Tony Robbins, man who’s coached presidents, billionaires, and world class athletes to get the most out of their lives.
What he’s doing right now in concert with the USDA and Hatch for Hunger may be some of the most important work of his entire career. The partnership here is engineered to eliminate America’s staggering 800 million pound protein shortfall for food insecure households. Tony and his partners cracked a problem that has stumped policy makers for decades in that most food panries lacked refrigeration and couldn’t afford protein sourcing. Together they have raised more than $40 million to make it all happen with Tony personally writing a check for roughly a quarter of that. What inspired you to get behind this?
Well, when I was 11 years old, we had no money and food at Thanksgiving. So it wasn’t a very happy time. and a family member told somebody, I don’t know who it was, what we’re going on with us. and somebody showed up at our house with a full Thanksgiving dinner for us. and it changed my life. So, I started feeding families when I was 17. I fed two families, and then four. I eventually got to a million people. And then about 14 years ago, I set a goal. I said, I’d love to provide a billion meals in the United States. And I did it in eight years with feeding America is my partner. And in this country, in America, the richest country in the world, there’s 48 million people that are going to go to bed tonight that don’t know where their next meal is going to come from. So I decided I was going to do a hundred billion meal challenge. and I’m proud to tell you, people thought it would never work. We could do it in 10 years. We hit 92 million billion, 92 billion this morning. But part of how we did it was I wanted a sustainable solution.
So, Hatch for Hunger is a group that for years has gone out, for 12 years, and they took those little brown eggs no one buys, that were thrown away, and they got them for next to nothing and distributed them. Then they looked for other protein sources. So I challenged them, provide a billion meals, be one of the 100 that we do this with. They went from 20 million meals to 100 million a year, a billion over 10 years. And then we came back and sat down recently. I said, how do we close the protein gap? So with Bobby Kennedy’s help and Secretary Roland as well, we worked together. They’re helping me with the refrigeration because that’s one of the problems. Then the cost of the protein is it. But you know, Chick-fil-A gets all the white meat, nobody wants the dark meat. They ship it overseas for next to nothing. So we’re providing a new way for that to be delivered. All that food now is going. So we’re going to deliver 800 million pounds of protein every single year, 3 billion meals a year in perpetuity. Next 10 years will be 30 billion meals. Tomorrow is World Hunger Day. And so I hope that people who are interested could decide if they want to support this. They can go to closethehungerggap.org, closethehungerggap.org and make a donation and we can help close that gap for everybody.
The United States, this is one of the world I mean this is the world’s richest country. Yes. Why are we still dealing with affordability problems down grocery aisles?
Well, I think people are not First of all, no one teaches people financial intelligence in this country, right? So most of us spend more than we have to start with. But then what happens is we have so many people that a five or $600 bill they’re not prepared for, and they can’t make groceries. We also there’s the government has cut down its support for all these organizations because there was so much abuse. But then there’s a lot of people that desperately need it as well. So all these food banks are really hurting right now. In the world, we produce enough food for 8.2 billion people. The problem is distribution and the problem is people hoarding it, and the problem is trying to control prices, so we destroy a lot of the food. So a big part of what I do is rescue that food with the organizations we have. Not food that’s sitting in a dumpster, food that the farmer is going to destroy and we get it to the people that need it right away.
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