By Shelbi LeMeilleur
In 2013, Max Gerall met Ms. Melissa, a cashier at Sbisa Dining Hall at Texas A&M University, and the course of his life changed forever. His goal became to turn around and change her life, as well as the lives of many other third-party support staff at the university, through the REACH Project.
Respect, Empowerment, Aspiration, Community, Health. This is the foundation for the REACH Project, which aims to weave the Texas A&M community together.
“We are a nonprofit that focuses on community development as well as affordable housing,” says Gerall, the founder and CEO of The REACH Project. “We have come up with a system that innovates [programs for] university students from various disciplines to provide resources to the affordable housing community. While also providing those resources to the affordable housing demographic, we are also taking the opportunity to refine and provide ‘professional training’ to undergraduate students.”
While a student at Texas A&M, Gerall met Ms. Melissa and learned of the often dire home situations of many support-staff workers at the university, so he founded The REACH Project with the hope of helping this community at Texas A&M, while providing education opportunities for students.
“[Ms. Melissa] kind of opened my eyes to the greater Aggie community,” says Gerall. “I heard some stories on campus of third-party employees that were homeless — that were actually having to couch surf from other employees houses as a means to ensure that their children could stay in the Bryan ISD school district where they started the year at. And that’s when I knew we had to do something. We are the Aggie community; we are the Aggie family. They are part of our Aggie family. We’ve got to help them.”
After several years of dreams and plans, REACH Project officially launched as a 501(c)3 nonprofit in January of 2018. Currently, REACH is divided into two sections, housing and education. The goal is to help those in the affordable housing demographic through both a physical house and education on homeownership. Additionally, REACH will work with students through their educational arm providing opportunities for community involvement, leadership, and high-impact service opportunities.
“Our goal is to build the houses ourselves,” says Gerall. “We want to provide what we call a residential learning village. This is a village that will have rental units as well as owner-occupied units. In this village we anticipate to have the resources that one needs to transition from the rental to the ownership all onsite.”
For residents in the residential learning village, there is a three-phase process, which would be a hands-on learning process. Phase One would start the foundation, with everything from naturalization GED and personal finance to maintenance and soft-skill development. Each phase will build on the skills learned with the intent to create opportunities for home ownership and sustainable job skills.
“We will be having opportunities to not only practice and implement those things you learned in the foundations phase, but we will have leadership opportunities, community involvement, and also ways to involve family members,” Gerall says. “We want to end the generational cycle of poverty, not just put a Band-Aid on it.”
The REACH Project gets Texas A&M students involved mainly through the high-impact service opportunities.
“We feel that learning is most conducive in an altruistic situation,” says Gerall. “What we do is we engage students to learn and practice their field while helping someone else.”
Some of the service opportunities so far have included a health fair and a design charrette. Their next event will be a bigger health fair in September at the Leach Teaching Gardens at Texas A&M. The REACH Project is partnering with the Brazos County Health district to provide free flu shots, as well as other organizations to help educate and provide resources to the community.
For more information, visit www.facebook.com/AgsREACH.
“We are really trying to focus these resources to the third-party support staff on campus because those are the ones who inspired us and really make the Aggie community run, if you think about it,” says Gerall. “We feel like the Aggie community, Aggie spirit, all the pillars that Aggies survive off of — we want to be able to exemplify and help spread.”
