This Is How You Save The World
….you can’t.
Sorry! I tried it already and it didn’t work.
3.5/10 don’t recommend.
Just kidding, (kinda!). Saving the world is an ambitious feat. My number one piece of advice to make it possible? Pick a problem.
“You can’t change the world, but you can make a corner of it pretty nice.”
— Dave Chappelle
This part seems easy because lucky for us, the world is FULL of problems (I’m a “glass-half-full” kind of guy, I suggest you pick a coping mechanism that works for you!) There are a truly overwhelming amount of problems that we all face at different social levels of our lives. A lot of times, it may feel like bad things are only happening to us when in fact you can dissect hundreds of individual, family, community or larger societal issues and find that each issue likely does not apply exclusively to you or your demographic. Picking a problem to attempt to solve can be daunting, but once you find your focus, the world-saving can begin.
“We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”
— Maya Angelou
Narrowing in and focusing on one problem that is close to my heart, is what led me to Bite, a movement that is combating widespread food waste and food-insecurity. Bite is my ongoing attempt to make my corner of the world a bit better. To properly convey what Bite means to me and why I started it, I’ll have to tell you a quick two-part story.
Part One: My mother, Myriam, was one of seven children raised in a humble hard-working family in the 1950s in Cali, Colombia. My grandparents, Gerardo and Dolores (Lola), had more children than they could adequately care for and often my mother and her siblings would go to bed hungry. Given her upbringing, my mom has stressed and instilled in me the importance of food and family ever since I was a child. Whenever we talk about her childhood, my mom always breaks down when she talks about how awful the pain of hunger is. How impossibly difficult it was going to sleep while hungry and now as a parent, she imagines my grandparents’ frustrations at not being able to properly feed their children.
One of my earliest memories as a child was hearing someone call for my mom outside our first floor kitchen window, “Mommy! Mommy!” It was this older white gentleman who would ask my mom for food. I don’t remember when it started, but my mom fed this guy for YEARS! When I asked my mom about him, she laughed because she never even knew his name. The story goes, one day my mom was cooking sancocho and this man happened to walk by our window and he asked for food with his hands. The guy didn’t speak English which is fine because my mom probably wouldn’t have understood him at the time anyway, but she recognized he wanted food and served him a plate outside the window and that was their connection until he stopped coming around. These examples of basic humanity are one of my favorite memories from my childhood and one of my favorite things about my mom.
Part Two: For the last year or so I’ve been learning how to code. I decided I want to change my professional trajectory and attempt computer science and turns out, I love it. Before class, I would drive my mom to work and noticed a lot of construction workers along the corners of 65th Street in Brooklyn. I remember thinking to myself “Someone should do something.” I said this for two weeks until I remembered seeing a YouTube video about a gentleman named Jorge Munoz who was a bus driver in Queens, New York. He has made it his responsibility to help feed these migrant workers along Roosevelt Ave to ensure that they would at least have one proper meal a day. That’s when I decided, I could and would help.
I have always had app ideas and creative solutions in my head for problem solving apps and services but never knew how I could build them. Once I learned how to code, I knew my first project would become, Bite.
“Donde come uno, comen dos.”
Bringing It All Together: Bite addresses the large population of migrants where I live who experience food-insecurity by connecting food-insecure users to restaurants that have excess food that would otherwise be thrown out. This app was built as part of a Hackathon competition where the app would go on to win “Most Impactful” and it motivated me to further push the project into the real world. The following weekend I rallied my family behind an idea, of making and serving as much Spaghetti as we could to the people on the corners. We made and fed over 60 people that first Sunday. That was on June 7th, 2020. Since then, we have faithfully delivered meals every Sunday at noon and even expanded into areas in Queens and have gone on to serve over 1,400 meals.
Our initiative has had a rippling effect in our community with people asking me how to help/donate/volunteer and it has become an example of grassroots efforts for people in my life. Everyone loves the idea that helping each other out is easier than it seems, and people often want to help but just don’t know how.
Will you help me show them? There are many ways you can help in your community and you’re not too small to try. I always thought “how can I have any meaningful impact on the problems around me?”, honestly I’m still unsure, but we’re trying and that feels like a start. I’d like to challenge you to think about a problem in your community that you’ve noticed and would like to change. Think about how YOU can be the change that will undoubtedly inspire those around you to do the same, or more.
Please consider taking a look at Bite on our website and on Instagram: @sunday_bite or check my personal Instagram @chrishurtado92 and watch the ‘bite 😋’ highlighted story to see for yourself. Companies interested in working with an iOS developer who is passionate about community and social good, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me and connect with me on Linkedin.
