YMCA Ignite is the online learning platform of YMCA of Greater Toronto.
It offers free or low-cost courses to anyone in Canada: job search and interview skills, financial empowerment, entrepreneurship with League of Innovators, youth health and well-being, online safety and, since August 2026, training for early childhood educators.
Ignite was built with funding partners. RBC Foundation helped launch the platform in 2023 with $1.2 million through RBC Future Launch, and in August 2026 committed more than $1 million to the Child Care Educators Training Initiative, which aims to reach 10,000 participants over three years.
YMCA reports more than 41,000 learners and 11,000 certificates issued on Ignite since launch.
In 2026 YMCA moved Ignite's SCORM LMS off Absorb and onto Core dna, the platform that already runs ymcagta.org. Courses and checkout now run in one learning management system with eCommerce, next to the website content.
The challenge
Ignite has several groups to answer to at once. Funded programs come with reach targets, such as the 25,000 young people RBC and YMCA set out to serve by 2025 when Ignite launched, and funders ask for participation numbers. Program teams launch new series and workshops through the year. Marketing needs every program to look and read like the YMCA. Most learners pay nothing, so the path from finding a course to starting it has to be short.
On Absorb, Ignite's reports covered time spent, completion and exam results, and YMCA built its monthly participant count from them. Program pages and course marketing sat apart from ymcagta.org.
What YMCA needed
- Free and paid courses, coupons and paid workshops through one checkout.
- Program pages, landing pages and news the YMCA team can build without developers.
- A catalog people can browse and search before creating an account.
- Self-paced SCORM courses, recorded webinars and live sessions.
- Certificates for completed courses.
- Reports by date range, including a monthly count of active participants.
How a nonprofit LMS runs on Core dna
Catalog and programs. Courses are grouped into categories such as Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Entrepreneurship, Health and Well-Being and Life Skills, with search and filters on the catalog. Each program, such as the Job Success Series or the Child Care Educators Training Initiative, has a page the team publishes from the CMS, linked to its own filtered course list. The search in the header covers courses, FAQs and pages in one place.
Free and paid courses in one checkout. Every course is a product with a price, from free webinars to paid Learning Lounges. A free course still creates an order and an enrolment, so every learner and every enrolment is counted the same way. Discounts can be limited by user group, product category, country, date, cart value or order history, and Stripe and Avalara handle payment and tax on paid courses.
Course types. SCORM courses launch from the learner's dashboard and resume where the learner left off. Recording courses hold one or more videos. Prerequisites control which courses a learner can take next.
Certificates. Completed courses issue a certificate the learner can download from My Certificates or email to someone else, such as an employer.
For the platform behind this, see the LMS, eCommerce and CMS platform page.
Want to see how it works?
Book a call with Core dna. We'll walk you through how free and paid programs, certificates and participation reporting run on one platform, and how that would work for your organization.
Participation reporting for funders
In Absorb, YMCA's monthly participant count included everyone who spent more than zero minutes in a course during the month. On Core dna, the platform records each learner's sign-ins and last activity, and an active user report shows who signed in and who had course activity each month. That is the basis of the same monthly count.
YMCA can also pull orders, enrolments and course progress into Looker Studio, into AI-generated reports through Core dna's MCP connection, or into its own BI tools through the Core dna API.
The results
- Ignite moved off Absorb and onto Core dna in about six weeks, on the same setup as ymcagta.org. Read how Ignite moved its SCORM LMS off Absorb.
- More than 41,000 learners and 11,000 certificates issued on YMCA Ignite since 2023, across Absorb and Core dna (YMCA figures, October 2026).
- 45+ online courses across career development, financial empowerment, entrepreneurship, health and well-being, life skills and child care (YMCA figure).
Read the main website story: how YMCA of Greater Toronto took online registrations from 1,500 in a day to 8,000.
