Variety aims to serve children aged birth to 21 with both physical and intellectual disabilities, regardless of socioeconomic status, through providing equipment, therapy and a wide breadth of educational and recreational programs. We measure our success by four parameters: Skills, Self-Esteem, Socialization, and Independence. Socialization:Socialization is an integral part of a child's development, and our goal is to ensure that all Variety Kids are able to engage with and experience their world as fully as possible. This prepares a child to operate more successfully in society, allowing him or her to build relationships with others of all abilities. Through socialization, children may experience increased participation with family, community members and friends, as well as an increase in initiating interactions with others and decreased time in isolated activities. Independence:Independence is about being able to express choices, identify preferences and have a sense of autonomy about your own life. Through our programs and services, we hope to increase the independence of Variety Kids in settings that are both familiar and unfamiliar. Self-Esteem: We find it extremely important that all children are able to demonstrate belief in themselves, their abilities and their possibilities. By increasing self-esteem for each child, we hope to increase confidence in abilities, improve attitude towards these abilities and increase motivation and perseverance in various tasks. Skill Development:Through our programs, Variety Kids gain the skills they need to engage and experience their world as fully as possible, no matter their abilities. This can be achieved through improving one's ability to physically navigate one's environment, or improving how one copes with this environment. We also aim to improve strengths, stability and other motor skills, as well as increase the ability to express oneself. Finally, it is our goal to increase knowledge and skills related to performing arts through programs such as Variety Theatre, Variety Children's Chorus and Curtain Up! Camp.

When Variety commits to a child, we commit to improving every facet of his or her daily life. For this reason, we provide a wide range of services, including durable medical equipment and various therapies (including physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, hippotherapy, aquatherapy and more) as well as a wide range of programs. These programs include Variety Theatre, in which children of all abilities perform alongside an adult cast in a major theatrical production, Variety Children's Chorus, which offers kids the chance to learn new songs and perform to various audiences and Adventure Camp, which offers a slew of new experiences that many of our Variety Kids would not experience anywhere else. To ensure that each of these programs is reaching our desired outcomes, pre- and post-program surveys are administered to parents, therapists and the children themselves. We utilize the information found through these services to continuously improve our offerings.

Each department in our organization, and each employee and volunteer, is truly dedicated to our mission and to Variety Kids. Our overall goal is to increase the success of each child in our organization based on our core competencies, and each department understands and works towards this goal together. All of our departments and programs are continuously evaluated for areas of improvement, and strategies are applied to achieve our goals and mission. Additionally, we are led by a board that is comprised of major community leaders, which includes ten active standing committees that also help to guide the decisions and strategies of each department. It is through the talents of all of these philanthropic individuals that our organization is able to succeed.

Variety is constantly tracking data on everything in our organization, including events, programs, communications and more. We work to set measurable objectives and measure ourselves against these objectives by looking at a breadth of relevant data collected from multiple sources, using effective measurement tools. In addition, we collect pre- and post-program surveys from all involved so that we may further evaluate current offerings and what we may do to continue to improve them in the future.

As an organization, Variety is constantly looking to the future and evolving year over year. Thus far, Variety the Children's Charity of St. Louis, specifically, has implemented many new programs in the St. Louis area, including Bikes for Kids, which provides both adaptive and standard bikes to area kids in need, Adventure Camp and Variety Theatre. In fact, Variety Theatre is unique in that it is a one-of-a-kind program that involves adults in addition to kids of all abilities. In 2013, we were awarded the Gold Heart Award, awarded to the top Variety chapter out of over 40 around the world. And, in 2015, Variety was awarded the Better Business Bureau's TORCH award for "Best Non-Profit. " We continue to look to the future, however, and hope to one day open a single facility that can house all of our programs in one accessible location.