Chris Huckabee (80:16)
And I said, I appreciate this, but it does me no good whatsoever. I don't need $10 million. I need $35 million. So I appreciate the generosity, but it doesn't do me any good. And he said, build the building. We'll raise the money. And I go, that's different. I'll never forget. I go, well, that's totally different. And so what? The Butt family. But what heb in general did is they helped organize and lead the effort to raise money. They made all the difference in the world, to be honest with you. And they're. In my opinion, you couldn't find a more wonderful group of people, but they did that. But what I did is I just reached out to and I found I had more friends than I realized. I reached out to every person out there. If they did carpet or brick or roofing or whatever, I would call them and say, I want to tell you what I'm doing. Would you be willing to donate X? And if they said yes, it wasn't that easy. We would literally, we had an official letter and we would say, we need this quantity on this date and you're committing to doing that. And everybody said, yeah, I mean, most of the building. So it turned out we were off on the number. It was 65 million that we raised. And that's from cash and in kind contributions. But everybody did their job. If the brick guy, if we needed brick on the site at a certain date, it arrived. If people said they were going to do it, they did. Everyone. And no one said no to me. In fact, people still probably have my number blocked on their phone because I ask everybody, but everybody said yes. What they would say was, yes, but. And then the but would be, I've got to go get, you know, some kind of approval. So it wasn't always that I got exactly my ask, but I got pretty close. And in the process of doing it, what it said to me. So let me fast forward. So we opened the building at the end of last year, and it's truly a special building. There's no other way to say it. It's a very special building. But I realized I'm in that town and I realize lots of people come to town when there's a crisis. But for all the wrong reasons, no one came to town to help those people. They came there to stick cameras in their face. And I don't know about enjoy their misery, but I can't explain it other than that they weren't there to help. They were there to kind of promote the misery of the town. And this town was hurting. They were hurting badly. And what we did was totally different. We didn't have cameras and we didn't want anything. We just wanted to help. And what's interesting about it, we came to town, they did not trust us at all. They did not want us there. They did not trust us. They just thought we were just one more group of people who've come to Town to be shysters. And, you know, thankfully, the H E B name gave us a lot of credibility. But every single person did their job. I got a call during the design about why is it taking so long to design this project? In fact, they said, could. Could you not go faster? Well, you can imagine I'm paying the salaries of all these people. I wanted it to go faster, but we needed to gain the trust of the community. And that took time. We just had to. We had. We spent. We. Every time we would do one presentation, we did four. And the four presentations were. There was a citizens committee and we would start with that. Then we would go to the school board and we'd start with that. And then we would do a private meeting with the families of the victims. And we gave them a commitment. We would absolutely never discuss anything with anyone outside of those meetings. That was their time to tell us anything they thought, and we would listen and take notes. Those could be very emotional meetings, but we were just there to listen and to respect them. And then the last meeting was we would open it up to the entire public and let anyone come in and give us input. So everything was four rounds of every single item, which is very unusual, but it was a process. At the end, what my team said, which is really the right statement, was we did not bring back those lovely children, those teachers. We didn't do it. So that community is still hurting. And all we really did was we helped them with their healing process. That's it. We did what we said we would do. We came to town, we built a building completely. We actually built it privately. It was built privately, and then it was gifted to the school district at the end. Furnished, I mean, playground equipment, you name it. Done. Handed them the keys and it was done. Well, it is a as nice a building as you will ever set foot in in your life. It has some of the pretty amazing security. It's very well thought out. There was a process we used for designing it called trauma informed design, which is how you go through the process and how you kind of bring the students into it. Re expose them to the building. It was all done correctly. It was done right. It doesn't bring those kids back, you know, unfortunately, it does not somehow magically restore the community. But I will tell you that the day we cut the ribbon, I drove around town and what went through my head was Uvalde would be sitting in the same place three years later that they were three years ago. And if nothing else, I hope this gives them some hope, you know, that There are good people in the world. They do care about them. And that we're. We were there for nothing. I mean, we were not, you know, there was nothing to gain from it. And that was every single person. No one ever said to me, hey, can I get my name on a sign? Can I do this? Can I do this? It was. They would always start with, yes, how can I help? Yes, how can I help? And then we would get into specifics, and people did their job. In fact, I walked around that building and I said to the superintendent that had built it, and remember, they built it for nothing. And I said, this has to be the best workmanship I've ever seen in a project. And he said, you don't understand the workers on this one. It was going to be perfect, like, everything. He goes, no, you know, sometimes you're like, hey, do that different or do this again, whatever. He goes, never said that one time, because I could ask them to work late, work early, make sure their work was perfect. He goes, everybody. It was just personal to everybody. So what I learned out of that was that that's what I wanted my life to be, that I wanted. There's plenty of opportunities. I never thought the idea that an architect could have any value in the world other than designing a building. I never realized, boy, you could use that skill of organization and credibility. And there are plenty of places that there are crises that come up and figure out how to take that and pay it forward. And that's really what I've decided. I want the kind of back half of my life to be abound is more of that. Obviously, I don't want a crisis, but, you know, if a crisis comes along, you know, we had the flooding in the Kerrville area this summer, and I immediately got a call, hey, could you come rebuild some of these camps? And would it be possible for you to come redo Camp Mystic? And those were the kind of things that come your way. And do I love the idea of coming in during crisis? No, it's the most emotional thing I've ever done. I. I mean, you can't imagine how emotional it is to be around these families and see this. And, boy, it's personal, and you don't really one, you wish it didn't happen, and you just really wish you weren't there. But it makes you feel good that people generally in the world are good people and that if you call on them to step up and come alongside you, they will, and that's rewarding. And, you know, if you're generally an organized person, you can kind of help people get back on their feet. And that's really what. What that was all about. It was. It was, for me, the single most important thing I've done in my career.
