So it's time to get started.

Welcome to the resilience committee meeting.

Today is September 18th.

In Council Chambers, we have Councilmember Julian Ramirez, staff from Councilmember Kamen, Councilmember Jackson, Councilmember Thomas, Mayor Pro Tim Castax Tatum, Councilmember Peck, Councilmember Alcorn, and Councilmember Castillo's offices.

Thank you all for being here.

Let's see if we can lower this.

Lower that.

Today we've got three presentations.

We're going to lower the podium so we can see you.

Hey, there you are.

Howdy, you're there.

We were hiding from you back here.

So first uh Tommy Holstein with Baker Ripley regarding the Blue Sky Volunteer Planning Group.

Thank you for being here on behalf of Blue Sky Volunteers.

We're anxious to hear what you've uh bringing to us today.

We wanted to get an update on our plans for uh those those things that sometimes form in the Gulf that we're not going to mention.

We're not going to talk about that.

So, anyway, welcome.

If you can just uh uh let someone know when just say advanced slide will expand the slides for you.

So go ahead and get started.

Thank you for being here.

And the opportunity to speak with y'all.

Um I'm Tommy Holstein, and I'm here with Picker Ripley, but I'm here on behalf of a group called the Blue Sky Volunteer Planning Group.

And I'll get into some of my friends that are here, but uh the starting point is really what this started as.

And I'm sure a lot of y'all are looking back at last year thinking, let's not repeat that, but um at least weather wise, but also some of the response and thinking about how regionally we can improve, um, particularly with the deployment, recruitment, activation of spontaneous volunteers.

So there were a lot of different conversations happening.

Um I know that uh the roundtable has a has an interest in volunteerism that Kelly may touch upon later.

Um, Councilmember uh Chair Carter with your experience with volunteerism at the Astros Foundation certainly had um some thoughts.

Uh the county judge and some of our leaders had some thoughts, and so we came together to try to consolidate a lot of different conversations into um one cohesive uh planning unit.

And so um we started about a year ago in October 24, and the the main ideas were to grow our volunteer base, coordinate with all jurisdictions, particularly the city and the county, as well as our regional um volunteer voluntary organizations active in disaster, the VoAD, and to encourage and manage spontaneous volunteers for local and national groups in disaster response and recovery.

Uh so the next slide is our steering committee, and it shows a whole lot of wonderful people, um, a few of which are here today.

We have Gary Flaherty with the uh Texas Gulf Coast Regional VoAD.

We have Jackie Miller with the mayor's office of public safety and home home security, um Jennifer Wandry with the ARP of Texas, and then Gayla uh Wilson and Jay Romero with I Am Houston and uh the volunteer Houston, as well as so many others, and really the perspective here is jurisdictions, it's government units, it's organizations, um, and civic entities as well as platforms and the the folks that actually manage and deploy some of the systems that get people in.

And so it was a great perspective of the doers, the facilitators, the uh recruiters, the ones that are statutorily required to be doing this type of work, um, and a lot of it a wealth of experience that um um all of us brought to the table.

So the next um slide is why blue sky planning um and why the names.

The name we came up with was that we need to be thinking about this 365 days a year.

We need to be thinking about it on days like today, even if it may get a little bit of gray skies in a little bit, but that the response doesn't happen in a day plus one or when something's brewing in the Gulf.

That um, if we're gonna be improving, we can take into account experiences as well as forecast um how we can improve, how we make sure that systems are are ready to go, how we make sure that collaboration is already happening, uh the Rolodex is already filled, and so that when it's a win for us, when um we need to act, the environment is already created to be successful.

Um next slide.

So I mentioned some of the initial objectives, and as we really honed in, we we identified four kind of biggie challenges and then solutions that we could we would try to address.

The first was volunteer recruitment, trying to increase our pool of volunteers, and that is and what I'll dive into kind of what each one of these is in a second.

But to recruit and deploy volunteers did not meet the capacity needed last year, and so we wanted to establish targeted pools of unaffiliated spontaneous volunteers.

Second was the volunteer Houston awareness.

Looking back at last year, did organizations or community members know that that was a resource?

Did they trust it?

And so the objective was to refine the process for recruiting and placing and assigning an identified unaffiliated volunteers into the system.

Third was the experience.

This is something that was kind of near and dear to me and our organization is that if we're facilitating, if if we're leading things or referring our neighbors to opportunities, we want to make sure they have a good experience.

Because if they don't, they may not come back.

And they may think poorly about us in the future and may not do some of our overgreen opportunities.

So identifying ways that we can have some more consistency with the experiences that volunteers have at any type of opportunity they face.

And another one was capacity building, and that was you know, one piece last year we've been so flood-prone, one example so flood-prone in recent years that when a windstorm, two windstorms came about, uh, the the capacity that was skilled and in chainsawing and debris removal just it wasn't quite there.

And so that was it was a lacking piece in the immediate response.

We had to rely a lot upon outside of the region volunteers, and so thinking about ways of how can we, in times like this, offer opportunities to build or build the regional capacity to to attack all types of things that um folks could be interested in.

Uh so the next slide is uh a focus on volunteer recruitment, and we had a group that came together.

Um, it was myself, um, Robert Anaki with the uh county judges' office, as well as um Jennifer was on it from ARP, um, Houston Methodist was represented, Houston Responds, a group that brings together faith-based uh organizations, um, and probably a couple others that I'm forgetting in the moment, but we came together to think about how can we reach a broader pool of volunteers.

And we we thought about kind of the biggie trusted institutions, corporations, um faith-based groups, civic organizations.

Uh Amy Um Zach Meyer with the new Houston was one I was missing.

That remember that.

But if we can create basically a bigger World Odex of people that we can reach out to, um, we can give them a toolkit of here is how you can cascade information about volunteer opportunities, your employers trust you, your congregants trust you, um, the membership of if you're kind of a civic organization, trusts you, your constituents trust you.