How This NYC Charity Is Teaming Up with Bodegas to Feed the Homeless
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Food

How This NYC Charity Is Teaming Up with Bodegas to Feed the Homeless

Many New Yorkers take their bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches for granted, but Hearty Start brings them to the people on NYC's streets that need them the most.

For almost two years, online-based charity Hearty Start has been handing out breakfast sandwiches to the homeless all over New York City. Combining an easy-to-use subscription payment model with food donation, the organization hopes to make it more accessible than ever to lend a hand to feed the city's growing homeless population.

The organization, founded in July 2015, lets users customize a meal plans for as little as three bucks a month. Choose an egg and cheese sandwich, add sausage or bacon, and how often you want a sandwich to be handed out during the month, and that's it. All sandwiches are made fresh daily by local delis, and personally distributed by the Hearty Start team. To date, they've given out more than 15,000 sandwiches to those living on New York's streets, and the organization was recently featured on The Rachael Ray Show.

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The organization also gives back locally by hiring formerly homeless people in recovery to distribute the food. MUNCHIES spoke with Teddy Fitzgibbons, the president of Hearty Start, and Alex Register, one of the founders and lead designers of the project about how bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches can make a real difference for the city's homeless population.

MUNCHIES: Hi, Teddy and Alex. How does Hearty Start fit in with more traditional food charities?
Teddy Fitzgibbons: Homelessness is rampant in NY and unfortunately growing, so shelters are stretched thin, but I think where we add value beyond the current ecosystem is that we are mobile and are able to help those that aren't receiving help from a shelter or aren't near a soup kitchen.

Did you always envision Hearty Start as a way of merging e-commerce and charity?
Fitzgibbons: In the beginning, it was the realization that it was fairly affordable to get breakfast sandwiches in New York, and you could buy them basically anywhere. It's through an e-commerce platform, which I think is an innovative solution; that was really to facilitate easy access, and the ability for anyone to donate a very tangible product. [We asked], how do you solve this problem scalably and let anyone donate a small amount?

Register: The technology side paired with how affordable it is to donate—it really lends itself to people in their early or mid-twenties who maybe can't afford to write a huge check to a charity, but can do something small for somebody, once a week or once a month.

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Fitzgibbons: The average donor of Hearty Start is, I believe, [about] 27, which is far younger than the average nonprofit donor overall.

This is essentially a subscription charity program?
Fitzgibbons: It's entirely subscription-based. We actually don't have a one-time donation option.

How do the homeless actually get access to the sandwiches?
Fitzgibbons: We hire recovering homeless individuals to pick up the sandwiches and then distribute them in predefined locations at predefined times. We pick areas like transportation hubs and parks in the summer, where there tend to be high concentrations of unsheltered homeless [people]. Currently, we distribute in four locations throughout Manhattan on the five week days. It's all localized, so we'll have a deli near a distribution area, pick up the sandwiches from a deli across the street, and then distribute them to the homeless in a park, or in Penn station.

Register: Munoz Price is the primary guy who is passing them out. Since he was homeless in the past, he has a sense of where these communities are. He's opened up a whole new understanding of where these people congregate. He's really been able to get to know them on a personal level because they feel more comfortable talking and interacting with him.

What kinds of sandwiches do you distribute? Do delis get to choose what they give out?
Fitzgibbons: The specific style or individual ingredients might vary slightly. Each deli might have their own specific supplier of rolls or eggs, but it's pretty streamlined there (egg, cheese, and sausage or bacon).

MUNCHIES: How many sandwiches have you delivered to date?
Fitzgibbons: That number is now a little bit more than 15,000. So, yeah it's scaled quickly.

What's next for Hearty Start?
Fitzgibbons: We'd ultimately like to roll this out nationally, because the model can work anywhere, whether it's a breakfast sandwich or an item that really resonates there—like out in LA, it might be a breakfast burrito—something where the community feels more ownership and engagement with it.

Register: Our first initiative we are planning is to reach out to homeless women of NY and getting sponsorship for different care packages for women. It is going to be very focused on women and specifically on sanitary products.

Thanks for speaking with us.