April Bragg: Support of the military is a critical function of what our chamber does. Robins is really a unique environment because of the integration of military and community to such an extent that they are always working hand in hand with civilians, military, and then, of course, our base contractors. It’s ingrained in our culture to be supportive of the military, the men and women, as well as the missions here at Robins. And it’s just a really cool place to be.

Amanda Ellis: That’s the voice of April Bragg, President and CEO of the Robins Regional Chamber in Warner Robins, Georgia. Warner Robins is just outside the gates of the Robins Air Force Base. And April will be sharing about the big role a significant military presence can play for your talent strategies as well as the overall fabric of a community. I’m Amanda Ellis and you’re listening to Inside America’s Best Cities, a podcast for chamber, economic development, and talent attraction professionals on making your community an even better place to live. To learn more about this podcast, visit livabilitymedia.com. And with that, let’s jump in. Welcome, April, thank you so much for being here on Inside America’s Best Cities.

April Bragg: Thank you, Amanda. I’m so excited to be here with you today.

Amanda Ellis: So you are based in Warner Robins, Georgia. Tell us a little bit about Warner Robins in general.

April Bragg: Yeah, so Warner Robins is actually right in the center of the state here in Georgia. We are the home of Robins Air Force Base, where we say that every day in middle Georgia is Armed Forces’ Appreciation Day. We have a community, located here in Houston County, of about 160,000 people. We’ve got a little over 80,000 living in Warner Robins proper, and then the base in total employees over 25,000 individuals, and that’s made up of active duty, civil service, as well as retirees. So the base obviously has a huge impact and influence here and I’m excited to share about some of that today.

Amanda Ellis: Yeah, and of course, that is what we’re here to talk about today, your significant local military presence and how you’re engaging with those folks and how you look at that as part of talent attraction, your chambers mission and all of that good stuff and what tips you have for other communities. So you already kind of started touching on this a little bit, but can you talk more about what that local military presence looks like and how it’s a big part of your community?

April Bragg: Yeah, so our situation here in Robins is a little different than many military installations in the fact that Robins Air Force Base is a maintenance depo. So basically if it flies in the sky, we touch part of it here at Robins. And so that means we don’t necessarily have active duty troops in the numbers that you would think when you hear there’s 25,000 people employed on the base, fewer than 6,000 of those are actually our military personnel. But from an economic impact standpoint, Robins Air Force Base has a $3.57 billion annual economic impact on the state of Georgia as the largest industrial complex in the state. So the remainder of that work and workforce is made up of civil servants, which of course are government employees. But working hand in hand, Robins is really a unique environment because of the integration of military and community to such an extent that they are always working hand in hand with civilians, military, and then, of course, our base contractors. It’s ingrained in our culture to be supportive of the military, the men and women, as well as the missions here at Robins.

Amanda Ellis: So your chamber, in particular, engages with those folks in a few specific ways. I know you have a committee and a whole event. Tell us more.

April Bragg: Yeah, so as I mentioned, support of the military is a critical function of what our chamber does. The majority of the work that we do in support of the military falls under our military affairs committee. And that committee work is really designed at focusing on airmen and their families. So mostly those enlisted young airmen, many of those are unaccompanied single individuals coming into the community. We host quarterly dinners for them at the refuge on base as an opportunity for community members to show up and meet them and let them know how much our community values them as individuals, not just because of the work that they do. Additionally, through the Refuge, which is a non-denominational chapel, if you will, on base providing a center of activity for the airmen and their families, we’re able to help find out about individual needs that may be going on as well as larger scale opportunities to support our military. Every month our chamber puts together welcome packets for our military members moving into the community, to the tune of anywhere from 40 to 80 of those a month. And we’re able to act as a conduit from information from the community at large, really helping to acclimate them to the services, amenities, and just stuff to do here locally immunity. One of the things that we really want to do is make sure that our military members not only feel welcome, but that we expedite their integration into the community from basic things like identifying a pediatrician for their kids and various healthcare providers, the different services that they need to connect to as new residents, as well as those quality of life things, knowing when to sign up for little league and how to gain access to our recreational facilities or community calendars and the like. And so lots of those ongoing initiatives of our chamber. And then, of course, we do have, as you mentioned, some more rigid, if you will, military programming that we do throughout the year. Those include everything from one of our largest events of the year, the State of the Base where the base releases their annual economic impact and talks about their priorities, progress, and partnership opportunities on the horizon, to our military dinners where we have informal discussions led by different mission partners, really getting to know the leader behind the mission. We really covet with those leaders who are leading these missions and leading our nation, and it’s a wonderful opportunity to get to know them as people, to build lasting relationships because we’ve found that many will come back and retire here in our community. In fact, we are the only military installation in the country that we can find that hosts something as unique as this. And we call it our Robins Cup. It’s a Rider Cup style golf tournament where we have 36 community leaders face off with 36 of our military leaders and personnel in a day of golf. And the real name of the game is about relationship building. It is super competitive, Amanda, as you would imagine, the military’s not going to let us get off easy. But we’re going into our 12th year now, and last year we had five different former colonels and leaders of our installations here at Robins come back to play, and some of them have retired in the area, some of them came from all over the country because they formed just tremendous relationships with the leaders in our community, with our chamber. And it really is just a wonderful opportunity for that comradery to linger much longer than the two years, three max, that they’re typically here with us.

Amanda Ellis: How do you feel like Warner Robins is uniquely positioned to draw and keep those military retirees you mentioned or those who are leaving and moving into civilian life?

April Bragg: It’s really interesting, when we hear the word retiree, in most instances we’re thinking of people my parents’ age who are in their mid-sixties, early sixties, I’m thinking about hanging up their hat, but our retirees from Robins are really young.

Amanda Ellis: 20 years, right?

April Bragg: Right.

Amanda Ellis: So as long as you’ve done that, you could be 40.

April Bragg: You could be 40, you come in at 18 years old and you’re not even 40, you’ve got school-aged kids and you’ve got a full life ahead of you. And so many of the resources that we have here really support that. One of the biggest attraction factors to our community is our first-rate public education system. We have one of the best school systems in the state of Georgia. All the metrics that one would evaluate a school system on from academic performance, athletic achievement, fine arts, just a multitude of AP and specialized learning programs. And so we have many that stay here or come back. But additionally, because of the maintenance depo aspect of our base, we have a lot of military contractors that are here that are military personnel, are able to basically do their same job outside the fence or just change their uniform and still work on Robins. As I mentioned, we’ve got over 10 or 12,000 of those employees at Robins are civil servants, and so many of them are able to do their same job just wearing a different uniform. We’re also really uniquely fortunate and blessed to be the home of the Georgia VECTR Center, which is the Georgia Veterans Education Career Transition Resource Center. I got all of that out in one mouth.

Amanda Ellis: Wow. That’s a long one.

April Bragg: Yeah, and really what that is, it is a statewide resource that allows veterans as well as those who will be retiring within the next year and their families to access world-class training in Cisco Systems, HVAC, welding, other high-demand career activities, commercial truck driving, that give the veterans an opportunity to either go and partner with a local employer or seek entrepreneurship on their own. And it’s literally a stone’s throw across the highway from the base to the VECTR Center. And so there’s a full integration into that last year of active duty service where they can be taking courses through the VECTR Center and become certified in one of these areas. They have career counselors and resume writers and just all of those different services that would make transitioning out of the military right here so much easier. Georgia is one of the first states to have something like this, and it really has been a game changer as it relates to veteran services.

Amanda Ellis: I know that you also engage in some work related to licensed reciprocity as a support to military spouses. What does that look like?

April Bragg: So for us, this has been a decade long process working with our military partners as well as our state delegation in making sure that not only Warner Robins, but the entire state of Georgia is military friendly, both for the military members as well as their spouses. So too often we see military spouses having to make the decision not work outside the home, simply because they might be a licensed teacher or esthetician or really any other field that doesn’t have a fast track, if you will, to licensure in the state of Georgia or in the state that they are moving to. And so our legislators have really carried the water over the last 10 years, and really in the last five years. In fact, we’ve got a final bill in the Georgia Senate that has just come out further shoring up the ease with which military members and their spouses can obtain licensure reciprocity, fast permitting to adopt the permits or licenses from whatever state they’re moving into to get them gainfully employed a lot quicker. I mean, you think about the time that it takes to move and acclimate to a community, and if you’re waiting for a licensing review board that only meets four times a year, depending on when you end up in a community, you may be halfway into your station here before even being able to go out and apply for the jobs that you’re skilled for. And so we find that they either don’t work outside the home or they’re really working in positions that they’re overqualified and, frankly, unfulfilled in. And so this has been just some really great work done here in the state of Georgia to really correct that and get ahead of the curve because our military is such an incredibly important part of the fabric of our state.

Amanda Ellis: Yeah, and not to mention if that process, like you were mentioning, can take a while, and a lot of folks in the military move pretty regularly, so sometimes it probably feels like you’re like, gosh, I just got situated here and now we have to leave again.

April Bragg: Exactly. Well, and I mean, it’s hard enough just knowing that you’re only going to be in a place for two years, but we think about those high-demand careers, like teachers and nurses and others, that employers are begging for the skilled labor. We have skilled labor right here. And so being able to remove and minimize a lot of those barriers not only helps the military members, but frankly, it helps our entire community because we’re able to address those gaps. And so knowing that you’ve got that stability, knowing that you’ve got that network. The other great thing that I had failed to mention about the military and the military spouse networks is they tend to know who’s coming in behind them. And many times they’re going to have friends in other parts of the country who are PCSing to our community on their next assignment that can literally step in and take over their existing job. And so then talk about a talent pipeline, when you’re able to cultivate your own. We’ve had employers who have a steady stream of military members filling the same position when another leaves because of their personal network within the military and the spouse’s organizations. So that’s kind of cool.

Amanda Ellis: Yeah, that’s awesome. I love what you’re doing. Love how intentional it is. And that’s really what chambers do, right? Take what you’re working with and your community and help everybody feel included and engaged. So love that. Anything else on this topic you’d like to share or add that we didn’t talk about yet?

April Bragg: I think the biggest thing is just being available and asking yourself what’s missing and are we uniquely positioned to fill that gap? Right when the pandemic hit in March of 2020 in our community, we created an online Facebook group called Robins To-Go. We are just shy of 40,000 community members in Robins To-Go, and it really is a positive place online to connect the community, our military, and visitors with our local business community, attractions, and things to do. And it has been the go-to resource for the 411 on the 478 ever since hitting the ground right at three years ago now. And it’s been so effective that we’ve spun off a group called Robins Works that provides opportunities for employers to connect with job seekers and resource partners. So whether it’s employment or you’re looking for a local dry cleaner or who has the best sushi in town, we’ve got you covered. We’re going to keep you connected.

Amanda Ellis: That’s great that you took a resource from early pandemic and continued to get something out of it, because I know a lot of people kind of started stuff like that, and I feel like it just fell off once things got more normal. So that’s really neat that it helps you build a longer-term audience.

April Bragg: It’s a moderated group. We make sure it stays positive, it’s pro business, pro community, but we approve between two and 300 new members to the group every single week. Any given month, we’ve got three to 4,000 posts and half a million comments, likes, and shares. And so three years later, this group is still just as impactful as it was in the early days. We’ve seen businesses really built on the back of the interest in this group. We just opened another Broken Egg, the franchise, because someone posted, “Hey, where’s the best place for brunch?” And we don’t have a lot of options on weekdays for people to get brunch, and so we had one of our local businesses went out, did their research, got on board as a franchise holder, and they’ve just opened up here and are wildly successful. Not only the business side, but also community needs. We had an apartment fire, and within a couple of days, we filled up two warehouses full of donations from the community. We’ve helped address homelessness with a warming center. As I’m sure in many military communities, our chamber members are always looking for opportunities to serve. And so many times we approach the military and say, “Hey, we’ve got members who want to help out, or is there a need we could address?” We have a very large internship program over the summer where college students from all over come in and intern to either potentially move into civil service or active duty military roles post-graduation. Every year we partner with the organizations on base to provide bed linens and toiletries and welcome bags with different local goodies and treats that they’re not going to find anywhere else. And it really does tell them, hey, we’re glad you’re here and we might not get to see you during this eight to 10 week stint, but we’d love for you to come back. We want them to know that we’re a welcoming community, and I think it really does pay off in the long run on recruitment retention, and then of course, just developing that talent pipeline for our area employers as well as our military.

Amanda Ellis: So speaking of downtime and fun things going on, so I always wrap up our interviews with a fun question, which is, if someone found themselves visiting Warner Robins, what would you say that they should do to spend some fun time?

April Bragg: So we have so many great attractions here. If you’re a history buff, we have the Museum of Aviation, which is home to the National STEM Academy, and we’ve got amazing displays of airplanes and just a rich history of the Air Force here. We also have a lot of fun attractions. We have Rigby’s Entertainment Complex. They have a water world that’s a lot like WhiteWater except way cooler and a lot newer. We are the home of the Georgia National Fair, and we have one of the best fairs I’ve ever attended with hundreds of thousands of visitors every single year, an amazing concert series, free concerts, by the way, and just top-notch name performers, lots of agricultural displays and all the animals and all the fried food you could ever want to eat.

Amanda Ellis: Very important.

April Bragg: Yeah.

Amanda Ellis: You mentioned treats just now. Treats you can’t get anywhere else. Were you meaning treats like dessert, and if so, just share more?

April Bragg: I think oftentimes when people think of military communities, they think about chain restaurants. While we do have our fair share of your national chains, we also just have some really great gems and hidden dives. We’re the home of Wilson’s Bakery with the famous Fingernut Cookie. You need to Google them. If you’ve never had a Fingernut Cookie, you need to. And we have a Buc-ee’s, so there’s something for everyone.

Amanda Ellis: Okay. Well, everyone always talks about their great food, and we know every community has some of that, but I love how you had some really specific examples.

April Bragg: Yeah.

Amanda Ellis: So thank you so much, April, for all of that great info from Fingernut Cookies to military and everything in between.

April Bragg: Thank you. This was so much fun. Thank you for having me.

Amanda Ellis: Thanks for listening to the Livability podcast where we take you Inside America’s Best Cities. At Livability, we highlight the unsung awesomeness of small and mid-sized cities across the country. We also partner with communities to reach their target companies and potential residents through digital content and print magazine programs. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, rate, and review this show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can learn more about us at livabilitymedia.com. Have an idea for an upcoming episode? Email me at [email protected]. Until next time, from Livability, I’m Amanda Ellis, sharing the stories of America’s most promising places.