Meet Greg and Kellye Russell, an Apartment Life Team serving in Dallas, Texas since 2023.  

If you had to pick one thing about your community that you most appreciate, what would it be?

We’re in a high-rise building; it’s about three years old, and it's just a beautiful building. We have a beautiful amenity space on the fifth floor with floor-to-ceiling windows facing downtown Dallas. The space that we have is just really spectacular. We have a beautiful pool deck. We have an event coming up which is going to be a sunset poolside cocktail party with live music. It creates a great feeling to have a party in that kind of space. 

Tell us what some of your rhythms are. 

We try to do events where we can have the maximum number of people; in other words, there's not an RSVP required. For instance, at our upcoming sunset happy hour, everyone's invited. Occasionally we'll do things like a paint class or a group Mahjong lesson where there is an RSVP because attendance is limited, but we try to do those only once or twice a quarter because we want as many people as possible to come to events. 

We might do a game night where we have someone come in and do trivia or bingo, or a flower bar where people can come make a flower bouquet. We have events like that on repeat throughout the year. 

Tell us about a memorable event you’ve hosted. 

Last year, we did a Friendsgiving on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. We have a vendor we partner with who’s called “The Hamburger Man,” and he grilled hamburgers, and we centered the event around the Cowboys football game. We know that everyone's going to have Thanksgiving food that whole week, so we do hamburgers, and it was a huge hit. 

You’ve mentioned a lot of activity-based events. Can you share some other activities that have worked well for your events?

The paint classes are popular, and Mahjong lessons, musical bingo, or regular bingo keep people engaged. They’re competing a little bit. They come together in teams, and friend groups come together and hang out. We also always try to have an event or two per quarter where we invite them to bring something to share. We've just found that people really enjoy events where there's an activity going on that they can be involved in.

How create an inviting space to welcome people and keep them engaged?    

We want it to feel like an extension of their home in a lot of ways, you know? Like they're having just people come over to their house. We think through details down to the layout of how people are going to flow, where the food is, and where the musician is going to be.

People really like live music. They come out, they're more relaxed, they hang out longer. It's just something that they really enjoy, even as opposed to having a football game going on one of the TVs or even a playlist. We’ve had live musicians out four or five times now, and they’re always really well-received.

This interview was pulled from Episode 303 of the Apartment Life Leadership Podcast and lightly edited for clarity. For more coordinator stories and interviews, you can follow along at apartmentlife.org/podcast. Follow @aptlife for updates on new episodes and upcoming content! If you enjoy listening, leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. We can't wait to hear from you and hope this podcast serves as a helpful resource.