The City Council Resilience Committee, chaired by Councilmember Carter, met on August 10, 2026, to hear presentations on volunteer coordination and community resilience strategies. Representatives from the Texas Gulf Coast Region Voluntary Organization Active in Disaster (VOAD) and Baker Ripley presented their ongoing efforts to enhance disaster preparedness and response. A public comment from the president of a super neighborhood highlighted local resilience needs.
Also in the area. And then we've got staff from Councilmember Salinas, Jackson, Ramirez, and Thomas's office. So welcome. And thank you all for being here on this Monday morning, kind of out of order, but summer vacations get us, and we have to shuffle the deck a little bit. I'm excited to hear from our friends today from the Texas Gulf Coast Region Voluntary Organization, Active in Disaster. I just say VoAD, so it's a little bit easier. And here on behalf of VoAd today is Miss Andy Cook with the Just Serve group, my friends from Just Serve, which I'm so excited to see this partnership. And Andy is volunteer management committee chair, and then Gary Flattery is here as well chair for Voad. And y'all come on down. We're excited to hear your presentation. I know you guys have been working hard, and as always, for Houston. So thank you. Thank you so much, Councilmember Carter. We really appreciate the invitation to be a part of your resilience committee today. If we could have our slides presented here, thank you. It's okay. Good morning. That's okay. We're just talking about that. They've evidently switched the system or something's updated, outdated, you know, that IT. We're fine. Thank you. No worries. Sorry, give us just a second. No problems. So in the meantime, how was Hawaii? Paradise. You really need to come. Andy's Hawaiian. Here we've got him up just in time. You didn't you didn't have to be questioned about Hawaii too much. Always happy to be questioned about Hawaii. Thank you again. So uh Texas Gulf Coast TXGC volunteers. Info is an official website that we've created uh by the Texas Gulf Coast Region Voad. And it's a unified digital platform for coordinating disaster relief volunteering across the 13 counties of the Gulf Coast region. The central mission of this site is to accelerate and the relief and recovery communities impacted by disasters along the this region. This is achieved through the collaboration of Texas Gulf Coast Region Voad, Just Serve, and Volunteer Houston. This site streamlines spontaneous volunteer mobilization, ensuring vetted assistance, reaching impacted areas efficiently. It prioritizes OEM and local agency needs and is active in disasters. Next slide, please. April and May, we experienced heavy rains, which caused tremendous flooding in East Texas. And May, we were hit with the Duracho, causing power outages, trees down, flooding, food, water shortages. And then on the heels of this in July, we had Hurricane Barrel, which brought more power outages, more damage, and in the heat wave, more heat food and water shortages. In short, we experienced compounded disasters. Next slide. As a result of these back-to-back disasters, we experienced great volunteer shortages. We had volunteer fatigue. A lot of the same organizations were responding over and over. They carried much of the need.