Each year, the President of the Board gives a special award, the President’s Significant Achievement Award.  

We’ve had an amazing year. We set goals that even I personally thought were a little lofty, maybe even unrealistic. As you probably know, our campaign totals have been in a state of decline over the past handful of years. We wanted that trend to stop, and I secretly hoped we could just stop it, with only a little hope that we could actually reverse it.    

We had two amazing Campaign Co-Chairs, Chief Ed Drain of the Amarillo Police Department, and Dane Williams of Valero who set a campaign goal of $4 million. It was a huge goal but it was one that everyone adopted as their own and set out to succeed. Our Loaned Executives worked hard, our staff worked hard, and our Board worked hard. This year’s success was a true team effort.  

When we reviewed and critiqued the past few campaigns, we knew we had to change. There’s an old saying “insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results”. Nothing could be truer. We needed new ideas, more energy, imagination, innovation, and thrill. We needed to reinvent our campaign.  

There are two people who immediately came to my mind when I began to consider this award. These two people transformed our campaign. They approached this campaign with new ideas, energy, enthusiasm, excitement, and a fire in their bellies. If I understand right, they were pretty much allowed to do whatever they wanted to do, with the belief that lighting the right fuel could start a really big fire.  It did. They did. I’ve never seen anything like either of them, with their passion, their smiles, and their philosophy of “let’s try it” in how they approached this campaign.