Brian Rice, founder of Bayonne-based WOWSE Foundation, expects to have a stiff back by the time Thanksgiving comes around since he expected to finish delivering 85,000 pounds of turkeys by then.
This is more than double the amount of turkeys he’s delivered in the past, although this year he’s had some help: the members of the New York Giants.
“But they got so beat up from the Chicago game they almost couldn’t lift anything,” Rice joked, clearly appreciative of the help the team was giving his charity effort.
Although he started his foundation as a way to help education efforts, Rice got involved with supplying homeless kitchens in 2003 when he heard Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger raise concerns about the lack of contributions for the Thanksgiving holiday that year.
Rice decided the help out, called his mother, who owned a deli, and put in an order for 175 cooked hams and 175 baked turkeys, and with a list of those missions most in need, Rice, his wife Michelle, his stepfather Robert, and a family friend began to make deliveries. When they got to Bowery Mission in Manhattan, Rice met Brian Johansson, the mission director, and found out the mission had received half of what they needed from other sources.
According to Bowery Mission’s Operations Director, Stuart Schoener, “WOWSE was our saving grace in 2003, with less than a day to go we didn’t have enough turkeys to feed the crowds we expected. Brian Rice, and WOWSE came to the rescue.” WOWSE has supplied the Bowery Mission with turkeys every Thanksgiving since.
According to Schoener, “someone upstairs must like what we’re doing. We were blessed to have a generous organization like WOWSE step forward and take responsibility for supplying us with the food we need to touch the lives of thousands of poor New Yorkers.”
“I did it on a whim that year,” Rice said
Since he grew up in New York, he felt the urge to help those there.
Teaming up with others
Since then, Rice has made this a yearly tradition, delivering 40,000 pounds of turkeys last year, and expecting 84,000 pounds this year.
“When we started we made deliveries in a couple of SUVs,” Rice said.
But to handle the larger effort, Rice had had to partner with City Harvest, a non-profit organization founded in 1982, is the world’s first and New York City’s only food rescue program.
Initially it was a cooperative effort, but this year because of the difficulty Rice found in getting turkeys from his supplier, his foundation and City Harvest jointly purchased the turkeys for delivery to kitchens in Jersey City and New York City, and other New Jersey sites.
Rice’s mission fit in easily with that of City Harvest, one of the best known and well-respected distributors of food to the homeless, which collects food that would other wise go to waste from retail and wholesale food companies for redistribution to shelters.
Rice said he has much more control over where the food gets delivered in New York than he does in New Jersey.
“We drop off the turkeys at sites in New Jersey and the shelters pick them up,” he said. “In New York, we know which kitchens get the turkeys.”
While almost every shelter needs food, state law requires that he deliver to those places, which have the resources to store the meat.
“We don’t want to drop off the turkeys any place that can’t store them and have them go to waste,” he said.
Rice has been called the “Turkey Angel” for his annual food drive, which has him traveling to hundreds of homeless shelters to give away turkey to underprivileged children and families.
Help unloading the turkeys came via a group called Rock and Wrap it Up, which arranged for the New York Giants to lend a hand. This group was formed in 1994 with the mission to address the problem of hunger in the United States by making use of all the food wasted everyday by taking all the excess food from back stages across the country and transports it to soup kitchens.
These players joined Rice in helping to unload the turkeys the various sites, flexing their muscles in order to help make certain kitchens like those at the Bowery Mission receive their turkeys on time for Thanksgiving.
Founding his own foundation
Although located in Bayonne over the last few years, Red Clay Media started in Rutherford in 1997 moved several times before ending up in Bayonne. Primarily a full service direct marketing company, it has grown into other aspects such as management, and expects to construction on a new urban condo unit in Bayonne next year.
The concept of giving something back to the community hit Rice after his business boomed in the late 1990s, exploding with an 8,000 percent increase between 1997 and 1999.
“I started donating to charity but I didn’t always like where my money was going,” he said. “I was told the only way to control where money went was to start my own charity so I did.”
He funded the foundation with his own money, and while he admits this gave him some tax benefits, he also hoped he could do some good in the educational area – and he is currently working on a new idea that may actually fulfill his original intentions.
The W.O.W.S.E (With or Without Someone Else) Foundation supports local and regional organizations to seed and develop innovative projects to create a better world for children.
He generally doesn’t take donations from clients, and does not lobby his clients to give to the foundation, which means he foots the bill for the cost of turkeys each year. His partnership with City Harvest this year allowed him to overcome a problem with suppliers and more than doubled the distribution from last year to 84,000 pounds. Since the professionals in food services for the poor claim donations are generally one pound per person, this is a huge effort – perhaps the largest in the area – this Thanksgiving.
Manning the lines
When the deliveries are done, Rice makes a point of helping to feed people at three of the shelters.
This is an education in humanity, and in values that he couldn’t get anywhere else.
“When you get to see people eating it is amazing how your view changes,” he said. “For instance, I look at the watch I’m wearing and think about how many people the cost of that watch could feed. You learn how people become homeless, about alcohol, about what it takes for people to get back.”
Rice said many of the shelters provide what are called “Get back to life” programs that help people learn how to use computers and get jobs in order to find a place in the world again.
Rice said serving at the Bowery Mission is banquet style, which means that people like Rice stand side by side with people like Diane Sawyer and Candice Bergen to dish out food for the homeless.
“That has to have an impact. When life seems low to you, you suddenly have someone like Diane Sawyer serving you food,” Rice said. “What you see is hope returning to their eyes. That’s what I look for. I’m watching the hope come back into people’s faces.”