Judge and Kevin burst out laughing.
But I felt my heart twist.
Of course, he didn’t just buy me coffee and donuts.
He got them for everyone.
Of course.
What was I thinking?
“I’ll grab tomorrow’s,” Judge offered. “Going to Wild Iris. Text me your orders before seven-thirty.”
“I’ll get Monday,” Kevin said. “Hitting Bosa like Rix did yesterday. Same with the texts.” He looked to me. “Alex, you have my number?”
“No,” I mumbled.
“I’ll email you,” he said.
I nodded and chimed in, “I’ll do Tuesday. I’ll let you know where I’m going.”
“And maybe I can free some funds up to create a makeshift break area, before the official one is put in place, so we can make our own coffees when we get here,” Kevin suggested.
“Works for me,” Judge agreed.
“Finally, we have at least one coherent plan,” Rix muttered.
I reached to my can of watermelon-lime AHA, thinking I should probably have brought in a ten-pack so everyone could have one (though we didn’t have a fridge yet), as Judge pointed out, “We’ve been kinda busy hashing out job roles and space, so we’re sitting here to get down to the business of building a coherent plan, Rix.”
Rix looked right at Judge and said, straight out, “I get it’s important we have computers and phones and desks and a place to do our business, but that’s getting finalized. And we’ve discussed this. Now, we got a half a billion dollars, and because we do, we got stars in our eyes. We could have twenty billion dollars, and we couldn’t heal this earth. We couldn’t take care of every kid that’s been let down by the schools or their parents or the system. We know we have to rein it in, but we got more money than most startups probably ever had, so it feels like we can do anything, when we can’t.”
“Which is why I asked all of you to come to this meeting prepared to share where you think we should focus,” Judge returned.
“Right, so gotta say, you’ve been doing this job, and I’ve been involved,” Rix replied. “But I haven’t been doing the job. I’m Director of Programs and I could dream up fifty programs to pitch to Wheeler, but I’d be winging it based on the fact I have absolutely no clue what some inner-city kid needs seeing as I was raised by two loving parents in the pines and scrub and rock of Flagstaff. I’m also a white guy who lost his legs two years ago, but I had an undeniably great run of it until that time.”
Holy cow.
This exact point (sans the personal mentions of being raised in Flagstaff, and obviously the limb loss) was in my presentation!
Rix wasn’t done.
“We need Wheeler to back off a week, maybe two, probably more, so Alex and I can fly to Cali, spend a good block of time there, hitting up Camp Trail Blazer, talking to the staff, the counselors, the kids, but also chasing up kids that went there and seeing where they are now. The ones that turned things around, but maybe mostly the ones who didn’t. What worked? What did they like? What broke through for them? Or why wasn’t there a breakthrough? What could make it more powerful? What could reach more kids?” He shoved his laptop forward on the table. “I got a full interview drafted. I also called Frank, the head guy at CTB who replaced Wheeler, and he’s good with Alex and me being around, talking to the kids, going out on rides, doing whatever we need to do to get some pulse, even a weak one, of what we’re facing down. He’s shared he’s also happy to reach out to some graduates, ones who pulled it together, also ones that might talk to us, even if they didn’t, so we can strengthen that pulse.”
I’d had similar thoughts, but I hadn’t fleshed them out that thoroughly.
Oh…
And I absolutely did not have some cockamamie plan to fly anywhere with Rix.
When I stopped staring in shock at Rix, I noticed that Kevin, who I knew liked Rix, was regarding him in a new way. It wasn’t like he didn’t respect Rix before, but there was a different respect forming after Rix’s speech, I could see it.
Judge was studying him even more closely.
He then shared, “I had much the same thought, and because I did, I sent out a questionnaire to our recruiting teachers for Kids and Trails. What worked for them about the program? How the kids in general reacted to the pitch to go on hikes with us? We always got feedback from kids, parents and teachers who were in our program, but for the teachers, I got deeper into that and pressed for input on how they might expand or enhance the program.”
I was loving this, mostly because it seemed, in a way, we were all on the same page.
Judge wasn’t finished, however.
“I also devised a questionnaire to send out to youth programs, administrators of juvenile detention centers, child support programs. The needs are going to be vast, preliminary searches are pulling up thousands of departments and organizations, so first, I gotta narrow that down to manageable levels that will provide us with representative data. But if they share, that data is still going to be extensive. That said, the questionnaire is devised to focus on time with kids in nature and what that might look like and what that might mean to the kids they work with. Still, it’s going to take a lot of sifting through, so if you’re all down with it, I want you to feed back on the questionnaire, I’ll finalize it, and I’m gonna task Krista with getting it out, compiling the data and pulling out trends.”
Krista was the woman who Judge had called that morning to offer the job of assistant, a woman we’d all been impressed by and unanimously agreed on (a miracle).
A woman who thankfully accepted the position.
And I was looking forward to the day when I didn’t have to weigh in on wall décor and storage solutions, but I agreed that it was way more important for Krista to amass this information for us and make it manageable.
Therefore, I said, “I’m down with it.”
“I am too,” Kevin put in. “I also feel that we need to get Alex and Rix out to California, ASAP.”
Uh-oh.
I thought we’d glossed over that to talk data collection and mining.
I straightened in my chair.
“Definitely,” Judge agreed.
Oh no!
“Wouldn’t that be a waste of resources?” I suggested swiftly. “If we want a personal touch, it would be better if I went and interviewed some of the Kids and Trails teachers. Or some of the kids. Or hit up the directors of youth programs. Or visited a few detention centers. We have one here in Yavapai County. I’ve been there before. The staff is amazing, they’d let me come back.”
“You’ve visited detention centers?”
This question came from Rix, and there was a timbre to it that was weird.
Nevertheless, I looked to him. “Yes.”
“By yourself?”
“Well, yes and no. Judge didn’t go with me, but there were teachers and officers there.”
Rix looked slightly mollified by that, but it remained weird he needed to be mollified at all.
I turned my attention back to the table to see I had another lunch scenario going on, but this time, Kevin was staring at Rix, however, again, Judge was looking between us.
And oddly, his lips were twitching like he thought something was amusing.