Your Zip Code Shouldn’t Determine Your Lifespan | Dion Dawson | TED

If you look historically at food responses, the pantry model has been unchanged since the 1950s. Everywhere in places that looked like mine. It was inefficient. It didn't champion quality or the end user experience. And it just bothered me. I'm Dion Dawson. uh founder and chief dreamer of Dion Chicago Dream. We're a nonprofit social enterprise that focuses on providing access to healthy food consistently, making sure that your zip code does not determine how long you live. We deliver a 10 lb box of fresh fruits and vegetables to more than 4,300 households in the Chicagoland region per week. Could be everything from a pineapple to different types of apples, citruses, Swiss chard, spinach, pomegranates. Since 2020, we've provided a little over 3.5 million pounds of fresh produce that we've purchased, packed, and delivered. And we've never charged any of our recipients to date. Our produce and our quality is topnotch. We've never taken a single piece of donated produce. We purchase everything. It may cost us a little more, but that's fine. You don't want to dictate what people think they deserve. If we're thinking about people living longer, healthier lives, and you want to give them the best opportunity to be healthy, you can't do that with expiring food. One of the things that we wanted to do a little different is make sure that we're talking to people. We do a bi-weekly touch point where we collect scores in six different areas like ease of delivery, quality of produce, staff treatment, and even stress after delivery. And so we can see that we're lowering stress levels daily by more than 80%. It's quite simple, just serving people and delivering quality food, produce. When this all started, I was working overnights at Amazon. I knew absolutely nothing. I didn't know any statistics. I had never done nonprofit management or grant writing, none of it. That blind ignorance will get you way further when you just don't know what you're up against. On Junth in 2020, a Jenzir came up to me that I had grown up with and said, "Hey, what are you doing for Junth?" And I had no idea, you know, I just I tried to kind of play along, but he said, "No, what are you doing?" and I just said, "I'm going to feed 100 families." I didn't think about it. I don't know where it came from. And from there, it was two GoFundMe campaigns later and buying 800 lb of food and bagging chicken leg quarters at 4 in the morning. What started as someone challenging me to do something for the community for Junth turned into a day and an event that made me feel like I had never felt before and wanting to chase that feeling of not having to convince myself that I wasn't the problem or not having to convince myself that something was good, but just feeling good. From there, it was on. It just lit a fire in me. We're up to 48 employees, about 15 vehicles. We're opening up a 20,000 square foot location later this year. We've grown in an environment where growth has been difficult. The average black le nonprofit never makes it to a million in revenue. We did it in 18 months. As a company, we've never been in a red. It's a social enterprise nonprofit that is still a business. Early on, it was really about individual donors and grants. And then over the years, we've tried to continue to figure out how to diversify the revenue so that we can be sustainable. We've never missed a payroll. We've never lost an employee. We've never had a volunteer. I just think that if someone does a job, they should get paid for it. It's a commitment back to people. Without a wealth buildinging vehicle attached to whatever social impact work you're doing, then you're just perpetuating the circumstances that you're trying to fight. You can still do good business and do good by people and you don't have to build like everyone else. There were so many people early on that tried to guide us into taking donated food, into using volunteer hours and trading board seats for money. And because of us rebuffing a lot of those things, here we are almost 5 years later and this work has really not only defined a lot of people's lives, but it's allowed me to wake up and go to sleep knowing and never questioning. I have no goals. I just believe that anything is possible. Part of just being a dreamer is understanding that I decide what I focus on. We've gotten the opportunity to write our own story. It's really about joy, happiness, being okay, knowing that you gave everything you had. All of these are things that are important and we don't champion them enough. It's always about reminding each other what difficult is. A difficult day as the chief dreamer of Deion Chicago dream pales in comparison to the words

that I've ever had as Deion Dawson. You evolve, you learn. This is the first time in my life where I can honestly say I've never stopped learning every single day. I learn, I apply, I try. Probably failed more in this 5 years than in my first 30, but I don't have it figured out. I think that's the fun part. — Yeah, it's pretty crazy.