- Howdy.

- [Audience] Howdy.

- Hey, that was good, off to a great start on a beautiful day.

Welcome, I'm George Mann and I'd like to do the introduction of our guest, Dr. Patrick Suermann.

who in our audience are two important people Ray Pentacost and Cynthia Rockridge from the Center for Health Systems and Design.

And Patrick is Interim Dean of the College of Architecture.

I've known him for several years and worked with him.

He's a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, and also holds a PhD and he came from the Department of Construction Science and their Construction Science Industry Advisory Board has been very supportive of the BUILD program over the years and we all appreciate Patrick, what you and the Department of Construction Science has done, but now you have a lot more things in addition to worry about.

So we're very pleased that you're here, let's give Patrick a big hand and welcome.

(audience clapping) - Thanks so much.

Well, thanks for this opportunity, there's no better student run organization at A & M than Texas A & M BUILD, the BUILD program is giving and it relies on student leadership and so fitting with that, Dr. Carstensz is the Faculty Advisor of BUILD and I am going to introduce him today, but unfortunately he's not able to be here with us, but I think it's fitting because this is such a strong Student Leadership Program because if you didn't know, the BUILD Program was meant to continue the values that we had that came from Bonfire.

And when people started to see the void of the student leadership that came from the years post Bonfire fall in 99, BUILD was implemented to try to capitalize on instilling those values in Aggies.

And what better way to make sure that we carry on the spirit of Aggie land other than helping others.

The selfless service that we have as one of our core values.

So, first let me talk about Dr. Gordon Carstensz.

He's a Professor of Animal Nutrition in the Department of Animal Science.

And Dr. Carstensz has served as the BUILD Faculty advisor since its founding and he plays an active role in long term planning and decision making.

In addition to teaching Animal Nutrition courses, Dr. Carstensz conducts research on energy metabolism and growth and development in ruminants.

His specific research areas include the regulation of growth and composition of carcass and memory tissues by nutritional control and the use of externally administered exogenous growth regulators.

Recent research has focused on methods to increase the ability of newborn calves to produce heat and fight off cold, stress and the influence of genetic and nutritional components on this ability.

That is very difficult for a construction person to read those words.

So Dr. Carstensz is obviously much smarter than me, but Dr. Carstensz is proud to put his faith in the student leadership we have here.

I'm gonna introduce you to Nick, who's the CEO of BUILD and to Travis, who is the Co-team Lead and Deputy.

So Nick Janzen is born and raised in Roseville, California.

Nick is a fourth generation Aggie studying Industrial and Industrial Systems Engineering.

Nick first volunteered with BUILD in 2018 before joining the command team and serving as the Chief Operating Officer in 2021.

As BUILD's Chief Executive Officer now, Nick establishes long-term objectives, works with the BUILD's board of directors and maintains relationships with non-governmental organizations, donors, and university officials.

Travis Andrews.

Travis is a Masters of International Affairs candidate at the Bush School.

He will be interning in Lavia with the Baltic Security Foundation over the summer on Chinese involvement in the Baltic's as well as his own individual research.

After two years in BUILD, Travis is now the External Relations Co-team Lead where he manages fundraising and helps coordinate with partnering with non-governmental organizations and keeping updated information on the Aggie BUILD containers that go out and help people all over the world.

And so what I love about this and I'll hand it over to Nick and Travis is that it shows that the physical BUILD environment takes everyone, takes the input of the designers, the people who are gonna use it, the people in the community and it's exciting to see the people who are the leaders of BUILD on something that, the types of things that we talk about on a daily basis in the College of Architecture.

So with that, I'll hand it over to Nick and Travis.

Thank you and welcome.

- Yes, sir, thank you so much, that was a great introduction.

We're glad to partner with you all again and Dr. Mann, thank you for having us here.

Like you said, my name's Travis Andrews, and we'll be starting with a few very basic questions.

So in terms of health development and healthcare around the world, you need to ask some foundational questions before you can get into the meat and the quality of healthcare, you need to first know, do you have access to healthcare?

Where is your nearest hospital?

And before Nick and I came over here, we looked it up.

We have three regional hospitals within a 20 minute drive and we have many more urgent cares and medical clinics within the Bryan-College Station community.

We have public transportation.

We could walk there if we wanted to bike, doesn't matter, it's all very accessible.

However, that's not the case around the majority of the world and that means that people don't have simple access to healthcare.

And the statistic is that 29% of Africans live at least two hours from a hospital.

You can't even worry about quality before you can even get to the hospital.

And that's not the case for everywhere in Africa.

Sub-Saharan Africa is definitely a lot worse than countries like Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, South Africa.

South Africa has high quality healthcare.

And then another statistic is that in the US there are 2.8 hospital beds per 1000 individuals.

However, on contrast in a country like Guatemala which is a developing country in Central America, there are about 0.4 hospital beds per 1000 people and that's what BUILD is trying to mitigate.

And that turns us to another question, what is the quality of your care?

Let's say you get to a hospital.

Let's say we travel to a regional clinic here in Bryan-College Station, we'll receive high quality healthcare for what we can pay and in the picture in the right, it's an urgent care room in Texas.

One, it's very accessible to us, you can see that there's high quality medical devices.

There's privacy, you have your own bed.

However, in contrast here's a picture of an under underdeveloped healthcare in Uganda where no privacy, you can look at the quality of the medical infrastructure and the systems that they use.

Look at the amount of patients that there are all waiting, sitting on the floor.

And this is a large problem in rural populations especially and that is what we do.

- Yeah, so this is really where BUILD comes in.

What we do is we convert these 40 foot shipping containers that you see on the left into fully functional mobile medical clinics that get shipped overseas to communities in need.

And the majority of these clinics are going to places where like Travis was saying, it's very rural, the problem is really access.

A lot of these communities don't have any way to get to their nearest hospital and so having these medical clinics that we build here on campus in their communities is really transformational not to mention they're built to a high standard, they are high quality medical equipment that's included in them and they really impact lives overseas.

And yeah, like I was just saying, so it's all about access and quality of healthcare.

There's another picture on the left there, Texas Aggie Medical Clinic, that's what they all look like.

To date we've done 37 in about 20 different countries.

And on the right is pretty much very typical of where these clinics go.

It's kind of out in the middle of nowhere, the infrastructure might not be very good, but it's in a state where you can get these clinic to the location and that they can be effective, they can be operated by either local doctors and healthcare practitioners or Americans who go abroad.

- And like the Interim Dean spoke about earlier is that we connect ourselves very closely with the Aggie spirit.

We connect ourselves really closely with the Bonfire remembrance, as many of all know, in 1999, the collapse of the Bonfire resulted sadly in 12 Aggies that perished so there was a gap in a almost semester long physically demanding project for students.

And that's what we do not want to replace Bonfire, but we want to reignite that spirit, that unifying Aggie student body spirit that it had for the campus on campus.

- And also put it towards something good, Bonfire was great, but at the end of the day you burn it and it's gone.

What we wanted to do with BUILD was to take all of that energy and put it towards something good for our community and for communities abroad.

And so in 2012, a bunch of student leaders got together and we formulated kind of the mission of BUILD and that is to unite the Texas A & M University student body through physically demanding large scale service project each year.

And if we go onto the next slide we can kind of see BUILD was really founded by a very broad base of the student body leadership.

So you have the student body President, you have the Deputy Core Commander, the President of the MSC, members from fraternities and sororities, the Aggie Band is represented and it was kind of an incredible thing to see the entire student body leadership come together with this sole objective of uniting the student body and putting it towards something good that helps people overseas.

- And one thing I think is very, very special about BUILD is that we also relate ourselves really closely to the Aggies that came before us.

We dedicate every single clinic to someone who has played a crucial role in the Aggie community and that's what every single project you have listed here is done.

So we began in 20, we were founded in 2012, but our project began in 2013 by partnering with Habitat for Humanity, but our initial clinics starting in 2014, we began with a "12 for 12 Campaign".

What that was is that every single clinic was dedicated to a member or a person that perished in the Bonfire collapse.

And then in 2017, we had our "5 for 5 Campaign" and then 2018 to currently now we are on our "Fallen Aggie Hero" project and those so far we've done 20 clinics.

- So Travis kind of gave an overview, I'm gonna go a little bit more in depth on kind of what we've learned from these projects, what these projects were and kind of the outcomes.

So our first project in 2013, when the student body leadership got together and said, what could we do that unites the student body, that's physically demanding, takes about a semester.

And they came up with a Habitat for Humanity house and this was a really great first project.

It was a house we built in Bryan, just 20 minutes from here you can still go and see it.

Components of the house, so like the walls were framed on campus at A & M both at the Grove and at Simpson Drill field.

And what we learned from this project, number one, is that our campus presence is essential.

If we want to unite the student body, we need to be accessible to the student body.

20 minutes drive is probably too far for most students to just kind of spend an hour or two.

And one of the best things about the Habitat house was that when the frames were being framed at the Grove and at Simpson Drill field, students would just walk past and have about an hour and just participate, contribute to the project, meet other people, have a good time and then just go about their day.

So that was something that we really wanted to continue doing in future projects, but we realized that the Habitat house model was not sustainable because it the majority of the project was not on campus and that wasn't something that we wanted.

So we came together and there was a local church at the time who was doing a medical clinic out of a shipping container once every like five years or so and so we kind of copied that model.

And like I said before, they're 40 foot shipping containers.

We outfit them with American electrical and plumbing with flooring cabinets, generator, air conditioning, medical supplies.

Everything is done by students except for the electrical and the plumbing because legal or something.

And these clinics are really built to survive shipment.

This is one of the biggest challenges that we have, we can't use stuff like drywall that will just vibrate apart when it gets shipped overseas because these clinics spend months at a time on the ocean being moved around in shipping yards and so they have to be tough, they have to survive shipment and we've learned a lot about that over the years, but yeah, that's the medical clinic.

- And to jump in you can see in this picture that the clinic is obviously not wide, but it has advantages because it has depth and there's multiple areas of separation that we'll go into briefly, but to relate it to a picture that I mentioned a long time ago, or a picture in Uganda where there's hardly any privacy.

As you can see here you have the curtain and you also have the partition wall and door in the back.

That's at least three areas of privacy right there for patients.

- So that's kind of exactly what Travis just said.

So this is kind of cross section of how we build our clinics today.

We have that front patio bit on the far left, that's just kind of the entryway, that's where we store the generator, that's where the plumbing and the electrical hookups all are.

And then you enter and you have that long room about 30 feet long and that's kind of where triage happens, basic treatment, that back with all the cabinets and the sinks are used for kind of a laboratory space.

And then exactly like Travis said, the very far back room is a private space where it can be one on one with just a doctor and that's really not something that you see in a lot of these communities, that level of privacy.

And it's also a lot more sterile, we even have NGOs overseas who practice surgery in that back room because there's enough separation from the outdoors.

So then, like Travis said, we launched into our "12 for 12 Project".

This was the first year that we were building these clinics.

We wanted to dedicate them in and somehow we wanted it to be meaningful.

And what we decided was exactly like Travis said, to dedicate these clinics to the 12 Aggies who had perished in Bonfire in 1999.

These clinics were built 100% on campus.

And like I was talking about with the Habitat thing, we learned that that was a really big deal.

We did four clinics which was quite a bit of a challenge.

I think we finished three in the 10 weeks that we had and we were most of the way through the fourth.

We had a lot of challenges.

The shipping containers are great for storing things until you start building a medical clinic inside of them and then you don't have anywhere to store your stuff.

So we realized we need to have a storage solution.

We also had no institutional knowledge.

None of us had done anything like this before, this was the first year, there were a lot of mistakes.

The biggest one, which was the most significant lesson that year was that we needed to work in parallel not series.

The first clinics that we built, we built one at a time kind of step by step and that meant we had to call out our subcontractors four times and we had to, and it sounds like such an obvious thing, but it was something that we had to learn.

And so now we do all of our clinics in series sorry, in parallel.

And yeah, so like I mentioned these clinics were dedicated to the 12 Aggies who perished in Bonfire and that continued through 2016, we did four clinics for three years.

In 2015, we were moved from the Grove to out by the GSC where we are to this date.

They had to build a hotel or something and so we are now at that 750 Agronomy location.

It's great for us, we're able to be there year round, which means that we can store all of our equipment there, our tools and our materials even though we only build in the fall.

- In 2016, we had our model clinic.

We finished the "12 for 12 Campaign" this spring semester we decided we wanted to build a almost permanent clinic that's gonna stay on the BUILD site.

So what this clinic does is that it stays on the BUILT site and acts as a point of reference, but also acts as the initial area that all of our volunteers go to.

For the majority of the part, students will arrive onto the build site and they'll go inside, check in and inside our model clinic has a lot of BUILD's history, BUILD information.

It acts as a reference point to use whenever we're constructing during the fall semester, but operationally, it has been in Rockport, Texas, and has also served in Hurricane Harvey relief and COVID testing and COVID treatment as well.

And is in remembrance of those or is honored those that were injured in the Bonfire collapse.

And then it also goes around campus for sponsorships and advertisement, it's been at Kyle Field Day.

We take it out for "Howdy Week", it's been ATCs.

It goes to Ru Plaza sometimes, it's probably one of our most or our best use of advertisement.

And at the end of the year, we talked about it briefly earlier, we have an end of the year gala after our fall construction cycle is complete and it's out there wherever we have our gala.

Donors can come see it, friends and families can come see what a finished clinic looks like before everything is sent out.

- So when we completed the "12 for 12 Campaign", we were looking for something different to do.

And we came across what was at the time, I think it was called the, "Aggie's Go To War" project.

And that was recognizing five Aggie's at A&M who played a significant all in the "Battle for The Bulge" and those are these five Aggies that you see here.

We obviously recognize a lot of the names Rudder, jumps out, and this was our first year doing five clinics, it was a significant challenge, we got them done and we learned a lot about kind of scaling up our project.

This point we were having more volunteers come out, we're around 1100, 1200 volunteers coming out.

And so allocating them to the entire project was an additional challenge.

And then as Travis mentioned, we've been on the "Fallen Aggie Hero" project since 2018 till now.

And this is recognizing all of the Aggies who have given their lives in service of the United States Armed Forces on or after 9/11.

To date we've done 19 and we're gonna just keep going.

- Oh, and then y'all might recognize if you look at number 27, our 27th clinic which is sent to Romania is in honor of President George H W Bush and his wife, Barbara, I think that's also a really special connection.

And here's like a breakdown of what a Texas Aggie Medical Clinic costs in total.

Like you said, since 2016, we've been doing five clinics and every clinic is $25,000 roughly.

But one of the challenges that we've been facing is since the COVID pandemic, a lot of these prices have been going up due to like supply and demand, shipping.

We've been facing challenges because containers which used to cost around $1,500 are now going all the way up to maybe $6,000 which is limiting a little bit of our operations, but we're facing the challenges pretty well.

And then one of our best milestones is helping us pivot around that is that as of 2021, BUILD is now a 501 nonprofit organization which improves our ability to mitigate those financial challenges.

And here's a big overview of where our clinics have gone.

As you can see, we've done like 36 clinics, but we've gone to almost every single continent, we've gone to five continents, but you can also look in Texas.

We stay in Texas, we have some clinics in Presidio, Laredo, Eagle Pass, (foreign language) and College Station, but we have pretty far reaching.

Like we have the George Bush Clinic in Romania.

We have a clinic at Cambodia, a few in Costa Rica, Central America, we have a couple in Jordan, Yemen, we're really far reaching I think that's really special for what a student organization can accomplish.

- Yeah, I wanted to touch briefly on, so I've talked about all of the construction of the clinics happens on campus by students.

When they're completed on campus after the 10 week construction process in the fall, we ship them to our partner called Medical Bridges in Houston and Medical Bridges is an incredible 5123.

They accept expired or unwanted medical equipment and supplies in Houston and ship them overseas to communities in need and the way that they help us out is that they stock our clinics with about $1,000 worth of medical supplies and equipment.

They're an incredible partner we would not be able to source those materials on our own and they also facilitate the shipment of the clinics overseas.

They work with the NGOs to freight forward and everything like that.

And we also work with them to locate new NGOs who want the clinics.

Early on we would have to reach out to NGOs and organizations and governments and say, hey, is this a something that could be useful for you?

And now at this point our name is out there so much that we have more demand than we can fulfill.

So we're looking at ways to increase the number of clinics that we can build every year and so on, but yeah, Medical Bridge is a great partner for us.

- [Travis] I'll talk.

- [George] You got a question from, we have about 26 of them.

From Sarah Midling she asked, where does the money go?

Does it help you pay your tuition?

- No, it does not, I wish.

- Sarah, I hope you heard that.

There's another question here from Richard Higgins.

What are the metrics on these clinics?

How many patient are they seeing?

What kind of patients?

Are there any clinics currently in use that you are particularly excited about or proud of?

- I can answer that, that's a good question.

- You can skip ahead to Mitchell maybe.

- Do what, no, not good.

Oh, we're about to get into that.

There's a few clinics that we're really proud of, a few clinics that we're about to go see as well in action.

And it also depends of wherever this clinic is located and who operates the clinic.

There's a clinic in Guatemala that is used for dental care.

And then there's some clinics, I think that the one in Iraq has about roughly a thousand people every two weeks.

- [Nick] Yeah.

- That they've told us that they receive and that's patients like that, that's just inflow.

That's how much that they can like check in on that may not, that's not operational, that's not fully procedures that's at least check-ins to, healthcare.

- [Nick] A standard number that we kind of throw out is about 250 per clinic per week is like an effective clinic that's going well.

- Yeah.

- [George] Can they visit your site out here?

- Of course, yeah.

- Sure, yeah.

- Absolutely, so we haven't really talked about it, but so construction starts kind of the third week of September and then we go till Thanksgiving in the fall.

So that's when you come out and volunteer and help and work out, but if you wanna just come on out, you can email us and we'll show you the site - [Moderator] One last one, we'll let you continue.

From Martin, the clinic in Honduras saw upwards of 400 people when they first opened several years ago.

That's just, it's not a question, it's just information.

Martin must be from there.

Michael Surac, maybe we'll hold your question for the end, I won't forget you and please continue.

- Okay.

- Thank you.

- Well, we're getting into probably my favorite part of this is, where do these clinics go?

Who is it operated on or by?

And then what is the impact?

So one of our partners is the VOOM Foundation.

Y'all had them speak a couple weeks ago I think.

I'm very, very proud of what they have accomplished.

I interred with them last summer, great foundation.

I'm very impressed what the students can accomplish in the organization as well.

So what the VOOM Foundation does, I just wanna reiterate a little bit is that they travel to Nigeria several times a year for medical missions where they perform cardiac surgery and now they have their own private hospital.

And that's a huge impact because in cardiac care in Nigeria, they rank almost near last in the world for just basic healthcare actually, that was a WHO report in 2018.

And I'm gonna be, we've said this word a lot today is access and that's what we really want to accomplish with the VOOM Foundation and it's impressive what we've done and that's what they need.

So what is that's what this partnership looks like.

Here's the picture the day (foreign language) Memorial Hospital and as you can see it' a modern looking hospital.

And what the VOOM Foundation has proposed is that our partnership is kinda like a spoke on the wheel around the hospital, it adds another access point.

We supply them more procedures, they can perform family medicine basic procedures inside the clinic.

And what it is is that indigenous populations can travel to the clinic for basic needs, for check-ins and if they need to, they can be transported then to the hospital cause a big thing is transportation and access.

And then our other partnership that we'll talk about is one that I'm very proud of we're about to go visit these two clinics in Jordan in May, the, "Walk With Me Foundation".

And it is run by Melissa Mitchell, who is a very accomplished individual in the NGO community.

Right now she is in Ukraine and Poland during the crisis and we have a clinic, an education clinic in Aqaba, Jordan, the capital, and then we have a health clinic in Amman, Jordan and I wanna point out the pictures in the right, one big thing about healthcare around the world is development, what does the initial development look like?

Is the clinic gonna be sustainable?

As you can see right next to it, what does it look like around it?

Basic development, not much.

And that's one thing that we're going to approve upon whenever we go visit the clinic, but what they can accomplish with just that health clinic in Jordan is impressive because the clinic is in a refugee camp and it's run by refugee doctors for refugees and one thing that's very special about that is that per the United Nations High Council for Refugees camps are not meant to be permanent.

So whenever a camp is not meant to be permanent, that means the development around the camp is not gonna be sustainable.

However, one portable high quality medical clinic in the location is extremely beneficial.

And our partnership with "Walk With Me" has benefited thousands of lives.

There are refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.

Syria has a large outflow of refugees since the climate crisis in the war.

And just now recently they're receiving Ukrainian refugees and I'm very, very proud of what they have been able to accomplish.

And here's just some more pictures from the "Walk With Me Foundation" and what it looks like.

So on the top pictures those are our education, those are pictures from our education clinics.

You can see the kids giving us gigs-ons and in the picture in the middle, you can see what it kind of looks like.

They're learning like English language, but what that is more importantly tying to is that these kids have come to refugee camps and they've been without education for who knows how long and what we've done is given them a facility to get back into learning.

And then the bottom pictures that is from our health clinic, we treat patients who may not have seen healthcare in months, years maybe.

And our age range obviously is from infants all the way to the elderly and that is one thing I'm very, very proud of.

And here's a list of where 2021 Texas Aggies Medical Clinics will be going to in April.

We have partnered with the Ademix Foundation, Pamoja Global and Partners of Compassionate Care.

We have two going to Nigeria, one to Tanzania, one to South Sudan, I'm very proud of the clinic going to South Sudan.

It is a majority rural country that needs health infrastructure and anything that we can do is extremely beneficial.

Thinking of just like as an outsider, this is done by college students and college students are having impact on relatively newly formed country that needs basic health infrastructure is impressive.

And I think it's gonna be highly admirable and looked upon.

- See, like Travis was kind of just saying, BUILD is entirely student run and it always has been.

One of my favorite parts about being so involved in BUILD is that I get to meet so many students from so many different backgrounds.

Through the course of our project in the fall we typically see about 2000 volunteers from the student body and so it's great to see, we have members from the core, sororities, fraternities, men's groups, flows, you name it, they come out and volunteer and that's really why BUILD is here.

We're here to unite the student body and so it's great to see that happening at our site every fall.

- [Travis] Oh, and then in the picture on the left you can see a picture of one of our adult advisors assisting us, those are retired men and women at the Bryan-College Station community that have, relative most of them have previous construction experience.

We would not be able to accomplish what we do without their assistance, very thankful for them helping us as well.

- And kind of what I was saying about volunteers.

We also have tremendous opportunities for members who are involved with BUILD.

Obviously running a project like this takes a lot of work by many students.

We have about 200 student members in the fall, about a hundred in the spring.

We use the spring to plan out our entire project, everything from putting together designs, getting materials ordered, marketing, sourcing volunteers for the project and we have teams associated with all of those particular objectives.

We have opportunities like I was saying earlier to meet students who you wouldn't normally meet, who aren't in your Major.

BUILD is not composed of all engineers or all construction science Majors.

We have humanities, we have liberal arts, we got biomedical sciences, we got everything.

And so it's a really great part of BUILD is that we all come from different backgrounds and we are all essential to making our project happen every year.

So I kind of want, I was talking earlier about how we have increased demand and we would love to meet that demand for additional clinics for new NGOs.

Our biggest constraint is not money, it's not how fast we can work, right now it's the space that we have on our site at 750 Agronomy.

And so we've been working for about six months with the university to do a few things on our site that will alleviate that and enable us to put in a little bit more clinics up to maybe eight or nine every year, so almost doubling what we do right now.

And part of that is what you're seeing in front of you, which is this roof structure to kind of permanently establish BUILD on campus, enable us to have light.

So I haven't mentioned, we work till seven, we work nine to seven during the fall and especially after daylight savings time, it is not fun when it gets dark we have to set up lights every single day.

And so having a permanent structure with permanent lighting, fans, cause we start in September it's hot would be really meaningful and it's something that we're looking forward to be moving forward with in the near future.

I think that the next picture shows.

Yeah, so at night having those lights, having a flat surface with concrete that we can work on right now it's just gravel.

And so having a flat surface to work on would be hugely beneficial and it's in addition to we're gonna expand the site, we're gonna have more space for containers that works in progress something we're really looking forward to in the near future.

- [Travis] And we wanna leave y'all with one final quote that was from Bryson Sutterfield, our founder.

He's the Deputy Core Commander and our first Chairman.

And he said, BUILD is about serving Texas A&M, our community, our state, our nation, and even the world.

It is about taking the passion, the work ethic, the ingenuity and the selflessness of Aggies and creating something that'll permanently impact lives.

That is it for our presentation, thank y'all so much for listening.

We'll leave the rest of the remaining time for questions and answers.

(audience clapping) - [George] There anybody in.

(indistinct background conversation) - You have to come up, have to come over.

- [Evan] Awesome, I'm supposed to stand over here.

So my name's Evan Kennedy, Senior Environmental Design student here.

I had a question about how these modules are designed.

I know you said in 2016, you had a design that is now being like shipped around, kind of advocating, showcasing what a continuer looks like.

But I know that you had mentioned that there was dental care coming out of one, there was physician, family physician, pediatrics, I'm assuming, all those are very different, they would have different layouts, different schemes.

So my question is like who's designing these?

Is it students?

Is it architects?

Are we having projects coming out, kinda like a studio environment and then being brought to like a contractor and saying, can we do this?

What does the design process look like?

- Yeah, so for I'd say the first four or five years that we were doing clinics, we were so new to it that it was very much so like copy paste, copy paste, copy paste and then after we built them, we would find an NGO and say, hey, do you want this clinic?

We made a clinic and then we'd ship it overseas and they would either use it as is or modify it for their purposes.

And in the last couple of years we've tried to really flip that around and do a lot of the design and communicating with the NGOs to find out exactly what they want before we design the clinics and build them in the fall.

So these days we have a lot more customization.

It starts with selecting an NGO, figuring out what are you gonna do at the clinic?

You know, we can't move mountains, but we can make small changes oh, you want an extra sink?

Oh, you want the cabinets over here instead.

You want to move this wall around, we can do those types of things so we're getting a lot better at that kind of thing.

- [Evan] And this is a student design?

- Yeah, these are all students designing this.

So we have like I mentioned, we have nine teams, one of those teams is the design team.

A lot of them are vis majors or construction science or some type of civil, some type of background with AutoCAD and that kind of thing and they're doing the designs.

- [Evan] That's awesome.

- Yeah.

- And then another question about like scalability.

I know you just said that potentially with these upgrades to your site you'll be able to do almost twice as many that's phenomenal, but I know that there is like a cap on labor that students can give here at this campus, I don't know what that number may be, maybe the entire student involvement of our student body that's phenomenal, but have you guys thought about branching off, creating chapters at other universities in Texas?

So on so forth places where costs may not be as high?

Like if you went to Oregon and let's say their building costs are not nearly as high as in Texas.

So could they create cheaper modules there better than the shipped, so what does that look like?

- It's something we've considered, we've looked into it.

One of the biggest problems cause we've had a few groups try it at different schools, one of the biggest, they run into two essential problems.

One, you have to get a property on campus, if you don't get property on campus you're not gonna get students out there and if you don't have students out there you don't have a project.

Kind of tied up in that is that you have to have a big enough student body that your labor isn't an issue.

Those are the two biggest issues we've run into, but it's something that we've tried and something we'd be very open to.

We haven't gone as far as Oregon, but we've tried a few Texas schools.

- Cause I mean, my first other thought would be like Florida state.

Like there are another massive post thousands, but I know that it's rooted in Aggie tradition and it's rooted in remembrance and selfless service that we know not all other universities kind of cater to, but so yeah, no, those are my questions, but thank you.

- Thank you.

- [George] Thank you Mr. Evan.

If I could switch here to Michael SuLac online.

Howdy, would you please ask after being in BUILD for several years now and seeing the growth and its potential for impact in the future, what is the singular thing you are most proud of about BUILD?

- Good, I have two different answers.

- Yeah, go first.

- Okay, wow, I think that my biggest, the biggest thing that I've seen improve is the involvement of students inside the organization and the relationships that form out of it.

I think that we wouldn't really have a project if we didn't have a strong unity within the organization.

And I'm very impressed by the coalition that we have inside to be able to pull this off because this is an arduous project.

It's not easy the fact that we're reaching out to five continents for what we do and we're 18 to 22 year olds doing this.

You need to have a strong unity within the organization and seeing that grow over the years is probably my favorite thing that I've been able to experience.

That was, yeah, that was my answer.

- Oh, sorry.

- That was perfect yeah, I'd say exactly that.

It's the commitment of our members, the community that we develop up.

Like Travis said, this takes a lot of work by a lot of people in BUILD to make happen.

And obviously none of us are getting paid, none of us are getting anything super tangible out of this, but to see the commitment of the BUILD members every single day to make this project happen, especially in the spring.

It's a lot more fun in the fall when like the project is happening and you can show up to site and you can work with your friends, but in the spring when it's just, let's put together some designs for clinics, let's do some marketing to see our members continue to work hard throughout that time is one of my favorite things.

- It's been so inspiring for me to go out there and see all these students who have coursework and maybe even other jobs, but there's a bonding that you, there's a spirit in Aggie land there.

And I'm proud to say the two of our AMI students did the design which will allow you to work in the rain and when it's muddy.

- Yeah, if you go back, yeah, exactly.

Those designs were done by.

- That was Caitlin Noon and having a senior.

- It was Caitlin Finn and.

- Finn.

- Caitlin Finn, yeah.

So we have another question here from Dell Donahue, how much does BUILD change the design of the clinics for each NGO?

We sort of answered that.

Is each container personalized in any way for each application?

But I wanted to give him a courtesy of having, is there anything you want to add to what you said before?

- Yeah, I mean, beyond saying that we didn't use to customize them as much and now we do a lot of customization year to year depending on what the NGO requests.

There's also, I mean, y'all probably saw in the slides there's murals that are done for every single clinic, those are different from clinic to clinic.

I'm trying to think about anything else.

The medical equipment that Medical Bridges supplies is very different.

- That's the main thing.

- That's the big thing, yeah.

- And here's one from Marshall.

Keep up the great work and never stop building, gig 'em.

- [Nick] Thanks, Marshall.

- It's not a question, it's a statement.

And thank you, Marshall.

And finally, are you guys from R Sally, to everyone.

Are you guys taking any volunteers at the moment or how can we get involved?

- Not at the moment be on the lookout for in the fall.

- In the fall.

- Yep.

- All right, Sally, any other questions from the audience here?

Well, every time I have contact with you, it gives me an infusion that we're in good hands with the next generation and I've interacted on a number of things with you and also a person who has inspired me, who couldn't be here today is Dr. Gordon Carstensz.

And he has a wonderful attitude, I think, towards the students and I sense that they have it towards him, at least in my presence.

- [Travis] Absolutely, sir.

- So any final question.

I'd like to thank KMU and Ray Pentecost, our Director of the Center for Health Systems and Design and Cynthia Rockridge for being with us today.

Anything you want to add, Ray?

- Actually, I have a question.

- Come on up.

- I did that.

- This is Ray Pentecost, the Director of the Center for Health Systems and Design.

- [Ray] Wonderful presentation, great work, great mission, congratulations.

My question is, do you find any opportunity in connecting these to another facility for example, the VOOM situation?

Do you find telemedicine connections or any kind of electronic connections?

You mentioned the generator and other things on that front so I guess you have some kind of power, but do you find that these are going out in regions where the ability to connect with wireless or internet that sort of thing is just not possible?

Or do you find some of these occasionally go in where you can connect them to a facility with higher acuity?

Can you build networks with these?

Have you had that opportunity?

- I don't think we've looked into that particularly, or any NGOs have reached out to us about something like that.

I know with the VOOM clinics, I don't know if it's their current plan, but at one point they were gonna have their main hospital they just built and just right on the side, they were gonna put our clinic as kind of like a triage space as like, all right, do you actually need to come to the hospital?

Do you just need Advil, what is it?

And then they would have our additional clinics that we're gonna ship down as kind of spokes on the wheel like Travis was saying, but I don't know.

- I think what you're trying to say is that what if you use the health clinics as the main point and have development follow up around the clinic as if the clinic was connected to like a larger network.

- [Pentecost] Can go either way, it's a great interpretation of my question, I love it.

Well, either that as a hub or as the outreach to another hub.

- [Travis] That's what I've been like thinking of looking into is that, you can't really have other development in a location if you don't have health.

So what if we partnered with NGOs that wanted to revolve other development projects, like water, sanitation, hygiene around the health clinic?

What if you wanted economics to follow up around the irrigation and agriculture.

I mean, there's not much, we have one clinic and location, but what are the possibilities of development around that clinic?

So that is one thing I'd be interested in looking into.

I like what you're saying.

- So not all of our NGOs are purely medical, so some of them do have those components that they supply themselves and Travis has mentioned we have an educational clinic or two out there, but yeah.

- We'd love to look at it with you.

- [Travis] Sir.

- Let's make that happen.

- [Nick] Sure.

- Thanks for being here.

(audience clapping) (upbeat music)