 Next up on our last lightning round session for the lunch time hour, Michelle Shea, who is from Texas, Texas A&M University, Central Texas, which their FTE is 3,470, and she's going to talk to us about community connections that they have been making at the university. So go ahead and take it away, Michelle. Hi. So we work with a lot of schools, libraries, and local organizations here in Central Texas. If you look at our slides, we have about 3,400 students, roughly. Our city area has 145,000 people, but we're really trying to work harder to attract more people coming towards our education system and just staying informed in the community. Our campus was established in 2009. We actually started as a smaller offshoot of a different university, and then we built up from there. We currently have three buildings. We're hoping to build dorms at some point, and our library, when it first started, actually was in a small building in the local school district. So we've grown quite a bit since then, and we're still growing. We offer upper-level courses for bachelor's and master's degrees, but those are just junior and senior courses. We actually partner with the local community college to make sure that people can get a four-year degree at a reasonable cost. So in our partnering with school opportunities, the Outreach Library and I have made a huge effort to attend special events on campuses. So this has included STEAM days, SMART days. We've gone to do poetry lessons. We've even attended festivals, so done things like ring, toss, community outreach, and that's been really helpful in terms of getting the word out about our school, but also providing great services to kids. We have camp programming that we run every summer, and I actually manage that. So what we do is we reach out to the librarians in our local districts, which is KISD, Colleen ISD, and we talk to the librarians about, hey, we have reading enrichment for Kinder through Second. We have STEM camps for our fifth and sixth graders. We're even going to start a new computer camp this summer, and we're writing some grants right now for that. We also have summer food service. So what that involves is we open our campus as a feeding location for people in the community. We usually have that running at the same time as our camps so that we can feed our kids breakfast and lunch. So that's at least 25, 30 kids consistently that are there, and then anybody else in the community who would like to eat as well, and we have to account for those numbers. We also coordinate field trips to the library. If other campuses reach out to us and say, hey, we'd like a tour, or can we do something with your campus, we can facilitate connections. So we also work with libraries in the community. This is mostly the public libraries, and then the libraries for our other college campuses around here. So one big event we've been doing is the Read Across Central Texas initiative, and actually have a map, as you guys can see. So we have locations listed, we'll give them stickers, and then we also put on the back the different locations they can go to. It's really helpful because it just helps community members know that there are libraries in the area, not just colleges, not just public, but even museums and other smaller entities. So it's just about sharing that wealth of knowledge. We also have done out of this World Science Days with some of the local planterium efforts that's at our community college. And then our public library worked with us on model rockets, my kind of thing. We've also participated in MakerCon events. So we brought out duct tape wallets, you can do sewing and other crafts. And then we've also had steam art events where we bring in circuit kits. And a lot of those materials were gathered from grant, grants that we had done a couple years ago, and those were with, let me just read it here, the Institute of Museum and Library Services grant with our Texas State Library Commission. So getting that helped us build up our material resources so that we could provide these services and share what we have with the community for free. We also have a great consortium program going on right now. We have an email chain of about 50 librarians. And that's coming from 22 different library and museum and other informational organization branches. So it's great in terms of letting other people know, hey, this is what we've got going on. Maybe tell some people in your community so that they can come participate. You can see the picture we have there is of our team up calendar. So we can come in here and add some of the recurring or one time events that we do. We broke it into different categories. We have a college library is one color. Different colors for the Fort Hood, which is our local military base museums. And then we also have colors for other smaller libraries in the surrounding areas, just so that we can keep things clear and organized. We've been trying to have focus topics in the past meeting or two. So we've talked about diversity and collection development, which was very informative, during the children and young adult areas. And then the next meeting we're going to be talking about working with patrons when you have stressful situations. So we're able to build on that. We also share any collaborations. So any presenters that might be coming to the area that we could co-fund or just any other opportunities that we learn about. We like to share those with our email chain. And then last slide here, basically, is we have some local opportunities as well. As I mentioned before, Fort Hood is our local military base. We have a big military community of veterans and current service members. And so what we do is we go to the base and we do craft activities focused around Earth Day events. And so what we did last year is we did a handprint world art project. And then this coming April, we're going to be doing some tree collages using recycled materials. We've had other presenters come to that from local organizations and also other school districts. You can also see there we have the Epically Kiki Expo. That's kind of similar to what some of the earlier presenters were talking about. We encourage people to bring their pop culture ideas. We were talking about doing 3D printing sessions collaboratively in our consortium. We also have a focus topic this year, retro cartoons, but in the past it's been just focused on gaming and cosplay and that kind of thing. Finally for the summer camps, we are working on bringing in more outside presenters. Last year we had a mobile water truck come and talk to us about the local aquifers in the area. And so because we're focused on future cities, we'd like to bring more of those type of people in so that they can talk about their field and how we're working towards a sustainable world. If you have questions, I know that was a lot of information. You're welcome to contact me. My email is right there, m.chay at tammyct.edu. I'm happy to answer any questions at any time if you'd like to know about summer camp programming reaching out to local contacts or any other information in that kind of vein. And that's it. All right, great. Thank you so much, Michelle. Yeah, that was a lot of different kind of information, but that's great. And I think it's great that we always see public libraries and schools reaching out. And universities, sometimes people don't think about that as being something that can get out into the community and do things and bring people in and get connected to the schools and the public libraries and get the kids interested in maybe even going to college, too. Definitely. Is there anything that you had we rescheduled to someone where it didn't work out? Were we talking earlier or failures, so to speak? So we have had times where we've tried to get programs going and it hasn't really turned out how we expected. We run a tutoring program right now. And some days we have excellent attendance and sometimes we just can't get the kids in. And what we do with that is I really just try to stay in communication with parents and let them know, hey, this is a free service we offer. We really would love for you to come spread the word. And we've actually had a lot of word of mouth marketing from parents saying, hey, this is a great program, you know, other people should come in. So usually we're able to at least get a waitlist for some of the grades, but we are still working on building that across our K through five audience. Sometimes it can be a struggle. Yeah. All right, not a problem. All right, thank you very much, Michelle. All right, and we are a little over, but that's OK. Thank you so much to all of our Lightning Round presenters. That was great. I got some comments, some hints, and enjoyed very much. So many good ideas. Yes, we there's always lots of information when I get out there and check it as much as we can and available to people. All right.