Friday, June 17, 2016

Special Culinary Opportunity for Donors to My Chefs Cycle Ride


In addition to the improbable spectacle of me cycling 300 miles for our No Kid Hungry campaign at the end of this month, there’s now an even more interesting angle: With just 10 days to go, Share Our Strength chefs are rallying to offer wonderful incentives for you to support the ride and help ensure we reach our $1 million goal (currently at $800K). If you donate $100 or more to my ride before close of business on June 29th, the last day of the ride, your name will go into a raffle for an amazing dinner for two of these four spectacular restaurants: 

Rose’s Luxury, Washington, DC

Masseria, Washington, DC

The Smoke Shop, Boston, MA

Craigie on Main, Boston, MA

 
Just click on this LINK and donate. If you donate $100 or more by Monday, June 20th we’ll double your chances to win by putting your name in twice! Funds raised will enable us to enroll thousands more kids in school breakfast and summer meals programs. To learn more about Chefs Cycle and the 140 riders, see LINK.

p.s. a pic from last year included here - just to give you confidence I'll finish!
 
 

Monday, June 13, 2016

Orlando and the Imperative of Rededicating Ourselves to Mission and Humanity


            The events in Orlando are almost impossible to process. If you are like me you search without knowing precisely what you are searching for: insight, lessons, solace. And you wonder if these tragedies are coming closer together in a world spiraling out of control, or just seem to be.

I’ve seen posts from leaders I know who say that their own work feels almost trivial or irrelevant in the context of what has happened.  I don’t believe this to be so. In fact, just the opposite.

            On the evening that Martin Luther King was killed, Bobby Kennedy broke the news to a crowd in Indianapolis in eloquent, extemporaneous remarks that have been oft quoted. But next day he gave a more prepared speech about the “Mindless Menace of Violence” and it touches directly on our work.  On that day, in an era before either domestic or international terrorism were understood as they are today, Kennedy addressed political violence at length, but also “another kind of violence slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or bomb in the night.  This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay.  This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in winter.”

            The full text can be found at http://tinyurl.com/mxhstby It is as haunting today in light of Orlando as it was when RFK delivered it.  Instead or reading it, I urge that you take the slower and more reflective path of actually listening to Bobby Kennedy deliver it in this 10 minute audio on You Tube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhANTymDIYk    And that you join me in doing the only thing we can do: rededicate ourselves to our mission and to humanity.