And what was the thinking around hiring Art?

Absolutely.

You know, you're absolutely right, Jared.

Art is an amazing leader, and I'm so excited to be working with him.

And it was one of the first, shall we say, jobs that I had to undertake, which I didn't sign up for.

But I certainly feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to be part of that search process and to have directly worked worked with the search committee to hire Art.

One of the things that I really appreciate about the process that was established was that we didn't begin by saying, what kind of person do we personally want? What is the job description? How can we change the competencies and skills? We started by listening to what our members wanted in the next leader.

So what's some practical advice for leading with confidence when the road ahead isn't quite clear?

thank you appreciate that and in fact roger i think you were talking about this a bit before we went live today about some of these issues on uh on you know with respect to planned gifts or planning um and afp of course has been heavily involved in advocating for uh you know tax related policies that are that are beneficial to giving so what are your thoughts

Yeah, thank you, Jay.

Well, I mean, certainly the headline, the 600 million and surpassing that is something to celebrate.

It's impressive.

I think it speaks to the resilience of giving in the U.S. economy.

What struck me and what I thought was something that I'd like to comment on that Nicola mentioned is just the importance of individual giving in particular countries.

the increase in bequests and that important element of the work that frontline fundraisers are doing because bequest giving is a large component of planned giving programs.

What do we need to do about it? What's in this data that helps us figure out what to do?