January 2026 –

We have officially closed out our 25th anniversary year and I would like to take this first opportunity as the new board president to both review our 2025 performance and outline our strategic direction for 2026. Before I do that, however, I would like to thank outgoing board president David Smith for his years of dedicated service to the organization. We would not be where we are today without his efforts. At the same time, I’m very happy that Sheila Castiglie has joined our board. She has been involved with HGA for many years and is already bringing great energy to our cause.

We processed 6,870 requests during 2025 through the updated system and patient feedback suggests the changes made in early 2025 to our Mission Management System has made it easier for them to request rides. easier for them to request rides.

Our number of volunteer drivers increased 14% to 87 that completed at least one mission during the year. This group, along with Uber rides purchased for patients, completed 4,334 missions for a 75% overall success rate. One important statistic that does not stick out in the above chart is the fact our volunteer drivers drove 143 fewer missions than the previous year.

As a combined group we averaged eight fewer missions completed per volunteer during 2025. This is certainly a trend we would like to reverse during 2026. On occasion, we are able to get Uber rides when requests are not taken by drivers; but as you can imagine we are limited in how often we can do this. Any such rides ordered are paid for through generous donations, both large and small. A total of 156 different individuals donated money to HGA during the year.

Some were for larger amounts but 135 individually contributed under $250. It is very common for patients to thank drivers by going to our website and providing a donation since our volunteers don’t accept tips. And we also owe a thank you to those that designated Houston Ground Angels as their preferred charity in the name of their loved ones.

The bar chart below compares our success rate over the past four years and is a good illustration of how the overall volume of requests has changed as well as our success rate in fulfilling mission requests.

Footnote 1: As discussed further at the end of this message, we changed the way we account for mission requests that are entered at the last minute and don’t provide adequate opportunity for our volunteers to see and take the missions. The change didn’t impact the # of Completed missions but did lower the Total mission count for 2025. Had our methodology not changed, our success rate would have stayed flat at 67%.

The chart below shows the volume of patients requests we get for the various airports in Houston as well as the percentage of requests that are taken. It is always great to see our success rate for patients coming into the smaller airports on private flights provided by such partners as Angel Flight South Central, Pilots for Patients, Dow Chemical, and Pilots for Christ.

Looking Ahead to 2026
The key challenge remains clear as we move into the new year. The 75% overall completion rate is amazing as is the fact we provided over 4,000 rides for patients in need. But we still had 1,431 patient requests that we were unable to meet. Our mission continues to focus on completing the highest number of requests possible.

There are two primary ways we will aim to increase the total number of missions completed this year. 

·        The first is to add new volunteers to our driver pool. Nearly all new volunteers hear about HGA through word of mouth, so we need all of our current volunteers to increase the awareness to those they cross paths with to encourage them to try out volunteering.

·        The second path to increased missions taken is through the number of missions each driver is able to take. We had 24 volunteers during 2025 that, as a group, drove an additional 700 missions compared to the prior year. That is fantastic and some quick math shows that if each of our volunteers found a way to drive just one more mission each month we would add over 1,000 more completed missions. That’s power in numbers!

Local Mission Requests: We continue to receive a significant amount of requests from local residents. These requests have continued to be more challenging to fulfill and as a result we only achieved a 58% completion rate during 2025. We have established aggressive targets to increase the local success rate this year. 

In addition to challenging our volunteer drivers to sign up for more Local requests, we have partnered with Victory Houston, a nonprofit established four years ago. They provide grants for cancer-related initiatives that include research and discovery, patient services, and access for underserved or underinsured populations that focus on all types of cancer and have agreed to fund a limited amount of Uber rides for those local residents that do not have a volunteer and are needing to get to their cancer-related appointments.

The thousands of patients Houston Ground Angels serves annually are certainly our primary focus but not a day goes by that I don’t feel blessed to be part of a wonderful team of volunteer drivers that each do their part in taking care of one key aspect of the difficult journeys our patients are on. Together you are the heart and soul of Houston Ground Angels! Keep up the great work in 2026 as we strive to accomplish our goals.

If you made it this far, I would love to receive any feedback you have on the information shared as well as any suggestions, comments, or concerns about the upcoming year. 

Send Paul Marvin a note.

With great appreciation for your support of HGA,

Paul

Brief note on record keeping: To provide the best opportunity for matching volunteer drivers with patient needs, we have long maintained an informal requirement that local and airport requests be submitted, 48 hours and 24 hours, respectively, prior to the requested pick up. We still allow requests to be entered after those deadlines, and they are often picked up by volunteers. When it came time for reporting results for 2025, however, we tagged these late entries as “cancelled” as we didn’t have an adequate opportunity to match requests.