I balance mission and strategy by prioritizing our mission, ensuring we have the ambition and systems to sustain it, while driving revenue to support our goals.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's it's really one leads to the it feels like they might be separate things, but the money drives the mission. Right? So we have to have rigor to be able to do drive revenue for to our organization so we can actually accomplish our mission.
And the way I like to think about it is I wanna prioritize mission because we have to have people who care a lot about what we're trying to do. We need to have ambition. Meaning, we need to have ambition for our chapter and our organization that we can touch many people's lives in a deep way and more than we have before. And then we have to have systems, structures, processes that allow for sustainability so that if there's transition, if the people in the machine change, the mission doesn't get compromised. The system is there.
The playbooks are there. The ways to work effectively are there. And that there's just this continuity around mission support. So those are kinda, like, the three ways I'm thinking about it, and our rigor is absolutely important. We have to be best in class to be able to be you know, serve and and and deliver value the way we want and really touch all these kids' lives.
And I'll just take a moment to tell you that in LA, many people don't know about Make A Wish LA that we have we're a federated model. So what that means is that there's a national organization. You might think about it like a franchise. And then there are local chapters. And most states have one chapter.
Like, Arizona has one chapter. And, you know, Vermont has one chapter, and many states have one chapter. And there's, you know, somewhere in the fifties total number of chapters. California has several chapters because we're just such a huge state. So I I run the Los Angeles chapter.
And it's really our job in LA to underwrite and produce the wishes for the kids and families in LA. Sometimes that's, like, a little bit lost because Make A Wish is such a amazing brand name and so highly thought of that people think it's all good. They're they're doing such a good job. It's all good. And they don't realize that in LA, we really have to, as Angelenos, support our own kids, the kids who are dealing with critical illnesses.
So currently, we have 700 kids on a wait list in LA, some of whom have been waiting for two years. So anyone who's a parent knows life changes a lot in two years, like who a child is, where they're in their health journey. And we're trying to help these kids get better. Right? So most of our kids actually through the wish process get better because the wish gives them and families hope, strength, and joy.
I share this all this in the context of the rigor because it's very important we do a good job. That's how we're gonna reduce that wait list from 700, five hundred, two hundred so that every Angelino child, you know, and family knows that if they were in this situation, they would be very well served. Like, not when we get to it, but that they can rely on us. So that's that's the rigor that