Viva St. Jude had a number problem. The Las Vegas fundraising weekend for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital had been running for years, had a loyal volunteer committee, had the right venues, and had consistently hit a ceiling. The goal every year was $1,000,000. The actual take, year after year, ranged from $800,000 to $850,000. The gap had nothing to do with effort. It was structural.
That is the problem Kelli Stavast inherited when she agreed to become the event’s chair.
The On-Ramp
Stavast’s path onto the Viva St. Jude committee started the way most volunteer paths do: almost by accident. She and her husband, the former professional racer Gavin Ernstone, were invited to attend a St. Jude poker tournament in Las Vegas roughly four years earlier. She’d been a St. Jude donor for years, writing the occasional check, treating it as her charity of choice in the quiet way people do when the giving is private. She didn’t know the hospital had a Las Vegas event.
They went. A patient mother spoke that night. Stavast has described what happened next in very few words. She cried. Her husband, who doesn’t cry easily, cried too. They drove home and decided this one wasn’t going to be just a check anymore.
The following year, they hosted a private fundraising dinner at their home. A celebrity chef cooked. A musician from The Voice played. Friends and family came, donated what they could, and the total went to St. Jude. It was a small event. It was also the kind of gesture the hospital’s regional development staff noticed. The local St. Jude representative reached out shortly after and asked Stavast if she would be interested in joining the Viva St. Jude executive committee.
She said yes. That was roughly three years before she was asked to chair.
The Ceiling
The Viva St. Jude weekend, in its pre-Stavast form, was a functional event that had found its floor and couldn’t find its ceiling. A 144-player golf tournament at the Arroyo Golf Club on Friday. A poker component at Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa. A Fashion Soirée gala on Saturday evening with dinner and live entertainment. Three distinct pieces, a committee of experienced Las Vegas volunteers running each one, and a development team at St. Jude supporting from the hospital side.
Every year, the target was $1,000,000. Every year, the number came in just under. $800,000 one year. $850,000 another. The weekend was good at what it was good at, but the math had stopped moving.
A plateau of that kind is a common problem in volunteer-led philanthropy. An event can be well-organized, well-attended, and well-regarded yet plateau, because the components that made it work at its current size are the same ones that cap its upside. Plateaus of this kind rarely break on effort alone. They break when someone with authority over the weekend is willing to look at the whole structure and ask which pieces are still earning their place on the calendar.
The Chair’s Decision
In 2024, Stavast became event chair. Her entry into the role, by her own account, was not diplomatic. The words she has used to describe what she did to the existing format is “blew it up.” She told the committee the weekend needed to do things differently if the plateau was going to break. Some committee members were skeptical. Some were nervous. She made the changes anyway.
She hasn’t publicly detailed every structural move she made. What is publicly knowable is the outcome. The 2024 edition of Viva St. Jude was held September 27 and 28 in Las Vegas. When the final totals came in, the weekend had raised just shy of $1.1 million. It was the first time the event had crossed the million-dollar mark.
What Stavast is willing to say about the process is that she did not inherit the chair role and run the existing playbook. She restructured the playbook. That is the difference, in her telling, between taking a title and doing the job.
Why This Is Harder Than It Looks
Anyone who has tried to push a plateaued fundraising event past its ceiling will recognize the quiet part of Stavast’s story, which is the part involving the committee. Event committees develop habits. They develop emotional equity in the components they’ve been running. A gala that has been the Saturday-night centerpiece for years is also the one a committee member took ownership of and poured energy into. Telling that person the format is changing is not a neutral ask.
The alternative, in most plateaued events, is to add. Add a new component. Tack on a new sponsor tier. Expand the guest list. Additions rarely move the needle because they don’t address what’s holding the weekend at 850. They just make the weekend bigger, which is not the same as making it more productive.
Stavast’s approach was the harder one. She subtracted where subtraction was required and restructured where the existing structure was holding weight it should not have been holding. The committee went along with it on faith. When the money came in above target, the faith paid.
The Recognition
St. Jude’s national organization tracks fundraising events by tier. There is a category, known internally as the Million Dollar Club, reserved for volunteer-led local events that cross the seven-figure threshold. Committees in the Million Dollar Club get different badges at the hospital’s annual committee gathering in Memphis. They sit in different sessions. The recognition is structural.
Two weeks after the September 2024 event, Stavast and the Las Vegas committee traveled to Memphis and were recognized in that tier for the first time. In the months that followed, Viva St. Jude was notified that the committee was being considered for a National Volunteer Group of the Year award at St. Jude’s summer leadership gathering, an award that spans every fundraising format the hospital runs.
The trajectory matters because it is the trajectory, not the title. A committee that had plateaued for several years posted a result that changed its standing inside the national organization in a single cycle.
The Lesson for Volunteer Fundraising
The instinct, when a charity event stalls, is to work harder within the existing frame. Sell more tables. Pitch more sponsors. Tighten the auction. All of that compounds incrementally. None of it addresses the structural reasons a weekend is capped at 850.
What Stavast did, whatever the specific moves turn out to have been, is the thing most plateaued committees cannot bring themselves to do. She looked at the format and decided that the format itself was the constraint. The committee had been performing at the ceiling of what the existing structure allowed, which is different from underperforming. Restructuring the weekend unlocked capacity that more effort inside the old structure could not have reached.
The outcome was the first million-dollar Viva St. Jude. The method was a chair who was willing to take the harder path in her first year in the role, say the uncomfortable thing in the committee meeting, and spend the political capital a new chair gets exactly once.
That’s the version of volunteer-led philanthropy that doesn’t photograph well. It’s also the version that moves the number.
