the personnel to build those bridges.”

With these new goals and a progressive history, the Evanston YWCA has emphasized social change.

In Evanston the YWCA was progressive long ago when it published an interracial charter in 1946.

Dailey said the YWCA has not forgotten its roots and hopes the new brand will remind the public its base.

“We hope that (the brand) just says to people, ‘this is an organization that really has taken a stand on these issues.'”