Doughnate Pizza: Good Food and Smiles for Homeless
Angelo Corso's pizza-family heritage and big heart deliver a new way to help
Bringing the Sauce for the Less Fortunate
“Pizza makes people smile,” said Angelo Corso, founder of the non-profit Doughnate Pizza organization. “I wanted to bring what makes me smile, what makes me happy, to people that don't have that same experience.”
The people served by Doughnate Pizza — members of Chicago’s homeless population — don’t have a lot of smiles in their lives. Angelo, who owns two tech companies in Chicago, was driven to start the organization by two threads from his youth.
The first, not surprisingly, is pizza. Since 1974, his family has owned and run Angie’s Sports Bar & Pizza in the Scottsdale neighborhood on Chicago’s far South Side (8352 S. Pulaski Rd.). Today, Angie’s is one of a number of pizzerias across Chicago that support Doughnate’s work.
The other was a deep well of sympathy for society’s less fortunate. He related, “When I was like 10 years old, I was just crying to see a kid and his mom [on the streets], and my mom and my dad are like, ‘Wow, you really feel for these individuals. This is horrible, no kid, no mom should be outside.’ And so they always gave me money to open up the window and pass it to them.”
Caring appears to be something that runs in his family, as he shared about a late grandmother who volunteered in homeless shelters.
Today he channels his concerns by providing homeless people with not just pizza, but some of Chicago’s best (click here to see the list of participating pizza places). “We're functioning as a non-profit, we're 100 percent volunteer,” Angelo said. “So every single dollar goes back to pizza and feeding the community.”
While Doughnate has a process for directly helping people living on the streets, most of its work involves standing relationships and orders from shelters and organizations; Angelo called out Ronald McDonald House, Deborah's Place, Lincoln Park Community Services, The Night Ministry, and Broadway Youth Center as examples of the roster of organizations with whom he works.
“We partner up with pizzerias that are close to the shelters,” he said. “The pizza community is amazing.”
He continued,
“We have our shelters scheduled, or pizzerias scheduled. The dietary restrictions, a shelter may tell us we want one gluten free and one vegetarian. We also make salad onsite, which our volunteers do… It's not like a dinky salad either. We're talking about bell peppers, cucumbers, carrots, bacon on the side.”
Nor is the number of pizzas supplied lacking, Angelo said. “We feed up to like 30 to 40 people to get their two or three slices with salad, and then usually seconds and third. So everyone's full and everyone's happy.”
One thing he does not do is ask the pizza makers to provide the pies for free. “These are small businesses in our community. They're helping us enough, we're getting 50 to 70 percent off, that helps us to an extreme,” he said. “It's almost a buy-one-get-one-free deal. We're feeding so many more people with our donors’ dollars. On slow days that they have, on a Monday or Tuesday, that's when we schedule the shelters.”
Growing up in a pizza family informed Angelo to take this approach. “People would walk in without any credentials and say, ‘Hey, we have a fundraiser tonight and we'd like 20 pizzas. We'd love to help grow your business, but we want all 20 pizzas donated.” He noted that Angie’s sometimes would meet the request, but added, “I just didn't like that.”
Like many members of his extended family, Angelo pitched in at Angie’s during his youth: “I was always well fed, but I know how to mop floors and clean toilets.”
His goal when he graduated from high school was to learn skills so he could join the family business, and he enrolled to study culinary arts at Chicago’s Kendall College. “I'm learning how to slice and dice, julienne, I'm learning all different types of meats,” he said.
But about halfway through his freshman year, he had a conversation with his father, who was driving him to school, that steered him in a different direction.
Angelo said he asked his father how many hours a week he could expect to work at Angie’s after he graduated, and his father said about 70. Then Angelo asked how much he’d be paid, and his father said nothing, and told him bluntly to create his own path in life. So Angelo quit Kendall, worked his way through college at DePaul University, and built an entrepreneurial career in tech.
As a result, there are many homeless people served by Doughnate Pizza who are benefiting from his dad’s tough love.
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