Mid-meeting, members drag out a small structure. It doesn’t look like much more than a pile of painted planks yet, but it will.

A single staff member steps up to the wooden frame at the front of the room. They’re handed a two-by-four etched with words that describe them — modest, creative, committed — and drive it into place. The room erupts. For The Big Event staff, this is what building the house looks like. One piece of recognition, one act of service, one person at a time.

The Big Event is a single-day event each spring during which tens of thousands of volunteers flood into Bryan-College Station to serve community residents. What they rarely see is the months of work during the fall and spring leading up to the project day when The Big Event staff recruits residents, shapes organizational culture, runs service projects of its own and prepares for the largest one-day service event in the nation.

Over three years, accounting junior Tyler Prince has moved from staff assistant to executive leadership, serving The Big Event every step of the way. What began as a spontaneous decision freshman year has become the cornerstone of his college experience.

“I was poured into a lot by the person who was above me, and that’s really the reason I stayed,” Prince said. “She was awesome. She kind of taught me the ropes and how to do everything.”

Now, as co-head of development on the executive team, he oversees more than 450 members, spending his days speaking at meetings, delegating tasks and running team-building activities. 

“There’s definitely a lot of behind-the-scenes things that a lot of people don’t see that we’re working on just to make it a better culture and something people want to invest in,” Prince said.

Part of Prince’s initiative includes a new staff-wide celebration, Build the House, which was pitched half-jokingly at a brainstorming session during a September executive staff retreat. At every meeting, The Big Event honors a different staff member, adorning a two-by-four with words that describe them and handing it over to be hammered onto the small house-like structure.

“Build the House gives an opportunity for our incredible internal members to be recognized for all of their hard work,” Prince said. “A lot of the time, the work we do is more logistic and backend stuff, so being able to be spotlighted makes a really big impact. It also adds to the culture of lifting one another up.”

By November, the house had already started to take shape, serving as a living metaphor for the staff’s work. For marketing senior and Recruitment Executive Ryann Berry, it represents the community she found when she needed one.

“[The] Big Event is what I found at A&M to be my place, my people,” Berry said. “We make it a priority to make sure that every single individual is seen and valued, and they feel the love of The Big Event.”

For genetics junior and fellow Recruitment Executive Tobin Wilson, it’s about the balance of working together months in advance to prepare for day-of logistics and then piling into a car for discount pizookies at BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse on a random Tuesday.

“The Big Event’s culture is, we’re a service org,” Wilson said. “One of the biggest things we do is serve. I think the next biggest thing we do is run our community and have a really strong culture. Everybody is just happy to be there and happy to help.”

Berry and Wilson’s team spends weeks tabling at community events, answering phone calls from residents, writing newsletters, pitching news outlets and monitoring sign-up numbers.

“We’re doing a lot of new marketing initiatives this year,” Berry said. “We’re just touching on different marketing strategies, slowly chipping away at that. And then on the more traditional executive side, we are seeing those job requests coming in. We’re making sure everything is running smoothly from the internal side.”

Wilson manages the office hours that power the resident recruitment process, coordinating staff assistants who call residents, setting up job checks, entering data and assigning tasks.

“I’m pretty much in charge of anything that is based around recruiting residents,” Wilson said. “I’m just mainly there to help facilitate that and make sure everything’s going smoothly.”

Prince focuses more on development initiatives, like facilitating interviews, leading trainings, planning retreats and creating systems for 450 people to work together efficiently.

“There’s definitely a lot of backend work in The Big Event executive team that you wouldn’t think,” Prince said. “We have to zone jobs and fill out all kinds of paperwork just to keep things running.”

Because staff members oversee the spring event on campus, most do not get to participate. Instead, every fall, they pause their preparation to hold The Little Event, designed for internal members. On Nov. 9, executives and staff assistants alike got their hands dirty, serving residents directly.

“As internal members, we don’t really get to serve on the day of anymore,” Wilson said. “So when we do things like The Little Event, it kind of puts us back at home, back to why we joined The Big Event.”

Staff members nominate former professors, local grandparents, past clients or community members as residents for The Little Event. For Berry, the highlight was serving the grandmother of a committee member on her birthday.

“It was super sweet,” Berry said. “We brought her a card, and she just needed a ton of little jobs done outside. She was so grateful for it, especially it being her birthday. She was just so grateful to have people around, and that was what was really special about that day.”

For all three executives, the fall semester isn’t just preparation and logistics. Every task checked off the to-do list also comes with personal transformation. Prince credits The Big Event with his growth in public speaking and professionalism, while Berry said it taught her how to lead.

“It gave me so much experience in being a leader, but also a follower,” Berry said. “I’ve learned how to love others better. I’ve learned how to really value people in an organization and show that they are seen.”

But most of all, being a part of The Big Event year-round has catered to the hearts for service that every staff member and volunteer carries, according to Prince.

“I feel like we’re called to serve by God,” Prince said. “It’s not just the physical service we do, the biggest aspect of it is the connection you make with the community.”

As fall turns to winter and the house in the meeting room gains more planks, staff members will continue to hammer away at the foundations for the spring event, from filing backlogged paperwork to forming community connections. 

“We are projected to have the largest Big Event yet,” Berry said. “Our growth has been extremely exponential this year, and we are projected to need the most volunteers we’ve ever had in history. We need over 25,000 volunteers this year in order to serve all of our residents and just say thank you to the people that make Bryan-College Station our home away from home.”

The Big Event may be a single day of service, but Berry said that for the people behind it, the house is built long before the volunteers ever arrive.

“It’s just unimaginable the amount of impact that one day can have on an entire community and how close it can bring students and residents,” Berry said. “I gained my best friends in the world through this. I would be literally nowhere without our exec team and our committee members and the staff that I’ve been so blessed to have and to know.”