I grew up a Houston kid. I graduated from Spring Woods High School, but I also went to Memorial High School and Emery, a private school in the affluent Bel Air suburb, for two years.

I actually left Memorial to go to Emery to play basketball. In a way, I guess you could say they “recruited” me. Emery is a small school, so playing there was an easy leap for me. But after my junior year, I realized I wanted to be in a bigger pond with more competitive players. So, I went back to public school at Spring Woods, near where my mother lived. I was a starter on the basketball team, played well, and earned a college scholarship to the University of Tampa in Florida.

That’s where my life took a sudden and very unexpected change.

College can be a tough transition for young people, and it certainly was for me. Not only was I trying to figure out how to deal with the routine of pursuing a higher education, but also I was adjusting to the new dynamic within my own family. My parents had gotten divorced and that was hard on me and my siblings. Plus, close friends of our family had been involved in a terrible car accident in Colorado just a few weeks before I left for college. Both parents were killed in the crash. In addition, two of their children were paralyzed for life, and a third child suffered severe brain damage. These people were like extended family, so the tragedy was very sad and I took it very personally.

One day in mid-November of my freshman year at the University of Tampa–shortly before my birthday and the beginning of basketball season–I woke up and felt a tingling sensation in the bottom of my feet. It was a pretty intense tingling, but I didn't think too much of it at the time. I went to class, got breakfast, then headed to another class when I noticed the tingling had continued to intensify.

After class, I went back to my dorm and called my dad, Ellis Gerall, and told him what was going on. He was quiet for a moment, then said, “Your basketball shoes are probably too tight. You need to get a bigger pair. Don't worry about it. You'll be fine.”

I immediately headed to the basketball office, got a new pair or shoes, and went on about my day. Or at least I tried to. The tingling continued and was creeping up my legs. It went from my feet to my ankles to my shins. Later that afternoon, I called Dad again and told him I didn’t think my shoes were causing the problem. “Something weird is happening,” I said, a little frightened. “Well, go to the campus infirmary,” Dad said, “and see a doctor.”

After I ended the call, I immediately headed over to the health center. The doctor there did a cursory examination and said he had no idea what the problem might be. “Go home and just relax,” was his advice.
In my case, easier said than done.

That night, I noticed the tingling seemed to be going away, but in its place, where the tingling had been, I couldn’t feel anything. It was the weirdest feeling…or lack, thereof. A little panicked by this new development, I woke up my roommate and asked him to drive me to the hospital. We got there about one o’clock in the morning. They took me to the emergency room and eventually ran tests. Medical personnel stuck needles in my legs, and I didn’t feel a thing. But, like the doctor on campus, these new doctors had no idea what was going on.

I was admitted into the hospital, and before the end of the night I was completely paralyzed. I couldn't move at all. I couldn't feel anything at all. And worst of all, I could no longer talk. My body had completely shut down, and for all intents and purposes, I was in a coma, but it didn’t feel like what I imaged a coma to be because I was completely aware of everything around me.

My dad flew out, got to Tampa about noon that day and never left my bedside for the weeks that I was in the hospital’s intensive-care ward. Dad has his own company and was able to put his work-life on hold to be there for me. I knew Dad was there. I could see him. I could hear him speaking to me, but I couldn’t respond or react to him. I’m not sure how that made him feel.

Frightened, I’m sure, just like I was.        

Each time doctors came into my room to check on me or order up another round of tests trying to get to the bottom of my illness, I could hear their conversations with my father, I could hear the concern in their voices, but repeatedly, there were no answers to the cause of my condition. It wasn’t lupus. It wasn’t any of the number of other things for which I was tested.

To this day, I still have a vivid recollection of one of the doctor’s telling my dad, not too long into my hospital stay, “We don’t know if he’s going to get better, or if he’s even going to make it through this. You might want to contact your family.” “My God!” I thought to myself hearing those words. “Am I going to die here?” Laying there with a tracheotomy tube down my throat and a plasmapheresis machine humming at the side of my bed–separating my blood plasma from my blood cells to clean out my circulatory system, my odds for survival seemed pretty poor at best. 

Family was notified, but no one came. For the next three to three and a half weeks, it was just the doctors, the nurses, my father, and me.

Then, just as suddenly as it came on, my symptoms began to reverse themselves. While the condition had started with my feet and moved upward, my recovery began in reverse order, from the top of my head downward. I knew something was going on when I felt the onset of a migraine headache. I’d had those before, but never was I grateful for the pain as I was then. I was finally able to feel my body again. Next, I could feel my eyes, my face, and my mouth. As this “miracle” gradually progressed over the next few days, the hospital brought in a research team from New York, still trying to figure out what was going on.

Slowly, all my faculties returned to working order. The medical team concluded that I had been suffering from Guillain-Barré syndrome, a very rare and serious condition that affects the nervous system, usually in people much, much older than I was. Everyone at the hospital was flabbergasted that a seemingly healthy 18-year-old had developed this condition.

As my recovery continhed, I was transferred to an in-house rehabilitation hospital where I learned to walk and talk again. Finally, in April, some five months after the tingling in my feet started, I was able to fly home to Houston with my father.

After having lived with my mother following my parents’ divorce, I moved into Dad’s apartment upon our return from Florida. There, he continued to watch over me, foregoing many of his work responsibilities to shuttle me back and forth for the frequent checkups at Texas Children’s Medical Center where I continued my recovery.

And, recover I did.

Then one day from out of the blue–or so it seemed–Dad decided it was time for me to go back to school. And he’s the reason I wound up at Texas A&M.

For a while, I thought I had dodged the college bullet. Not fully understanding why I had gotten so sick, I thought it might have been caused by the stress of going off to school, and I did not want to go through getting sick and nearly dying again.

But, Dad had other ideas…and more faith in me than I had in myself.

He went onto the “Apply Texas” website and submitted my online college application for me. I wasn’t aware he had done the until he called me one day to offer his congratulations. Puzzled, I asked him why.

“You’re going to Texas A&M in the fall!” he exclaimed. This was 2013, a year after my arrival and short-term stay at the University of Tampa. I wasn’t happy about what Dad had done without my knowledge, but quickly realized he wasn’t going to be taking “no” for an answer.

He picked Texas A&M, so he told me, because a friend’s daughter said it was a great place to go to school.

When I first got to College Station–which got its name for the railroad stop at the school many years before a town even existed–I didn't sleep. I called my dad almost every night crying, begging for him to come and save me. “Get me out of here!” I wailed. “I'm going to die!” Dad would chuckle–I can still here his muted laughter during those phone calls–and respond, “You’re not going to die! You’ll be fine. Just relax.”

Again, that meaningless piece of advice.

The calls persisted for weeks and finally, Dad had enough.

“Max,” he told me in his sternest Dad voice, “You are going to college and you are going to graduate college. That’s what people in our family do. You need to get out of your doldrums and out of your dorm room and get involved in the college experience.”

“But, Dad,” I pleaded. “My roommate doesn’t like me, so I don’t really have anyone to do anything with.”

“Well, that’s because you’re all sad and mopey and your roommate is taking advantage of all that college has to offer. Make some new friends!”

As a first-year student at Texas A&M, I was a “fish.” That term dates back to when Texas A&M was an all-male military school. Technically it wasn’t a military school in the sense of West Point and places like that, but throughout much of its first one hundred years, every student at Texas A&M was a member of the Corps of Cadets, dressing in uniform, living in barracks, and abiding by military traditions. That slowly began to change in the 1960s when the school began admitting women and minorities, but the term “fish” still applies to all incoming freshmen.

I certainly felt like a “fish out of water” in my first few weeks in Aggieland.

During my freshman, er, “fish” year, I took my meals at Sbisa Dining Hall, which served Texas A&M Cadets for decades before the campus went to open enrollment. One day, one of the food-service workers at Sbisa, a young Hispanic woman, walked over to whee I was having my lunch–alone–and struck up a casual conversation. She was relaxed, friendly, and seemed genuinely interested in wanting to know how I was doing.

In a real sense, that encounter changed my life.

Since then, or not long after, I’ve affectionately called Melissa Martinez, “Mama Mel.” After we got acquainted, it didn’t take her long to pick up that I was on shaky emotional ground. From the beginning, I felt comfortable in pouring my heart out to her, sharing my litany of anxieties and concerns. Those conversations continued on a regular basis for the rest of that year and she’s been a close friend ever since.

Mama Mel got me through my fish year at Texas A&M. She listened. She cared. She offered advice, good advice, that helped me relax, feel better about myself, and make new friends. I joined a fraternity, got involved in an intramural basketball league, and felt more at east in my own skin than I had since…well, since the time in Tampa when I couldn’t feel my own skin. Eventually, she began teaching me Spanish, and in return, I helped her polish up her English, which was already good enough for her to help me understand who I really was.

And who I wanted to be.

That human connection between Mama Mel and me not only changed my life, but it also inspired the beginning of a personal endeavor that has blossomed into a campus-wide movement, which, I’d like to think, has changed a lot of other lives for the better.

Mama Mel is the reason I started The REACH Project at Texas A&M in 2017.

So, what is The REACH Project? I’m proud to direct you to a page on the Points of Light Foundation website. That organization was founded in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. Its ongoing mission is to “ensure that people feel empowered to act on their unique desire to stand up and say, ‘I can help’.” 

Here’s what they have to say about The REACH Project, which was honored as the “Daily Point of Life” number 7630 on August 31, 2023:

Over the course of my conversations with Mama Mel, I not only shared my heartaches and challenges, she began to tell me more and more about her story, too. Once she began opening up to me, it didn’t take long before I thought there was something odd going on in her life, too. I was particularly startled when she told me she was living in a trailer…with six other people. At the time, I was living in a high-rise apartment building on the edge of campus. I had a car, a computer, and everything I could possibly need. But thanks in great part to Mama Mel, I also possessed an increasingly confident persona.

Meanwhile, she was living in a state of near poverty and had to walk miles every day to get to and from her job on campus.

Why?

Eventually, she said to me, “Max, you know I’m in a pretty good place compared to many of the other people who work here at the university. I’d like to introduce you to some of them so you can hear about their circumstances.”

The first person she introduced me to was a lady who was actually sleeping on the couch in Mama Mel’s trailer…along with her 10-year-old daughter. As I discovered, this woman, who also worked in food services on campus, had lost thr family home when her mother had died. When that happened, she told me, she was determined to keep her daughter in the school she attended, which meant staying in the low-paying job she had helping to feed college students.

“Low paying?” I thought. This was a woman who made my breakfast omelets every morning. She worked for the university. Why did she lose her home and why are her and her daughter sleeping on the sofa in somebody else’s home? In essence, she was homeless while doing the only job she had ever known. And that shook me to my core.

Slowly, I was coming to the realization that I was living in a place that was, for all practical purposes, two separate worlds.

That's when I started to piece together the harsh reality that led to the launch of The REACH Project.

What I eventually learned was that the university had orchestrated a cost-saving maneuver a couple of years before I got to Texas A&M. This resulted in the outsourcing of basic campus services, such as grounds maintenance, food service, and custodial work. Texas A&M was not alone in taking these measures. Many other schools had done the same thing because, on the surface, it made sense to save money wherever possible. But when this “nonessential” part of the university workforce was cut loose from the “Aggie family,” there was a sizable shift in the campus landscape.

Not only did these formerly full-time university employees lose benefits like retirement and healthcare, when they became outsourced workers, they experienced a sizable reduction in pay. Just as importantly, there was also a loss of identity, self-esteem, and sense of community among these people with no real other employment options. For years and years before the outsourcing took place, these “essential campus workers,” as I like to call them, were members of the Aggie family alongside Texas A&M students. administrators, faculty, and staff. In time, I came to see them as the true backbone of what is proudly referred to as the  “Aggie Spirit.”

As Mama Mel introduced me to more and more people, I frequently heard comments like, “My mother also worked on campus. She had a great job. She felt good about the work she was doing. I followed in her footsteps, but the pipeline to a quality way of life is no longer there.”

Even more disturbing is the fact that the outsourcers are now outsourcing themselves. In recent years I’ve started to meet, quite frequently, “second- and third-chance” employees, illegal immigrants and individuals who have been through the prison system.

Personally, I believe people deserve second–and third–chances. But, if I had an 18-year-old daughter going to school here and didn't know that the custodian cleaning her dorm room had some serious legal baggage, I could see how that might create some major issues.

Despite that, The REACH Project continues to try to make a positive difference, and does, time and time and time again.

Let me give you a pretty dramatic example of that.

In February of 2021, on the heals of the COVID-19 pandemic, Texas was hit by a series of winter storms that the Weather Channel ultimately dubbed “Winter Storm Uri.”  I didn’t know they gave names to winter storms like they do hurricanes, but this one certainly deserved the recognition.  For more than a week, temperatures dropped into the teens and below. As a result, the Texas power grid couldn’t keep up with demand and millions of homes and businesses were left, literally, “out in the cold.”

I began to realize just how bad things were locally when I started to receive text message after text message from the families REACH served asking for extra blankets and heating devices. The demand became so great, I became overwhelmed and didn’t really know what to do…in large part because I was shivering in the cold in my own apartment. Soon, the text messages became more dire: “It’s 15 degrees in our trailer,” several read. One stated, “Our mother is already sick, and we don’t know what to do to help her.”

That really freaked me out. So, I started calling people to see if we could get a warming center opened up somewhere.

I called the high schools. I called the County Health District. I called the building on campus where we had just relocated the REACH office to see if we could use somebody’s space to help people in need. I keep running into wall after all after wall as most places I called had problems of their own to worry about with the ever-widening blackout.

Out of frustration and desperation, I decided to email the president of the university.

In that email, I tried to put the situation into a compelling context. I wrote about how I’d already heard from multiple families that were, literally, freezing to death in their homes. These were people, I shared, that were essential Aggies with menial-but-important jobs on campus. School had been cancelled because of the persistent sub-freezing temperatures and these workers were powerless–both literally and figuratively–to do anything about their increasingly dire situation. “We have to do something to help them,” I wrote in concluding my email. I then hit the send button and off my plea went to the interim president of Texas A&M University, Dr. John Junkins.

To be honest, I didn’t really expect to hear back from him, but within an hour I get a phone call. I was more than.a little shocked when the Caller ID on my cell phone read “Texas A&M.” I answered, and the voice on the other end of the line said, “Yes, this is John Junkins. Is this Max Gerall?”

Incredulous, I managed to voice a reply in the affirmative.

“I got your email, Max. How can I help?”

I was completely flabbergasted, but at the same time, I was a little starstruck, too. I told him, “I never imagined you would get or read my email, let alone call me back and do so SO SOON!” I realized I was a little too excited, so I took a deep breath and tried to stay calm since I was talking to an important person with whom I was hoping to do business.  Fortunately, Dr. Junkins took the lead and started asking pertinent and relevant questions about the matter at hand.

In my responses, I quickly told him about The REACH Project and again shared the pleas for help I was getting from our families. A few of our clients had texted me photos of their thermostats and I sent those to Dr. Junkins’ cell phone. I reminded him, “If we're not careful, if we don't act fast, people are going to die.”

He completely understood.

“Max, thank you for reaching out,” Dr. Junkins said. “Thank you for thinking of me. Give me an hour and I’ll get back with you.”

When he hung up, I was filled with gratitude. Then the pessimist in me reared his ugly head and said, “Right. You’re never going to hear back from him!” But thad little devil who sits on my left shoulder was wrong. Within an hour, the president’s cell phone number appeared with the ringing of my phone.

“I’ve made a number of calls, Max,” Dr. Junkins said, “but I haven’t been able to find a place we can use. Because of the cold, pipes are bursting all over campus and there’s no place that will lend itself to doing what you need us to do.”

My hopes were momentarily dashed, but Dr. Junkins was quick to add, “Give me some more time. Let me call you back in another hour.”

And this time, I knew he would.

“We’ll figure something out,” he said.

Sure enough, he called back. Dr. Junkins shared with me that he’d taken a brief walk around campus to witness firsthand some of the trials and tribulations the extreme cold was causing to the university’s infrastructure.

“Nothing yet,” he said in response to my question if he’d found a warming location, “but don’t give up hope. Give me a little more time.”

I thought Dr. Junkins sounded a little desperate at that point. On behalf of my families, I was getting desperate, too.

Later that afternoon, Dr. Junkins called back yet again.

“Max, I was able to convince the chancellor and the athletic director to allow us to open up Reed Arena as a warming center,” he said. He explained that their original answer had been no, the initial pushback stemming from the university's experience when Reed Arena had been used to house evacuees from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans back in 2005. The venue had suffered significant damage as a result, and there were concerns about liability matters in opening up the facility to outside parties again. Dr. Junkins was able to get the go-ahead, he told me, based on his own “personal recognizance.”

“I’ll be there myself to make sure nothing goes wrong,” he said.

Four hours later, Reed Arena was opened to the public and many of our families flocked to the site. When I got there, President Junkins was standing at the entrance welcoming local residents on behalf of the Texas A&M community. It was amazing. “He doesn’t really have to be here,” I thought.

In fact, he didn't have to do any of this, but not only did he do it, but also he was there personally to offer hope and reassurance. Our families who made it to the site occupied some of the lowest rungs on the Texas A&M workforce ladder. These were custodians, maintenance men, groundskeepers, cooks, and dishwashers, and as they arrived, they were being welcomed by the president of the university. That made a big impact on everyone.

It certainly made.a big impact on me.

I’m proud to say that Dr. Junkins and I remain friends. We talk frequently and he’s become a big supporter of The Reach Project. I’m humbled by his interest and involvement.

My long-term personal vision is to create a replicable model of The REACH Project that empowers college towns to serve everyone, not just college students, but those who may have a need in those towns, whether they are essential workers or just people who have been dealt a tough hand in life. Long term, I think this not only creates healthier communities, but also we can create a more empathetic society as a whole. As the college students who volunteer with The REACH Project at Texas A&M University graduate, they take with them, as a result of their experience with us, a greater empathy which will allow them to become more compassionate decision-makers as they continue to impact other people’s lives.

My vision is to create relationship-based communities, like the one we’ve formed here in Aggieland, all across the country. Over time, I see my role becoming that of an advocate for relationship-building, someone who is willing and able to have the hard conversations and bring together individuals who, perhaps on paper, have few reasons to collaborate for the greater good.

I want to become a true change-agent, someone who can travel around the country and help create more sustainable, vibrant, and healthier communities, while at the same time inspiring young college-aged people to do good. Young people are often counted out for a lot of reasons, but I think what REACH does, and what can be emulated elsewhere, is to show that young people have not only a huge capability, but also a huge power to do good, as long as they have the support they need.

Where I am now, The REACH Project offers that support.