Welcome to Brazos Matters.

I'm Jay Socol.

So if you were a student at Texas A&M any time between, say, the 1980s and now, then I'm pretty sure you're familiar with the big event, whether it's it was in its infancy or it looks like it does now, but it's always been the largest student led single day of community service in the nation.

And it's a day of Aggies giving back to the Bryan College Station community.

They served as home for four years or maybe more.

So chances are you at least have a vague idea of what big event is, but there's a chance that you don't.

And there's also a chance you've never thought about the kind of advanced coordination that is required with both cities to ensure things run smoothly.

And we're not left with big debris piles in all of our neighborhoods.

So my co-host today is student contributor Gracie Dolan, and our guests are Becca Dawson with the Big event and Caroline Ask, Solid Waste division manager for the City of College Station.

Thank you for joining us, Becca and Caroline.

Thanks for having us.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Gracie, it's all you.

Take it away.

Becca, we're going to start with you.

Obviously, big event has changed a lot in the last 40 years, but how has it changed in the past few years or even, like, from last year to this year?

Yeah.

So in the last few years, we've made a lot of changes, especially with our internal organization.

So we have an internal organization of about 400.

So that starts with our 315 staff assistants as the ones who are going out in the community ahead of time on things called job checks and going and meeting the residents, having the thoughts and paperwork and just getting to know their story.

And so they do that at time.

And then our committee members, we have about 60 of them, they kind of manage our staff assistants and then they also have specific committee roles, whether that's on the operations committee or public relations or donor relations.

And there's six different committees.

And then we have our executive team of 12 and then our associate director, and I serve as the director.

So it's grown a lot in the past few years, our internal organization, just to be able to go on all those job checks.

And we go to every single resident's home ahead of time and make sure the safety is ready to go and that we know what the job is.

We have the tools so that we can provide for them.

So I would say in the past few years it's grown probably from like closer to 300 to more 400.

In the past, like five years, just to keep up with the amount of residents that were serving, because we want to be able to serve all residents that sign up on time.

And so to be able to do that, we have to have the internal structure.

But I would say we're still getting back to actually our numbers pre-COVID.

So in 2019, we had about 20,000 volunteers.

And last year our number was about 16,500.

So we're still trying to get back to that number.

We've made some fun things happening this year to try to increase.

We were able to give out 5000 T-shirts to the first 5000 sign up.

Hey, I got on.

Yes.

I got so excited.

I love, like, hearing every one of my classes be like, I got an email about it.

And I was like, yeah, I did.

So really excited about that.

Just trying to increase our volunteer signups.

But with the rate that we're growing, it's definitely going to have to make some changes to just be able to keep up with everything.

But we've been making some really great changes and like we used to not have a donor relations team and typically it takes a lot of money to run.

And so we created that team about three years ago and that's been a really big change for us.

That's been great.

That's great.

Next, I wanted to ask you, obviously there's a lot that goes on that goes into putting on big event.

So from being selected to staff or choosing your committees to the kick off ceremony and to tool pick up what kind of goes on behind the scenes that people might not expect, people might not think about.

Yeah, so the big that really is a full year round event.

So I was chosen in my position early April and then very quickly my associate director was chosen and then our executive team and then we got our committee and our staff right at the beginning of the fall semester.

And so we're really planning all year those job checks.

Like I said, our staff are going to over 2500 residents homes.

That's a lot.

And so they need plenty of time to be able to prepare for that.

But we also put on a donor gala in the fall, and this year we actually had the opportunity to host a conference with big events from other schools.

So fun fact, there's I think it's 282 big events at other schools.

So it's not just that and we did found it here.

It was founded here, but we've been able to spread our message to a lot of other universities in the country and nationally, the whole world.

So we hosted a conference in January and had about 16 schools come in and share ideas and collaborate and just learn from each other.

And then but really leading up, we there's a lot of strategy that goes into our tools.

So making sure that we're able to allocate enough tools if we need to purchase more tools each year.

Also planning the traffic flow.

We work at A&M Transportation Services and they really help us with how do we get cars in and out the fastest way possible?

Because if we don't want everyone backed up and just like we want to be able to get them in efficiently and out.

And so there's a lot of just planning that goes into each of our executives.

They both have a partner.

And so out of the 12, there's a six committees.

And so we have operations, donor relations, public relations, recruitment, development and programs.

And so they each kind of have a different thing that they focus on, whether that's tools or the kick off ceremony we have, we've been working since last semester finding vendors and entertainment speakers for the kickoff ceremony.

So there's really a lot of planning that goes in, but it's definitely spread out amongst our whole internal organization.

That's great.

That's great.

So I'm going to switch to Caroline.

Most people think of the big event being entirely a student endeavor, right?

But it actually involves a ton of coordination and planning with both cities.

So could you pull back the curtain just a little bit to give us some examples of what the city does leading up to the big event?

And on the actual day and in the days following the event?

Sure.

So there are multiple multiple representatives in different departments that work directly with big event and their executive staff, and that begins with internal communication and then, of course, external communication.

We're looking at ensuring that the community in some of our senior community has the ability to be able to sign up, whether that's not an electronic version, but something in actual hard copies and available to them, which is great.

And the exact team has been really generous with their time to ensure our community is being able to participate.

On the operational side, What we also look at is ensuring that we have staff that's available the following week.

So like you mentioned, is ensuring that there are no major piles all over the place in our residential areas and those that are being served by the event, we ensure that we have disposal guidelines that are provided to big event volunteers as well as the residents that are receiving that service.

And kind of some of those items that we're looking at is ensuring that we have separation of piles.

So it's a smooth and easy process for our solid waste team.

If there's any brush items that are out, we'll make sure that we have enough staff to take care of those.

We do a lot of communication on that end as well as the items that we can actually accept.

So another big event that's coming up is the HHW So what we'll do is we'll put out some advertisement just for those that are being serviced by big event that hold on to some of your hazardous waste items and we can collect that for free during the HHW event.

But there's a lot of internal communication making sure that we have those sign up.

Solid waste is ready to go to service all of our communities on both Bryan and College Station as well as after the fact.

So that's kind of what it looks like behind the scenes.

Yeah.

So my years with both cities, I recall the roll off containers that would have to be set out ahead of time in neighborhoods to make big event easy on volunteers and relatively easy on your crews.

Can you talk about those?

Sure.

So we have in the past where big event has requested roll off boxes at certain parks and more public locations that are readily available to the volunteers.

So that is always an option for them.

And usually it's just kind of more of a a centralized communal disposal option, which is great.

We still have our bulk and brush team that goes out and we service all residences on a weekly basis so you don't have to utilize roll off.

Boxes will come through the next week.

Just as kind of a reminder, we only have about 34 or 35 full time operators and they're sectioned out based on lines of business.

So some specifically service commercial entities and the rest service are residential areas.

So it's kind of hard for us to do a clean sweep of the entire city for single family homes just a couple of days after big event.

But we will get to everyone and make sure everything is collected the week, the whole week following big event.

Yeah.

What kind of overlap in Collision of collection is there when you've got all of this debris and all this extra stuff out, but you still need to run those regular routes.

How how does that is that.

Yeah, right.

So there's a lot of coordination between like a typical rear load crew and a boom crew.

So in case anyone was kind of wondering what a boom truck is, it's the truck that has the giant claw on it.

So anything that's larger or too heavy for two people to pick up, we utilize a boom truck.

They communicate quite a bit.

There's usually a rear load team and a boom teams assigned to each route and they are constantly talking to each other to make sure that piles are being picked up in which specific type of truck to ensure no injuries.

Besides that, it's really where we run until the route is complete.

There is no cut off at, say, four or 5:00.

We're going to complete the route.

And so if you see that maybe we haven't gotten to your pile by four or 5:00, we're going to run until the sun goes down.

So you will be collected on your designated collection day.

It's nice to know that we're going to come back to you.

So you talked about all your difficulties and things and how you do the job checks.

You have people for that.

So logistically, how do you guys decide, you know, type things of things like number of volunteers at each location, the tools you need, the supplies, everything like that.

How do you guys decide that?

Yeah, So that all goes into those job checks like I was talking about earlier.

So when our staff and so we have about 314 staff assistants and there they each have a partner and so they go to the they reach out ahead of time to the residents and set up a time to go to their their home and see the property have developed the paperwork.

And so in that they see what kind of job needs to be done, we write it down so that we're knowledgeable of what's happening.

And then also they decide, do we need this many shovels or some rakes here to clean up the leaves or whatever they need?

Our staff are trained to know what tools that the job might need, and so they talk about what tools they need if the resident may already have some or if we need to provide any we provide tools for, I would say probably about 85% of our jobs, at least gloves.

And so we provide those tools and they write it down on our paperwork and then they send that back to us.

It goes through our committee members who enter it, into it into our system, and then our executive team also checks over it.

And so that shows the amount of tools that they need.

And then through that, we're able to we have a really great system online between online or like website and the IT department.

Here at A&M has been really helpful with us to just keep track of everything on there.

And so then we're able to basically run a report that assigns tool lines and prints out these check out checking cards so that volunteers know how many tools they need.

And so basically also when they're on those job checks, they kind of talk with the resident, see how many volunteers are you thinking?

Like think they also use?

They're just kind of judgment of, if it's a smaller task, maybe they only need four volunteers.

If something really large, maybe they need more like 12.

And so they kind of just make that decision.

And also talking with the resident to make sure that they know what's going to be happening.

And it's not 20 people showing up when it was only supposed to be 12 or something.

So we want them to be prepared.

And so all that goes in our online system and yeah, awesome.

So the people who are doing those job checks are doing the heavy like Yes, yes, we're very appreciative of our staff citizens.

They they work so hard throughout the year and just going on so many job checks and especially at the end when we'll have a lot of job jobs coming in.

And so they work so, so hard and they are going on this job checks every single day.

So it's really great.

Yeah.

If you just tuned in, I'm Jay Socol with Gracie Dolan.

You're listening to Brazos Matters.

Our guest today, our Becca Dawson with the big event and Caroline Ask with the City of College Station.

We're talking about this annual Aggie tradition of students giving back to the Twin Cities.

Okay, Caroline, you talked about the kinds of things that that your crews have to go out and collect, but I imagine you're trying to divert as much of that from the landfill as possible.

Is there any kind of coordination with Brazos Valley Recycling, or how do you address that aspect?

So when we're looking at kind of separating out different items in kind of the piles that we'll see after the service event, we rely pretty heavily on our guidelines as well as communication that's provided by both the big event staff to their volunteers and those that are being serviced as well as through both cities.

And we relatively, Bryan and College Station have the same guidelines.

So it's a lot of communication, a lot of coordination.

So in terms of disposal guidelines, we ensure that say if you're putting something into your garbage cart, it should be in your garbage cart.

So that means no bulk items, no brush items.

And you mentioned kind of separating out those items and how we can divert items from the landfill.

So how that works is we request that any bulky items and any brush items are separated out.

We actually collect brush by itself and that brush is diverted from the open cell of the landfill.

There is a separate section of the landfill where all of our brushy vegetative items are mulched and it's actually available or at BVSWMA And it's available to the community if you want to purchase mulch from BVSWMA.

Right.

So that's great.

And it actually extends the life span of the landfill as well.

BVR does play a heavy role in ensuring if you have any recyclable items, they do as well as us.

We continuously check if we have any complaints or whatnot or if they have to skip containers to ensure that there isn't any trash, what we call contamination inside of the containers, because they want to ensure that they can actually recycle the items that are there.

So we rely, like I said, pretty heavily on those guidelines that are distributed out to everyone.

Makes sense.

Yeah.

Okay.

I wanted to ask so is big event really only for under-resourced households or is it really for anybody, no matter what their income, their ability might be?

Yeah.

So the big event mission is to say thank you to the community of Bryan College Station.

So we don't base off who we serve based off of socioeconomic status or anything like that.

It really is just as long as they sign up by the deadline.

And so we our mission really is to say thank you.

I think of it as kind of like we're coming to this town really nine months out of the year for four years, and we make grocery lines, crazy traffic just yeah, insane.

And so we really kind of disrupt the town.

And so we want to be able to show our gratitude because the City of Bryan and College Station both like, they really welcome us in here and they're so kind to us and, you know, really get to see the residents very often when you're kind of you're in your campus bubble and you really don't get to see the residents that you're surrounded by.

And so this is a really great opportunity to get to meet them because the residents love hearing the stories of students and they love just getting to know them, They love to give them advice.

And that's just a really special opportunity to have.

And so, yeah, we serve anybody who signs up by the deadline because we really just want to be able to reach as many residents as possible.

And so we really want to just be able to say thank you and show our gratitude and also be able to give not just the residents, also the students.

That connection.

Yeah, that's from.

Yeah, Human connection.

We all need it.

Yes.

Then I was going to also ask, how do you get to helping every household that has a request?

You said, how many people is that that you serve each year?

We're looking at about 2500 residents here.

So how do you guys serve everybody in one day, or is there maybe a secondary day that you go and help the maybe less big requests or does it all really get done on that big event DAY?

Yeah.

So I think something we're really fortunate to have is the student body that is so invested in tradition and the students really care.

They want to show their core value of selfless service.

And so we're able to have so many volunteers sign up that we're able to have the capability to be able to go out to all those residents homes.

And sometimes there might be, when we run our system and finalize the job information, if we for some reason don't have enough volunteers, then it'll be like basically kind of like maybe one job here and there.

We cut one volunteer off or something like that so that we're able to go to each job.

But luckily we have been very fortunate to have the student body that we do, and they're so invested in the tradition of the big event and they want to serve and they want to volunteer and meet the residents.

And so we're able to have enough numbers that we are able that we are able to serve.

Every resident sends up sometimes on the day of there are circumstances that happen, whether that's a miscommunication somewhere or a volunteer group doesn't show up or something like that, and we reassign jobs as much as possible.

But we do have a spring service project where basically our internal members go out and serve residents to some.

If something happened and maybe it was a last minute, something came up a emergency and they weren't able to have volunteers come out or for some reason we weren't able to send volunteers out.

That is a very, very low number, which we're very happy about that.

It's such a low number, but we do make sure we go back about two or three weeks later and our internal members get the opportunity to serve.

And that's really awesome.

That's great.

I bet it's great for you all to be able to also play your part in it.

Yeah, We also have a fall service project, which is a little bit more of just to kind of get our internal members more familiar with the big event and also to give them that experience.

Because on the day of we are running the logistics, we are we're so busy running around doing the tools to kick off everything.

And so our internal internal members don't actually get to go out to residents homes and serve.

But we're able to do that.

Our full service project, which happens around October.

And so we kind of try to see if there's any residents that maybe we have a special connection to or that have just really shown a lot of interest in the big event or maybe possibly someone who was able to get served back in the spring.

And so we go out in the fall and we're able to do that.

All 400 of us go to all these residents homes.

But in the spring we do about two weeks later, we make sure that every resident gets served.

That's great.

That's great.

So I'll put this out to both of you.

Big event I don't guess is ever going to get smaller and the community is not going to get any smaller.

And so as time goes on and things grow, do you see the potential for some changes here and there that could make things better, easier, more efficient, both for your organizations and for the homeowners who who host you?

Well, if you wouldn't mind, I'll like start from the city point of view.

So, Jay and I actually had this conversation before recording is from a city standpoint.

So I've been with the solid, solid waste department for a while and have been privileged to sit on the stake or participate in the stakeholder meetings with you guys.

And I will say this year has been absolutely exceptional and the communication and just being able to play a part and have a relationship with you guys has been fantastic.

And coming from a city, we I feel like we share a common goal is we're always of service to other people.

And so I want to say just from my standpoint with solid waste is we had no comments, no reviews, no nothing.

Y'all did a fantastic job and I'm really excited for this year.

I think that you guys are going to have a great event and it's going to go very smoothly.

And I just wanted to outright say how much we appreciate y'all and giving back to the community.

So from the city standpoint, I think they've done fantastic.

Well, I will only interject to say that during my years at both cities, I heard from time to time from those liaisons, the city liaison saying it's like this group never even talked to the last, you know.

So yeah, they didn't even contact us and we're the cities.

And so to hear this from Caroline, that's a big compliment.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

Yeah, we obviously were trying to improve every single year.

We've tried to improve that communication with the cities.

We there are things that we don't even know is possible that we're able to go and talk with both the city of College Station and the city of Bryan, and they're able to give us all these new ideas of ways that we can reach residents or provide us with the guidelines for what to how to dispose of things.

And so we are trying to improve that communication and also be able to communicate that with our volunteers and our residents.

And so we're definitely as we grow, it's going to have to make some changes, but we there are still so many residents that maybe don't even hear about the big event.

And so we're still trying to be able to reach every single one.

We want everybody who, if they want to sign up, that they get to and that we're able to send volunteers out there.

So we're working with the city to we'll do things like go and table at city Hall or go to community centers just any way that we can to reach those residents who maybe they don't have social media or anything like that and they're not able to see our platform as much.

But being able to go to in person and get to see them and be able to sign them up right then and there has been really great.

So we are the the OG on big event, right?

It started here in 82, you said Yes, 82.

And so, you know, we have ownership of this thing, but you said there are how many other big events across the country.

It's a it's over 280.

So my curiosity is, do you hear how some of those have been operated to where you're like, you know what, That's a good idea.

We need to borrow that.

And like, you start borrowing good ideas from other big events.

Any examples of that?

Yeah, I mean, at our conference that we hosted, so we hosted it this year, it kind of moves around between different schools, but it's a great way to just share ideas and collaborate something that we weren't really able to implement this year because it was a little too late.

But another school told us that they send out information to sign up and the water bill that goes to all residents, if you think about it, I mean, that is something that every single resident would see.

And so that's something that we're going to be looking into for next year, seeing if that's a possibility.

So things like that.

It's just a great way to share ideas because we have a lot of similar obstacles and challenges.

And so we're able to hopefully implement some of those ideas.

Okay.

Any nightmare stories Because there has to be lore that exists about like, my gosh, what there was is there is this group of students and they went to this one house.

And it also I'm hoping that is not my house because we've had big event for a bunch of years.

It's been some interesting jobs, but anything that stands out is like these were these were examples of trying times.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

not that I can really think off of off the top of my head.

We we hear a lot of stories.

It's great when like, when the volunteers are coming back to drop off their tools, sometimes they might be waiting for a second here and there, and all of our staff are all around the parking lot and so we're able to hear a lot of positive experiences every once in a while there might be a negative experience.

Maybe they just didn't click with the resident.

But overall, I would say we have normally very, very positive experiences and we do send out surveys at the end to all volunteers and all residents, and sometimes they might say, the volunteers didn't stay the whole time or something, or they just didn't want to have a heavy lifting or something.

But that's why we try to we do a volunteer training video ahead of time and they have to go through this little course to make sure that they're kind of prepared.

But because we try not to have any thing bad happen and so we we really try to train and equip them beforehand.

But yeah, no lore really.

Okay.

Well, I think you're being very kind because I think those stories are out there.

So as we are beginning to wrap up our time together, Caroline, I wanted to give you an opportunity to really sing the praises of your crews because you're kind of the unsung heroes, right?

They they make magic happen.

And, you know, we put stuff out at night and then we wake up and it's gone.

But talk about the quality of your crews.

Well, first, thank you.

I appreciate that.

Yeah.

So I as part of the Solid waste division, you are absolutely correct.

So the majority of the time, if things disappear and we don't hear from people, it's usually because it's going well.

We only normally hear from people when something is happening.

So thank you.

I appreciate that.

Yeah.

So we have about 34 to 40 or two, 35 full time equipment operators and they have to service all 130,000 people that live here, residents as well as all the commercial entities.

So we're a little bit of an anomaly for utilities because we physically have to touch every account, every person's home, every everything.

And I'm really appreciative, appreciative of the work ethic of our staff and the amount of time and effort they put in to not only their training and holding themselves accountable and their teammates team members accountable, but again, like we talked about, our common goal is just servicing the community.

And I think sometimes maybe if you're not from Bryan College Station, we do things a little bit differently.

Our service, our lines of service are almost to the not necessarily to the extreme, but we want to make sure that every one is taking care of, which is why we provide weekly card service.

We provide weekly bulk and brush service, which sometimes is a little unheard of.

And we have that single stream recycling for our staff.

So thank you.

I really appreciate you mentioning that.

And absolutely huge thank you to our staff and everything that they do for us.

Of course, unfortunately, our time is up, but Caroline and Becca, thanks for being with us today.

Thank you for having us.

Absolutely.

Brazos Matters is a production of Aggieland's Public Radio, 90.9 Kamu FM, a member of Texas A&M's Division of Marketing and Communications.

for Gracie Dolan, I'm Jay Socol.

Thank you so much for watching and listening and we hope you have a wonderful day.