Mission Creep

The Red Cross has more than $3 billion in annual revenue. You respond to tens of thousands of disasters each and every year. And this includes everything from individual house fires to big natural disasters, affecting thousands of people. You play such a big role in providing relief for so many. So what is your process of expanding your sphere of influence in how many lives you touch?

First of all, we're really careful about mission creep. When I first got to the Red Cross, we had a parking lot where we were selling used cars. We had a mausoleum which I don't know exactly what we were doing with that. Had people driving drunk kids around on Saturday night, which is a good thing to do, you don't want to tell your mom, so you call the Red Cross. But it wasn't part of our mission. And so we're really trying to avoid mission creep because our mission is complicated as it is. I mean, we are responding to disasters, we’re teaching first aid, CPR, we've got a huge operation to help our military, we collect blood, we work overseas to help other Red Cross and Red Crescent societies. So I don't want to take on more mission, but I do want to be able to expand what we have. And a big way we've been doing that is to partnerships.

We have a really strong partnership with FEMA. They are unbelievable. They're usually unsung heroes, but hats off to those guys because they really help us during disasters. So it's a team sport. If we collect more money than we need for just response, we go deep into recovery. So we'll go home to home and figure out how bad is the damage. Can we give you some extra dollars? And we give everybody a month's worth of relief in terms of financials. But if your house got knocked down, we'll give you more. And that's when we expand our partnerships yet again, because there are local charities and all of these communities, we're in every single county in the US, but the way we can expand what we can do is by working with other nonprofits and for-profits for that matter.