Her work was explained in Katherine Mayo's 1920 account of the YMCA's contributions in the war:Gertrude Ely had a flivver, lucky woman.

Into that flivver, on the word to move, she packed a lot of rations, a cook-stove, a boiler, chocolate, a fiddle, some maps, a Y red triangle sign, writing paper, pens, ink, candles, her own bedroll, a lot of useful odds and ends, and all the cigarettes that room remained for.

[11] She shared a place of honor in a 1919 parade in New York, with fellow YMCA war workers Mary Noel Arrowsmith, Frances Gulick, Ethel Creighton Torrance, and Marjorie Skelding.

[12] Ely was active in many feminist and cultural organizations; her associates included President William H. Taft,[13][14] Jane Addams,[15] journalist Dorothy Thompson,[16] Albert Einstein,[17] and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

[3] At the beginning of World War II, she served refreshments to the recruits at Camp Blanding in Florida,[9] and wrote to her friend Eleanor Roosevelt about the plight of German Jewish families.

[30] Gertrude Sumner Ely died in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, on October 15, 1970, aged 94 years.