Syd Mandelbaum: Rock and Wrap It Up!
Syd Mandelbaum is the Founder and CEO of Rock and Wrap it Up! (RWU). Rock and Wrap it Up! is an award-winning, anti-poverty think tank. RWU researches, discovers and nurtures potential donors who have renewable assets to share. RWU has fed over 1 billion people since 1991.
Syd worked 18 years as Human Rights Commissioner in Nassau County reducing prejudice and bigotry. As a scientist, he’s worked on DNA, genetics and cancer research. He introduced and helped pass the Federal Food Donation Act. He helped develop the Whole Earth Calculator mobile app to quantify and correlate the relationship between food waste and GHG emissions. As a US Air Force veteran, he recognized the needs of at-risk men and women who had served, and started the Andy Parise Veterans Toolkit, a set of databases of vet-friendly colleges, employers and kitchens across the US to feed vets and their caregivers.
Hi Syd, thanks for chatting today! We’re excited to hear more about you, and all the programs of Rock and Wrap it Up!
I was always involved in fighting hunger, because both my parents are Holocaust survivors. My parents were in a DP (displaced persons) camp for five years. They married in 1947, near Munich, before immigrating to America when my mom was pregnant; I was born in the US. America was the only country to accept them, and it means a lot to me.
Around 1981, my dad and I went to Israel to celebrate the first international gathering of Jewish Holocaust survivors. Something passed between both of us over like five, six minutes at the Western Wall. He and I had an epiphany. I said that ‘I need to go back and change America, and make it better.’ And he said, ‘I felt the same thing. I want to help you do it.’
We started a series of lectures at Hofstra University, specifically for high school juniors to teach them skill sets to be less intolerant, and the first keynote speaker was Sandy Chapman, the widow of Harry Chapin. I became friendly with Sandy, and she asked me to serve on the board of directors of Long Island Cares, which is a regional food bank that Harry had started. She asked me to help do fundraising, and we went to Jones Beach Theater to meet with Harry's old manager, a guy by the name of Ron Delsener. Ron was a rock impressario who had brought the Beatles to the US in 1964. Delsener said, ‘I have tons of food at Jones Beach Theater every summer. You're welcome to it.’ And I was already president of a soup kitchen in 1991, The Claddagh INN in Rockaway Beach, NY. And we started picking up food at Jones Beach Theater. And in the first summer, we picked up over 4,000 pounds of food. And we did that in 1992 and 1993. And we founded Rock and Wrap it Up! at that time.
I felt that if a band was playing at Jones Beach Theater, or at one of the other arenas, there must be a way of having them donate the leftover food. I came up with something called “contractual obligation”, which is still used today. We thought that a band’s management could put a stipulation in their rider. Saying that all edible leftover food (prepared but not served) cannot go into landfill. It must feed the hungry and RWU will arrange for the recovery. The first band to join us in 1994 was the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger had thought this up in 1975, but had no idea how to do it. So they immediately joined us, and the second band was Aerosmith. And after that was Nine Inch Nails, Phish, Michael Bolton, and Candlebox. And by 1995, we had over 40 bands that were using the contractual obligation tool, which is still being used all over the world. Over the next 10 years 160 bands joined us, feeding millions of people with backstage catering that would have been thrown away.
I was interviewed by a number of magazines in 1995-6. An article published by Rolling Stone got us thousands of volunteers to do food recovery. In 1997 we were interviewed by Good Housekeeping and Dan Glickman, Secretary of Agriculture read both articles. He served as Secretary of Agriculture from 1996 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. In 1997, we launched our first school program nationwide, under the auspices of Rock and Wrap it Up! and the US Department of Agriculture, where we got hundreds of schools to take a look at their own food that was not being used, so that we could feed the hungry within their communities. And that exploded, and we started College Wrap in 2000 at Duke University. One of the kids that had been doing high school food recovery went to Duke, and he arranged for food from Duke to feed the hungry in Raleigh and Durham, NC. And then it spread throughout North Carolina. Through a recommendation by Secretary Glickman, in 1999, I was honored by President Bill Clinton with A Point of Light Citation for my community service work fighting hunger and poverty.
In 2002 my person in Detroit who does our food recovery at The Palace and other arenas did an interview in Detroit Hour magazine, which was the equivalent of New York Magazine. The article got seen by a lot of eyeballs and I got a phone call from a woman, Brooke Maroth, who said, “My husband, Mike, is a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, and he says there's a ton of food leftover in the clubhouse. How could we get it to the hungry people of Detroit?” and we called our Detroit person, and within a month, all the food from the Tiger’s clubhouse was feeding the hungry.
In 2004, a member of my board introduced me to his close friends who own the New York Giants, Bob Tisch and Wellington Mara. My wife Diane (who does all this with me) went to meet with them. And a month later they basically said, ‘We think we can further what you're doing, because we think that we could get our concessionaire to give you food that was not sold from the concessions of at that time Giant Stadium.’ And then we did presentations to the New York Yankees, the New York Mets and the New York Jets, and all four teams joined us.
And over the period of five years, we had the entire NHL. One of our other board members was close friends with Jimmy Dolan, whose family owns Madison Square Garden. And so the Garden was the first arena to give food prepared but not served from every event to Rock and Wrap it Up! And now 85 arenas and stadiums donate food. There was a hiatus obviously last year, but it's kind of restarted again. And eventually, we got involved in hotels and hospitals.
In 1997, I gave a lecture on sustainability to TV and film producers at the New York Comedy Club. I spoke about how, with the right logistics, they can have food recovered from the TV and film shoots. The first film we worked with was The Devil's Own, with Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt; it was shot mainly in the Hamptons. We picked up about 1,200 pounds of food. There's a paper out there called Dan’s Papers, and they did an article on us that got us in front of a lot more TV and film producers. And these days, our organization called Project: It’s a Wrap works with many studios in LA, and we do food recovery on film shoots across the USA.
We morphed from an anti-hunger think tank to an anti-poverty think tank. And it's a subtle difference, but an important one, because we have projects other than food. The number one item asked for is feminine products. We did an event called Mardi Bra with our close friend, Sharon Osbourne, about six years ago in the Sofitel in Beverly Hills. Women were encouraged to wear a fancy bra, and bring at least one box of feminine products. We had over 200 women come.
Then Sharon sent out a tweet to her network, and our partner Union Station Foundation in Pasadena came and picked up over 1,000 boxes. And Kelly, her daughter, donated 1,000 boxes of product. So that project was launched, and I named it Mardi Bra because it was cute, and we had done it at the same time as Mardi Gras. But we changed its name to Hannah's Project. That project is a winner on every level.
I have a background as a scientist and a degree in Geology, and I taught Earth Science in high school. As a former educator, I felt that if we could give projects to kids we would turn them on to working with us. I have students that started with us in 1997, now in their 40s, that still volunteer for us throughout the country. It all comes down to the individual making an effort.
The Rock and Wrap it Up! School Lesson Plans
We created the Whole Earth Calculator, which is on our website, and I had a couple of educators write climate literacy lesson plans to use in schools. The lesson connects the Whole Earth Calculator with partners that let us use their logo. The first partner was Aerosmith, and the New York Yankees gave us their logo. In the lesson plan, there'll be questions that'll say, ‘I picked up 400 pounds of food at an Aerosmith concert. How many meals did that equal? How much greenhouse gas was diverted? If it was composted, how much greenhouse gas would be saved, and how much water is not going to be used by donating the food instead of having it rot in the landfill?’ It immediately puts in their head that there is an equivalency. And then if they're going to donate food from their school, they know ‘Wow, I’m helping the environment in ways that I never thought to do.’
There is no reason why students can't be proactive. The food that is prepared but not served can go directly to those that are at risk. And these are simple projects that we've been able to get a lot of people to do. And sadly every community has families in crisis throughout the community.”
Wow, this is so impressive. You have so many initiatives happening. How do you do all this?
“We have a lot of people helping us, I don’t take credit for all this. I stand on a lot of other people's shoulders. And I will tell you that sometimes things fail, and we put that aside and just move forward with things that work. You have to not be afraid to say, “Wow, that doesn't work. Let's move on.” Because there's so many other things to move on to. And you just have to be willing to fail. And knowing that the greater good is really meant by the things that you succeeded in.
And those things absolutely take off. And you got to be a risk taker. And one of the things we're blessed to have is a fabulous Guru named Jim Spellos. Jim has been doing event planning for about 25 years, and he's on our board. And he creates the forms that are on our website. For example, if an organization goes to the Dallas Convention Center, we want to have totals of how much food is donated. So we have a very simple form, that whoever does the food recovery fills out the form, how many pounds, or how many trays. And all this is very elegant. It goes to a back page, which has an Excel spreadsheet. So at the end of an event, event planners are able to give statistics on their own websites. “Wow, you know, we had, we had 612 pounds of food left, and it didn't go to waste, it fed the hungry of Dallas.” And that's the key: that we want to empower event planners to offer something that is becoming the status quo.
It didn't start out so easy. Obviously, a lot of sports teams didn’t care so much about this in 2005. By 2015, we put the numbers on our website at the end of the season, and everybody gets to see how magnanimous and environmentally conscientious this is. And I believe this can be sold to any organization that event planners work with, because the value of this is so intrinsic, and it's going to be forever. And we want to get to a place where if people don't do this, people will say ‘Wow, why didn't you do that? There's so many hungry people everywhere.’
I know the caterers I worked with for 30 years, work between 5% and 10% overage, no matter what you give as your guest count, there's going to be 5% to 10% built in because they can’t run out of food at an event. And if we find a way to get that 5% to 10%, to the at-risk population, then we've really done our job, because that 5% to 10%, historically has been thrown away, or been somehow taken home, but it has also wound up in a landfill.
The people we feed need to know they're going to not get sick from the food we’re giving them. And that to me is tantamount whatever we do. Safety is Numero Uno. And one of the reasons why I talk about this is that there are a series of laws that we follow written in 1996, called the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Acts. Sadly Bill Emerson died in 1996. His wife Joanne Emerson, who replaced him in Congress, became one of our board members for the last 20 plus years.
We ourselves wrote the Federal Food Donation Act in 2007. The Federal Food Donation Act, specifically is for agencies, and this act basically says food prepared but not served from taxpayer dollars, cannot go into landfill and must feed the hungry. Then I tried getting that articulated on a state level. I was blessed in 2018 when Tennessee became the first state to pass the Tennessee State Food Donation act. Last year, New York State became the second state to pass the New York State Food Donation Law. And they added a caveat, which is food not able to be donated should go to a digester to make methane. We showed them that if you want to really attack this, there’s a lot of food that’s not compostable, but can be used to generate gas that can help our planet. And these are some of the things that we're working on through the Rock and Wrap it Up! advocacy program.
You know, look, in the back of my brain, the only people I listen to is God, and I listen to the people that are on the line waiting to get food, no one else matters to me. Those people on the line don't know me. But they know that someone is looking out for them.”
Website: www.rockandwrapitup.org
Facebook: www.facebook.com/RockandWrap
YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/SydMandelbaum
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wholeearthcalc