Joy Rineer oral history interview: transcript

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOY RINEER

CLAYTEE D. WHITE DECEMBER 7, 2017

REMEMBERING 1 OCTOBER

ORAL HISTORY RESEARCH CENTER AT UNLV LIBRARIES SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES

This is Claytee White. It is December seventh, 2017, and I am with Joy Rineer. Joy, could you please pronounce and spell your name for me?

Sure. You got it right. It's Joy Rineer and it's spelled J-O-Y, last name is R-I-N-E-E-R.

Thank you. I am going to put a special note that you want to see this before we put it online.
Yes, I would appreciate that. That would be great.
This is about October one. I just want to start by finding out how long have you been in Las Vegas?

My family moved back to Las Vegas in 1985 when I was seven, but my family roots are originally from here, and so my parents had been raised here as well.
Wonderful. Tell me how you felt about Las Vegas as a place to live, as a city, a place to raise children.

My impressions of Vegas have changed over time. I think the city that I loved when I was younger versus the city of adulthood are two different things. I had moved back to Las Vegas following college and working in a few other states, in 2004, and I thought I would only be here for a short period of time, under a year, so in some ways kind of the classic Las Vegas story. It was in that time frame that I ended up meeting my husband. He was from elsewhere and he had moved to Las Vegas from northern Virginia and he absolutely loved this city. One thing leads to another and I think actually seeing Las Vegas with fresh eyes, coming back in a more professional setting and working in this city from an adult perspective and then also as we started to have conversations and decided to raise our family here that kind of relationship with Las Vegas has evolved. I like to say that Las Vegas is what you look for. In looking for that community connection for me from that adult perspective—my kids just recently turned five and

1

2

six and this is our home and this is where we've put down roots and this is where we absolutely want to stay and we've made that choice—for me Las Vegas has become ideal. When you start to look for those community connections—even though my family roots are from here, all my family has since left—in some ways we have built this network for ourselves that are these friends, the village that we're choosing to raise our family in is Vegas for us. That's how I see it, is home by choice.

Good. October one, of course, we had a massacre take place. First, tell me when you found out about the shooting.
I didn't find out about it until the morning. The ironic part of that within my family dynamic is that everyone that we knew actually reached out to Ian because I'm an early-to-bed kind of gal and on a Sunday night and having to get to work the next morning, I think everybody felt somewhat confident that I wouldn't have been out in that location, but my husband is very different in that regard, and so all of the reaches really went to him and had been happening over the course of the night. I was asleep and he knew what was going on at that time, but fortunately for us he was home and not out that evening. He heard me start to stir in the morning and actually almost flew out of bed because he wanted to make sure that I knew what was going on because I don't seek out news stories in the same way. The likelihood that I would have actually plugged into any kind of media first thing in the morning before making it to work was pretty slim. So that was when I first heard about what was going on.

The reaction of Las Vegas surprised the world. Were you surprised?

I wasn't. I really wasn't in the sense that I think people don't get the heart blood of this city and that we are so small and we are actually so connected. Like I said, Vegas is what you look for. In that setting the community I knew did what we did. In that way I was not surprised at all that we

3

bonded together in that way and we came together from so many different angles and just the tremendous amount of different types of conversations that I had with the people that I loved in this city as we started to see what it was and the uprising of support on every single level was the city I know.

Tell me what the conversation was like when you arrived at work that morning.

I think the first conversation was accountability, where is everybody? How do we make sure that we can find all of our people? So it became an immediate...Everybody gathered in the office. We run a pretty flexible schedule, and so architecture is notorious for late nights. There isn't this expectation of arrival at the same time. There is a pocket of time that people end up coming into the office. In the case of this, it wasn't atypical that maybe not everybody was there, but that outreach started to happen. It was instant outreach, like, let's make sure that everybody is okay, especially some of the people that we thought could have potentially been at the show, so tracking them down also became a top priority.

Then the second part of the conversation became, we understand. The people here physically, our people are accounted for, but let's talk about the mental part of the impact of this and if anybody felt like they needed to be out of the office, be with people. What ended up happening with those closest to us, it became the friend of the friend, the daughter of the friend, the brother of the cousin. It was this one stepped removed, but it was then prevalent and it started to become a lot of kids. It was somebody that we knew, it was their kid's friend; that for some reason seemed to be a trend of some of the connections of people that I knew that were more directly impacted. A lot of it was like, if you have people that you need to be with today or that you need to reach out to today or if you just feel like you need a mental moment to pause and be part of this or figure out how you need to regroup in the aftermath of this, certainly take the time.

4

That became, I'd say, the day-of conversations, to try to figure out how do we process this before maybe the launch of what do we then start to do.
Did other companies in your atmosphere, your environment and your friends approach it the same way?

A little bit different based on how they were plugged into the community. I think from a general overarching, yes. It was let's, for one, get our bearings. I think there was an overall sense of, let's get our bearings about what's going on. But then there was a secondary layer to that, actually, like Leadership Las Vegas. One of my really good friends from that program that had gone through that year is the CEO of the Red Cross, and so he is in a very different conversation in a situation like that. I'd say that there were also many other individuals in that case to where their jobs and their roles within our community was to activate immediately and to start that process of mobilization and just make sure that the resources were in place. For them I'm certain and in conversations hearing about what they had to do to mobilize and launch that day and really be there for a community was a very different approach from even a professional setting, not even a personal setting although there were layers of that, but from a professional setting, watching them kind of jump into that and, again, colleagues that worked for MGM, seeing their process and what they had to do as an organization and then even their personal roles. I think what was really fascinating coming out of that is that some of the individuals that I had been friends with and had these great personal relationships, I have now since developed a much deeper understanding of what their true role is within our community in those kinds of settings. Watching them just really step up and be just amazing in how they handled those situations has given me a whole greater depth of appreciation and love for them on all of those levels to watch how they handled that situation.

5

A few days later your company had the opportunity to do something pretty amazing. Can you tell me how this came about, the entire evolution of it?
Coming back to our day-of-type conversations, one of the difficult transitions of that was then the next layer of conversations. I feel like the next layer of conversation started to become, okay, what can we do now? What does it start to look like where we can have some meaningful impact and really give of our energy and time and resources and such? I think to a certain extent there are some obvious ways to start to plug in in that situation that everybody started to define very early on. For example, you could give blood; you could give money; you could give time; you could volunteer. But within a lot of that arena, certain professions and certain personal connections allowed for a more direct plug-in in time and energy. Our next layer of conversation was, how do we start to define ways that we think will have a long-term, lasting, meaningful impact, and how do we bring our expertise to the table?

It's amazing how when you hit those kinds of moments and you start to visualize it out— we really, I think, as a group wanted to have some opportunity like that—then the next thing you know one of the fire chiefs with Clark County ended up reaching out because he's friends with one of my coworkers. It was in the transitionary period to where they were trying to essentially find a new home for the Vegas Strong Resiliency Center. They had a very short window of time to put together an office and a counseling center. It would double as a place for families to be able to go and people to be able to come for resources. They were able to get a location donated that was over by the School of Medicine. They had the space donated to be able to set up this location. If I recall, we got the phone call on Wednesday. I can confirm that. But it was an incredibly short period of time. I think we got the phone call on the Wednesday and they had to be in, up and running on the next Monday. It may have been actually been the Tuesday. So we

6

got the phone call on the Tuesday and then by the next Monday they needed to be completely up and running in the new space.

He just had asked would we be willing and have some resources to be able to help them in putting that together because they were trying to select some carpet and pink color and furniture and do some furniture shopping. So we had the opportunity to connect our interior designer with two individuals; one was the purchasing director for Clark County and then the other was a coordinator for the Preparedness and Response Team that's associated with the fire department. She was able to work closely with them to try to get a better understanding of what the program was going to be for that space and then what their needs were. Then everything from picking out a full material pallet in that short period of time to then the coordination efforts to reach out to all of our vendors that we work with consistently. For one example, with the carpet, usually there's a pretty long lead time within that material. She was able to reach out to some of the reps that we work with all the time and say, "Hey, look this is what it's for. We're trying to pull this together in a really short period of time." The response was tremendous. People were like, "Hey, I don't have a product that would be available that you're looking for in this time frame, but, hey, this company does, and why don't you reach out to them?" Everybody across the board I think was to a certain extent waiting for an opportunity to come to where within our trade, within our industry of what we did, somebody open a path that we could make some kind of meaningful impact in what we actually do. This is what we do on a daily basis is try to go through this process, and so being able to see that response, she was able to put together and work with them to get the material and get it sourced and figure out how to get it there in the time frame that they needed. In addition, she joined them for some of the shopping for the furniture because a lot of it had to be found and not necessarily ordered just given the time

7

frame.
Then we got an opportunity for some of us from the office to join in with the county and

also the fire chief and some of their team to come in over the weekend and help install and put things together. Arecely is our interior designer, so she had been going over, over the course of the week. Then our team showed up on Sunday, everything from hanging up photos to installing blinds to setting up the furniture to dusting, to try to get them all ready that weekend before so that come Monday morning...

My favorite was Misty at the time. She was saying that they had really no idea what to anticipate as far as that first day because they were in the process of getting everything set up and transferred. They were seeing some of the resources that had been part of the center or part of the services that they were offering on that Friday were not necessarily going to transfer. The amount of people that they had on Friday, they didn't really know if it would be similar, those expectations.

So trying to get them as set up as we could really from in some ways an industry perspective of feeling like we could help not only like hands and feet on the ground that weekend of, but really feeling like we could bring at least some of our talent to that conversation to help them out. In some ways we were just so pleased because it felt like a true project that we had condensed, but we were able to give them what we felt to be a great quality product for them to be in. One of the pieces of that is that I think fundamentally, too, part of what we love is that you're trying to get environments that feel comfortable for what the needs of that program and that space is. That's a huge tenant of what we try to do is to make the environment fit what the needs are. Walking out of there that weekend and seeing some of the family counseling areas and some of the small intimate rooms that were able to be established, they just felt comfortable and

8

good and somewhere that hopefully will become a great environment for them as a landing spot and the energy of the space will feel good for the mission of what they need as they move forward with all the goals for the resources they'll be able to provide for our community.
Tell me about the size of the space.

Within there, there was kind of a main lobby area. I'll check on the overall square footage. There was a main lobby area and then they had one larger room that was intended for families and a little bit larger space for counseling. Then there was, I want to say, three other additional rooms that were a little bit smaller than the family counseling room that were off one of the main hallways. Then they had support spaces to go along with that as far as a kitchen and some office space.

That was actually one of my favorite parts as well and one of the things that I think has been one of the most powerful exercises is of this whole conversation that has started within our whole city, is that within that room you had all these people from different backgrounds and different professions. Everything from the fire chief and his team and all these other volunteers that had come in, in addition to us. We were just like one piece of that overall puzzle. All the people that had donated either product or time and everything to be able to make that happen and to plug in to that bigger matrix that made that all come together is what Vegas did. That's what makes our city very special.
Yes, it is. Describe the colors and the paintings. Just put me in that space.
Oh, I'll do better than that. I can show you photos, actually. I think one of the things about any kind of good quality designed space like that is that it somewhat becomes personalized. Aracely had gone through and she had helped them and gone shopping, essentially shopping with them. The colors and the artwork that was on the wall, it just all felt great. It came together. The carpet

9

looked great. But Misty had also found these images online of some of the images that were in the media at the time of what was going on. One of my favorite parts of day—I kind of always like to think a little bit in this way. You put together all of these core pieces, so the color scheme and the carpet and the materials, the pallet. But then where things start to resonate is where you put personal touches within all of that space. We provide the framework oftentimes for people to come in and personalize and really make it sing, kind of the last note, the sprinkles. In the case of this she had found all of these images. One of the things that we did during that weekend was come up with the layout to start to hang them on the walls in addition to some of the other pieces. I felt like in some ways that became the color and that last finishing touch in many ways. This is a fascinating to me as putting the memory garden together in a period of a few days. Yes.

Another instant...

Instant. Speaking of this, yesterday I was involved in a blood drive with my Leadership Las Vegas group. One of the things that I have found is a very interesting balance in the conversations that are happening, things to where it's like that; our entire city has rallied in the memory garden or in exercises like this where you had a very condensed period of time to jump in and make an impact that needed to happen on a now basis. But one of the other interesting conversations that has then continued to happen was sitting down and trying to brainstorm ideas in the aftermath of everything, how do we start to do something? Another conversation that ended up happening for me is that I had reached out to Leadership Las Vegas group and we ended up having a wonderful dinner, all of us just starting to brainstorm ideas, because everybody had great ideas about what are some of these elements that we can do as a community even if it's something like a thank you, a thank you to our community or to some of the people

10

that are involved in some of the more immediate emergency response efforts. Two amazing conversations came out of that.

One of the other women that I had gone through the program with from 2014, she ended up coordinating an amazing effort where care packages were put together for the coroner's office. She was the leader within that effort and the team and I'm watching how a few of them really were able to put together something very special as a thank you to those working within the coroner's office.

The secondary conversation is that I had thought a blood drive or wanting to contribute in that way is, again, what we said, one of those more immediate things. We had had some conversations, actually quite a few conversations with the Red Cross to try to figure out what that looked like. Well, until those conversations I hadn't been aware about some of the testing and the time frames from when you donate to when the blood becomes available. Did you have a similar experience?
I had no idea.
No idea, right? All of the blood that was available in that time frame on October first, it was from people that had donated two to three weeks prior to that and then we had had such an amazing uprising within the community to go and donate blood. But what it started was some meaningful conversations about, what are the pockets of time? What are the needs in the community? What could that look like long term? We have been working to try to figure out...Because of that delay period, they say that the summer and then this pocket of time becomes a high-need donation period for them because you start to end up then getting towards the end of the year, New Year's, Christmas, and this pocket of time in particular, this first week in December, people have already shifted into holiday mode mind-set and you've hit

11

Thanksgiving already. The delay of this donation period versus the needs associated with some of the New Year's holiday and such like that, there is a consistent need in this pocket of time for donation. Plus, there was such an amazing uprising within the city as far as donating blood that finding a pocket of time to be able to organize something like that in the immediacy of it didn't make as much sense.

One of the things I've been working with, and one of the other graduates of our same class, is at the Boys and Girls Club. Between this very collaborative effort with some of the alumni from the Leadership Las Vegas program and then those two amazing organizations, we were able to put together a blood drive yesterday that was hosted at the Boys and Girls Club. Just the response from some of the alumni to come out and donate was pretty remarkable.

One of the things that we've talked about as well is that as a community this will always be a need for our community as a whole, so how do we take some of the lessons learned from this one moment, this pocket moment in time, and start to set up that safety net or those things that we can do on a consistent basis moving forward? I think that there is great interest by many involved to say that what if we make this always the first week of December thing so that as a group we're plugging in consistently moving forward because Vegas is always our home. How do we start to create that deeper, tighter safety net moving forward on a consistent basis from things that we're learning coming out of this?
Amazing. Thank you for that. How do you think the country's attitude changed about Las Vegas, pro or con, after this?
Let me think about that. I think a trend...If people don't have a personal connection to Las Vegas, I think that they see it as a playground, and so I think in some ways what may have changed is that Vegas was humanized for them. I'd say that that's probably what I hoped to be the biggest

12

takeaway from a community perspective in the way that it's like, yes, this is home for many, many people; that it's important to us.
What did this experience teach you about yourself?
I think I've always been a fundamentally optimistic person and one of the hardest things I had to reconcile in this is that I had a really hard time when all of the national conversation went to agendas, when it started to become almost that agenda too quickly, and, quite frankly, I still felt like our city was bleeding. So for me, my biggest single takeaway is that I feel like I want to make sure I am plugging in on a very human individual basis more consistently because I don't feel like I resonate as much so when it instantly goes to some of the politics associated with the conversation. I'd much rather just be activating at a very wonderful local level with all of those people, things like this to where it's connections, humans.

What did it teach you about Leadership Las Vegas?

Oh, man, I just love that group and I love those people so much. There's quite an application process to be accepted to participate into the program, and so there's a series of interviews. You have to do an application, you have to do an interview, and then you're selected to participate. They always say that you end up in the class you're meant to be in, in that way.

But the whole premise is that you're taking leaders within the community and you're doing two things. You're educating them about different arenas within the city that they may be unfamiliar with. For example, somebody may be incredibly embedded in a leader within the educational community of Las Vegas, but they may not really know anything about criminal justice or they may not know anything about healthcare in the city. So there is an educational process through the entire program. Every month you're learning about this different arena within our city. By the end of the program, the concept from that perspective is that you're now

13

empowering people from an educational knowledge to feel very well rounded to go out and make an impact in the community.

Then the second piece of that is that you're bonding this group and you're connecting this group that goes through this program together so that you are giving them just this amazing interpersonal relationships now across all of those different arenas. There's a class project associated with it that each class individually defines, and so there's that second layer.

When you marry those two things, at the end of the program the whole goal is to create impact within our community and leadership within our community because now you've invested a ton of time and energy and effort. The program is run by volunteers following, alumni that then plug back in to give back to this program in those two facets.

What I learned about Leadership Las Vegas is that they are succeeding at what they are trying to do because watching my class, just watching them on all of the different levels that they came together, they were leaders within this community. I love them all dearly.
I love it. Has your attitude changed at all, in any direction, about guns?
Gosh, you're going to one of those political questions, right? It didn't change. It stayed consistent and I'm pretty anti. So that's it, pretty consistent.
I appreciate this so much. We are doing across-the-board conversations of various people. We had no idea that we would be talking with you, someone who did what you have done for this cause. I appreciate the intellectual look at it as well as the very heartfelt look at this. I just appreciate this so very much. Is there anything else you'd like to add now that you kind of know what we're doing?
No, nothing comes to mind directly.
I liked when you talked about the next level of the conversation. That was very important

14

and I had not defined that, but I find in most interviews that that's exactly what has happened. I just thank you so much.
Thank you. [Pause]

One of the other things with Leadership Las Vegas, one of the session days was History in Arts. Given the time frame of that day, it was occurring in October as well, and there's usually a mixer that follows that all the alumni are invited to the mixer because it's actually the very first session day that kicks off for that new class. They end up doing kind of a gateway, which is an intro, but then the first educational section is the History in Arts in October. At that mixer it was the very first time that they had gathered since the event. In some ways it was the very first time also that the alumni were getting together in that way. There had been a lot of conversation about also is this whole idea of thank-yous. We knew that many different first responders had come into town just for a very short pocket of time. Hundreds of people will come in from the city from the American Red Cross or from other organizations to try to help in that immediate moment of crisis, but then they go back to their home bases; they go back to the cities that they come from. One opportunity that we saw as a group and that there was a lot of conversation within the Leadership Las Vegas group, is there a way to be able to do thank-yous for some of those people before they leave? In conversations from people that we knew within those organizations, we were able to pull together a Leadership Las Vegas thank you. We had these amazing thank-you cards that were developed by one of the alumni and people were able to come into the mixer and then we had all of the pens and they were able to write thank-you cards to those that were leaving the next week to go back home at that time, but then there was also another group of cards that we were able to do for those that were in the hospital still. For some of the victims we were able to write notes to them as well. It was this combination of first

15

responder thank-you cards but then also notes to those that were victims of the event as well. Then they were gathered up and distributed from the group.
I love it.
Watching people find creative ways to express gratitude and to try to just let people know that there are people that are thinking about them.

I think in some ways the crazy part of it all, it's just how incredibly arbitrary it felt. There have just been so many conversations with people that were either, “Well, I could have been there; I go to those events all the time.” Or, “I was there, but the person next to me didn't make it.” Or, “The person next to me ended up in the hospital.” There was no rhyme or reason to any of it.

I think just letting people know that they're appreciated and thought about are two fundamental human ways to approach this, too, when you really get out of your head and back into your heart. I feel like this entire thing is exactly that. You go into your head about what are things you can do or the very logical side of impact and action and plans and all that, and then you sink into your heart and you're like, how do you just let people know what you're feeling? And then how do you go back to the head? For me it has very much felt like that yo-yo a little bit.
I know I'm a little bit over the top sometimes. This is a tragic, tragic event. I see the response of this city as the beginning of world peace.
I think if people could anchor into just the interconnectedness of all of us, much of that would stop. One of the big fundamental problems in all of it is when you start to view others as others. In this case, also just disposable others. I fundamentally don't believe that that's the case. I feel there is an interconnectedness to humanity. The more that we anchor in that I think it is the path

16

to just relating and empathy and believing that what you do to those others is what you do to yourself.
Yes. Thank you so much.
Thank you. [Pause]

—donate and figure that out. If you're trying to look at time, treasure and talent also coming together and saying, how do I do all three? But how do I do all three in the right way? So we were saying the most amazing thing about having this opportunity—because the chief knows and is friends with one of my coworkers, and so he had reached out then on Tuesday to say, "Would you even be able to help with this? Is this something that you could be a resource?" Since we had been previous conversations leading up to that, we were just...And I feel like our entire industry and the people that were able to contribute were just waiting, just waiting for somebody to come and say, we need you in something that could be a talent way. I love seeing that and how that has manifested in the entire community across the board, people just trying to find any possible way to tie in to all three of those in a meaningful way.
This has been great. I really appreciate it.
Thank you for doing this. Stuff like this and having these stories and having this history, I think just even—
STEFANI EVANS: This is another niche that's being filled, this.
Yes. I've always loved history, the history and the stories of people. Not only are you a part of the stories that make you up, but you're a part of the stories that I think—sometimes within families—the stories you tell. So you're the stories that make you up, but you're also the stories you tell and the stories you remember and the stories that you honor. As you start to have those conversations, I think a community is very much that as well. What are the stories we're going to

17

honor coming out of this? Because that is what will make us the community of our future as we find ways to navigate this.
STEFANI: The who we are.
The who we are and the who we were. Who we were in that moment and then who we want to be as we move forward. I feel like this legacy of this moment in time is incredibly critical to defining how we identify that and how we honor it, too. The people that came together in this community, like you were saying, people not really expecting the response in this way, humanizing Vegas and everything that we already knew that we all were, but seeing people are really...

BARBARA TABACH: And the greater world is seeing it. It's like, yes, we are real people. We are a real city. We live and breathe it.
STEFANI: We don't live in hotels. We have souls.
Even that deeper level, too, we are truly, even though it's become another phrase, but we are a strong community. We are a small-knit community. We're a community with incredibly deep roots and identity. It's like we're human, but there is an identity to this city that is unique that makes it everything I love about this city, too. We're big and we're little all at the same time. People only see the big. They only see the billboards. They only see that and watching everybody, yes, we're that. But we're so much more and we're this. We've all known we're this. Let us share that with you, but let us share it with each other in this moment in time, too. Like we were saying, just watching even people that you know across their professional and personal and just doing what they do amazingly and coming together, it was all the right conversations. BARBARA: What a great experience for you and for us.

This is great, yes.

18

It's an opportunity I think in some ways for our community, which now that I'm saying that...But it's a hard thing to view anything like that as a moment, but I think you almost have to, to a certain extent. You have to anchor into that place and say, okay, well, yes. How do we then take what we've learned out of this and allow it to be an optimistic opportunity to make not only just our community, but how do we allow that to be a stronger conversation that needs to happen? BARBARA: I think you're absolutely right. That's what enables us as human beings to survive the challenges that are thrown in front of us like this.

And to connect.

STEFANI: And it's deeper than what separates us politically or economically or anything else.
One of my favorite stories, like you were just saying, kind of economically, socially, whatever, in the sense of it didn't matter; none of that matter.

STEFANI: It didn't matter.
One of my favorite stories are the Hoodlums, the Hopeful Hoodlums. Have you heard about them? Have you talked to them? Oh, they're awesome.
I cannot wait to find them.
Oh, Ian knows them. My husband knows them.
Good. I want them. I tried to find them when I first heard them on television and could not find them.
My husband and I, for many years we threw a pigathon.
STEFANI: A pigathon?
A pigathon.
Is he from North Carolina?

19

He's from northern Virginia, just outside of D.C. But they used to do pigathons—they weren't called a pigathons at the time—but they used to do pigs and you'd gather. His family, they're huge barbecuers and cookers, and food is a fundamental part of major activities. If you're doing Thanksgiving, you're not having a turkey; you're having four turkeys that you vote on and then a ham to the side of the sides and a menu. Oh, yes, you sticky tab which one did well that year. Here's your Post-it Note for your winner.

STEFANI: They take this seriously.
They do. My roots had originally been here, but my family has since all left. When we made the conscious choice that Vegas was going to be our home and we were going to raise our family here, we had just had our son and we were like, "Let's have a pig in the park and everything." STEFANI: Instead of the pig in a poke?
Not in a poke, not in the ground, you can't. So we ended up renting a spot for the first year over on Sunset Park. He rented the griller. Seriously full pig. That first year we may be had fifty, sixty people, friends come to that. Then over the course of the next five years it grew to where the final one we had over five hundred people.
BARBARA: Oh my goodness. Oh, wow.
STEFANI: How did we never hear about this?
The second year it was again just friends and some family would come into town. Then the third year we decided—people kept saying, "Let us give you money to help with the event." We were like, "No, that's not what we're really trying to do." But we said, "If you want to, let's just do a raffle." We ended up the third year, threw something together, did a little raffle. I think we had collected like four or five hundred dollars and we just donated to charity. Then over the course of that next year, I had an opportunity to find the Shannon West Homeless Youth Center. I got a

20

tour of that at that time when they were over in their old facilities. They've since now moved into a new building over off Flamingo. So we connected with Help. For the fourth and the fifth years we ended up raising a few thousand dollars and we ended up donating it.

Coming out of that, though, my husband loves graphic design. This is how it ties back in to the Hoodlums. He loves graphic design, so he would develop the fliers. Well, we also love to collect art and just like really eclectic fun art. For the third year, I think it was, we ended up working with an artist who gave us part of the background for the flier that we put out for the invite. One of the years we ended up working with Dustin to develop the pig because they all have different style pigs and we love seeing the artists interpret the pig. He had developed that and he's part of that group, the Hoodlums. So he's been posting all about that.

They were putting together an event—this was quite a few years ago; I don't think they have the space anymore—but it was over off Decatur, if I recall, and they were putting on these art events that Ian and one of his friends were going to pretty consistently during that pocket of time. It was basically just for artists to display their work and also it turned into a huge party, I think, once a month to where it was a big warehouse space and just an amazing venue for all of these great talented artists to come together and just really have a great time with the art, honestly. They're a pretty tight-knit group as far as I understand.
They started doing just all kinds of small things, groceries and water. They've talked about them on television a couple of times. But I could never find them.
I think what I love so much about that story, too, is every day they were waking up and people would hear about them and all the sudden they're gathering pizzas and off they go. They're like, "Where are we going today?" I think even watching stories like that, none of it mattered; your background, all that. Everybody jumped in and they did exactly what they could do in that

21

moment and you just hear these tremendous stories about people coming together in that way.

Great. This is great.
[End of recorded interview]