Help Texas Recover after Hurricane Harvey

Greetings Friends,

This past August marked three years since our work first began in Coastal Bend following Hurricane Harvey. What an incredible milestone, which you helped make possible! 

We are VERY excited to provide you with an update, now just a week away from the official end of our operational pause. As our team worked through the summer months to map out what the reopening of our programs would ultimately look like, we knew our traditional volunteer model would need to be revisited. Not only were we considering things like the structure of our base itself and how we could alter the layout to encourage safe disatancing, we also felt we needed to identify a way to minimize risks for our staff, volunteers, and beneficiaries over extended periods of time. In order to address this concern, our team came up with a new volunteer recruitment and engagement strategy called DM12.

DM12 is a 12-week service commitment to communities impacted by natural disasters. The group structure, with participants arriving/departing program and working on the same 12-week schedule, reduces potential exposure points to COVID-19. This initiative will replace our regular volunteer application and acceptance process until we are safely and effectively able to mobilize and engage volunteers on an individual basis.

A small group of staff have been in Texas for the past month working on base adaptations and making preparations for incoming volunteers. With assessments already underway,  I am excited to report that we are officially accepting volunteer applications for the Texas DM12 initiative and we are on track to begin working again this October.

I look forward to updating you again soon. Thank you!