A Little Caesar’s HOT-N-READY® Pizza costs $5. It’s not the most nutritious product in the fast food universe, but there are eight slices in a pie, and it tastes delicious. Even better, you can order it in unlimited quantities, and it’s the same price with pepperoni or without. From a business perspective, it’s the kind of price point you can only dream of; as a social entrepreneur, it was the inspiration for the project that has dominated the past two years of my life.
I founded Peace of Pizza, a Non-Profit 501(c)(3) Organization, in February 2015. For a few weeks—like most teenagers, I like to Google myself—I was the youngest CEO in the state. Through creating a
Gofundme page, hitting up the parents of my friends, and persuading the Jewish News to make us their cover story, we raised …show more content…
Given that Detroit currently contains approximately 20,000 people who are homeless—around a fourth are children—that meant that over several months, we could feed most of them at least once. As the day of launch neared, my friends and I cold-called every media outlet in the city—I was interviewed on all the major networks—and we handed out our first pizza in front of TV cameras and news photographers, all of whom reported our story in depth.
Since starting Peace of Pizza, I’ve faced a whole range of naysayers. There were some who suggested we could never find a way of delivering the pizza effectively, but we managed to partner with a local soup kitchen and arrange for extra volunteers on the days we worked with them. Others assumed that pizza companies would never work with an organization run by sixteen year-olds, but we set up a relationship with Little Caesar’s corporate headquarters, negotiated for free delivery, and used our 501(c)(3) status to avoid being charged tax. The most common criticism was that we were merely applying a band-aid to a problem without addressing its causes. But then we never claimed that handing out free pizzas
I founded Peace of Pizza, a Non-Profit 501(c)(3) Organization, in February 2015. For a few weeks—like most teenagers, I like to Google myself—I was the youngest CEO in the state. Through creating a
Gofundme page, hitting up the parents of my friends, and persuading the Jewish News to make us their cover story, we raised …show more content…
Given that Detroit currently contains approximately 20,000 people who are homeless—around a fourth are children—that meant that over several months, we could feed most of them at least once. As the day of launch neared, my friends and I cold-called every media outlet in the city—I was interviewed on all the major networks—and we handed out our first pizza in front of TV cameras and news photographers, all of whom reported our story in depth.
Since starting Peace of Pizza, I’ve faced a whole range of naysayers. There were some who suggested we could never find a way of delivering the pizza effectively, but we managed to partner with a local soup kitchen and arrange for extra volunteers on the days we worked with them. Others assumed that pizza companies would never work with an organization run by sixteen year-olds, but we set up a relationship with Little Caesar’s corporate headquarters, negotiated for free delivery, and used our 501(c)(3) status to avoid being charged tax. The most common criticism was that we were merely applying a band-aid to a problem without addressing its causes. But then we never claimed that handing out free pizzas