Youth With A Mission (YWAM)

YWAM has no head office and no single leader, on purpose. It is a movement of more than a thousand locations in over 180 countries, and it invented the short-term youth mission back in 1960.

Everyone enters the same way: through the Discipleship Training School. That is roughly six months — twelve weeks of lectures followed by eight to twelve weeks of outreach somewhere in the world. It runs at more than six hundred locations, with versions for people over thirty and for whole families.

In Poland it is known as Młodzież z Misją, active since the 1970s, with the first Polish DTS held in 1990. The base in Poznań runs the school in Polish.

• Founded
  1960, in Lausanne, Switzerland
• Founders
  Loren Cunningham, who died in 2023, and Darlene Cunningham
• Led by
  No single leader — deliberately decentralised, with regional teams
• Based in
  No central headquarters. The historic hub is YWAM Kona, Hawaii
• Reach
  More than 180 countries and over 1,000 locations
• Languages
  National sites in local languages, Polish among them
• Cost
  Programmes are paid. Blog, FAQ and prayer resources are free
• You get
  The Discipleship Training School, the University of the Nations, outreach trips, evangelism and mercy ministries
• Training
  Discipleship Training School — about six months at 600+ locations. Roughly $2,500–3,500 at budget bases, rising to $9,000–10,000 or more in the United States
• How to join
  ywam.org/get-involved/dts, then find a base at ywam.org/locations
• Polish
  Yes — Młodzież z Misją. Bases in Poznań (DTS in Polish), Kraków, Ustroń and Rzeszów
• Contact
  Each base has its own contacts — ywam.org/about-us/contact-us

Youth With A Mission (YWAM) does not sponsor or endorse Embassy of the Kingdom, and we are not affiliated with them. We list them because we checked them and would put them in a friend’s hands. If you lead a ministry and would like to be considered, or believe something here should be corrected, write to us — we read every message ourselves.