ABOUT
More than 20,000 people die of hunger EVERY DAY and this is entirely preventable.
"The Rules"
1. Ryan will only eat one bowl of rice each day. He will only drink water, but can drink as much as he wants.
2. Ryan will make a 3 minute (approx.) video update each day with his thoughts on the experience. He will try to make these interesting. Heh.
3. This will continue until $1,000,000 has been raised for organizations focused on hunger internationally.
4. Each day, visitors to www.simplesizeme.com will vote for which organization should receive the funds donated on the following day. Whoever wins the votes on Monday will be the beneficiary on Tuesday. The idea here is to encourage as much participation as possible, so go to it!!
5. Email ryan@simplesizeme.com to suggest an organization doing work to relieve hunger internationally. Not interested in US programs at this time.
6. Email ryan@simplesizeme.com with anything you want and maybe I'll put it in one of my videos.
"Why?"
I'm doing this for my personal benefit, to challenge my peers, and to do a little good in the world. For me, it is an exploration of several concepts:
1. In my job as a fundraiser for a neighborhood nonprofit, I often think to myself, "If just ONE rich person would take up our cause and tell all their friends to chip in, we'd be set." I just realized recently that in the global scheme of things, I am one of those rich people with rich connections. So I wanted to do for the global poor the thing that I wish someone would do for the American poor here in my neighborhood.
2. I hope this project will attract a wide variety of people. It's a big tent and everyone who comes is the right people. Having said that, much of the motivation for this project is born out of my own personal interest in Jesus. Jesus has strong words about the rich and the poor. I want to pursue those themes more deeply and encourage others to do the same, whatever their faith perspective.
3. I think it is worthwhile to take some time to experience a tiny fraction of the hunger that billions of people around the world struggle with every day.
4. I am fascinated with the internet, philanthropy, and how the two can work together. This is my "big idea" to try to make a mark in those worlds and learn a few things.
5. If this does succeed, it will help me do my actual job better. If many many people find this interesting and lend me an ear, then at the appropriate time I can pitch them on the great stuff happening at www.ayudacc.org
MEDIA
Please direct media inquiries to ryan@simplesizeme.com
Guest post on Flavia Colgan's Citizen Hunter blog at the Philadelphia Daily News:
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/flavia/Mosquito_Bytes.html
-
Project Noise TV - Preston Long
-
Hannah Yi, Columbia School of Journalism
-
Local man takes action against world hunger
February 17, 2009 by Christeen Vilbrun
LINK to Temple University News
Ryan Kellermeyer hasn’t eaten a proper meal in almost two months. Living on just water and one bowl of brown rice per day, he has already lost 35 pounds and will continue to lose more as the weeks go by.
What’s the cause for his significant weight loss?
Ryan Kellermeyer began a hunger strike Jan. 1, in part to re-evaluate his eating and spending habits. So far, he has lost 35 lbs. and counting.
Kellermeyer, 31, is taking a stance against world hunger by going on a hunger strike.
The strike began on Jan. 1, when he pledged to drastically cut back on his food consumption until $1 million is raised for organizations fighting world hunger.
Using the fast food documentary Super Size Me as inspiration, he came up with the “Simple Size Me” campaign. So far, he has raised more than $3,350 and is slowly on his way to meeting his goal.
His campaign includes the Web site simplesizeme.com, on which he periodically posts videos on his progress. It also has a page on the Causes application on Facebook.
Kellermeyer, who works at the Ayuda Community Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping families in North Philadelphia, was troubled by the number of people who die from hunger and related causes – approximately 20,000 to 25,000 each day – and wanted to do something about it.
“We’re talking about a whole lot of people,” Kellermeyer said. “Right now, we have a bailout plan that’s putting all our money toward the rich, banks and the economy, when nobody really knows what that’s doing anyways. And there are so many people who don’t even have enough food to live on. To me, that’s troublesome.”
He also had other reasons to follow through with the project. Kellermeyer was struggling to figure out how to live on his current salary and had received a warning from his doctor to watch his diet. He wanted to re-examine his personal life, how he spent his money and what foods he ate.
“As Americans, I think we’re trained to want as much as we can get for ourselves,” he said. “You have to wonder if that’s really good for yourself and if it’s good for the world that you live in. I think there’s a lot of evidence that would say that it’s not.”
Kellermeyer, who used to be an avid coffee drinker, struggled during the first few days of the fast, suffering from severe headaches due to caffeine withdrawal. Except for the headaches, he said the first month was somewhat easy – he actually felt normal with the exception of the first day.
Lately, he has been feeling famished, and his nose has become sensitive to surrounding food, making him feel hungrier at times.
“Just the other day, I was walking through the park and suddenly I could smell McDonald’s,” Kellermeyer said with a laugh. “When I looked around, I saw a guy about a hundred miles away holding a bag with the logo. I was pretty amazed that I could sniff it from so far away.”
But even with his recent hunger pains, Kellermeyer is determined to continue his mission until his goal is reached. Although he admits to thinking about what his cutoff point should be, he is trying his best to stick it out.
Kellermeyer said society has become unresponsive to images of starving children in developing nations, and it would be useful to put a new face on hunger. He hopes that once he gets really skinny, people will take notice, and it will build momentum for his project.
He said he expected the campaign to start slowly, but he doesn’t think his goal of raising $1 million for world hunger organizations is too ambitious.
Kellermeyer is not interested in donating to domestic organizations. In his opinion, starvation is not as big of a problem in the United States as it is worldwide. He said the United States has the opposite problem, as 32 percent of American adults are obese.
“I’m not saying [hunger] doesn’t exist, but I’m certain that there is nowhere near 20,000 people dying a day from hunger in the U.S.,” he said.
Kellermeyer said the United States is a rich country, filled with rich people. To him, poverty is a relative thing, and anyone who can afford to go to college is rich.
“Don’t let anybody tell you different,” Kellermeyer added. “You are one of the wealthiest people in the world.”
He draws this conclusion from globalrichlist.com, a Web site that allows individuals to type in their annual incomes to see how rich they are from a global perspective. Most Americans will probably find that they are at least in the top 10 percent, if not higher – meaning 90 percent of the world is poorer. To him, that’s a very empowering position to be in.
As a Christian, Kellermeyer said his job is to help his neighborhood.
“I believe that my neighborhood will be most healthy when we’re helping other communities who are even worse off,” he said.
Perhaps the best explanation for his mission is the motto written on his Web site.
“Hunger sucks. We’re rich. Giving is fun.”
Simple words for a cause with a simple solution.
Christeen Vilbrun can be reached at christeen.vilbrun@temple.edu.
-
Starvation Riot
A Hunting Park activist takes a stand against global hunger.
by Tara Murtha, LINK to Philadelphia Weekly
Ryan Kellermeyer, who grew up working farm fields of rural Indiana, is the unlikely resident-activist rabble-rouser of North Philadelphia’s Hunting Park. The neighborhood, anchored by its notoriously dangerous namesake park off Roosevelt Blvd., is a grid of tightly packed rowhomes with small front porches secured by locked iron cages jammed with takeout menus.
Looking out from Kellermeyer’s house on Ninth Street, the park looks downright Currier & Ives on a recent afternoon, covered in blankets of snow and dotted with barren trees twisting up into a clear February sky.
The tall, baby-faced 31-year-old bought his house eight years ago at a time when he was sick of “Christian campus suburban living” at Eastern University.
Now he’s dug deep roots here. As head of the civic association, Boy Scout leader and director of development at the Ayuda Community Center, he’s dedicated the last eight years of his life to making Hunting Park a better place.
On Jan. 1, Kellermeyer took his can-do activism to the next level by starting a one-man campaign to eradicate global hunger.
“Simple Size Me,” Kellermeyer’s new project, is inspired by Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary Super Size Me. The campaign is similar to the film, but in reverse: Instead of chronicling a skinny guy growing fat by eating junk food to raise awareness about the fast-food industry, it stars Kellermeyer as a big guy—called obese by his doctor, though he doesn’t agree with that—shrinking by subsisting on only brown rice and water to raise money to eradicate global hunger. His motivation? It’s estimated that between 24,000 and 30,000 people around the world die each day of starvation.
Kellermeyer raises awareness about the crisis by posting project updates at simplesizeme.com, and he generates money for the cause using the Network for Good Facebook application. Each day, in the spirit of what he calls “charitable democracy,” Simple Size Me Facebook group members vote on which organization will receive the next day’s funds.
So far, Kellermeyer’s lost 35 pounds and raised more than $3,100 for global hunger organizations. The website, emblazoned with the motto “HUNGER SUCKS, WE’RE RICH, GIVING IS FUN,” has garnered more than 2,300 hits.
He plans to keep going until he gets sick or raises a million dollars, whichever comes first.
It hasn’t been easy. The charismatic Kellermeyer, who smiles a lot and quotes Scripture without coming off creepy, readily cops to wolfing down a few slices of ham and knocking back three whiskeys in moments of weakness. There’s also that glass of O.J. he feels bad about. But other than these few transgressions, he’s stayed strong.
Kellermeyer says the jump from living on mostly Taco Bell and Dunkin’ Donuts—a bad habit he picked up partly from living in a neighborhood lacking real restaurants—to rice and water was a shock to his system at first, and he suffered the usual headache and fatigue symptoms of detox. Now, other than the occasional bout of hunger he tries to quell by loading up on more rice—he’s up to about 126 bowls—he’s feeling pretty good.
Though he hasn’t formally studied the problem of global hunger, Kellermeyer says, “If you can sit in a Phillies game and recognize that an amount that large will die from hunger tomorrow, most of them children, you don’t have to be an academic to grasp that or feel inspired to want to change that.”
The activist and Christian in him—he attends the Spirit and Truth Fellowship church across the street from Ayuda and quotes Isaiah when he really gets going—dictates the first of his two goals: to make people see that a human being starving to death matters. The second goal is to make people understand that they can do something about it—especially since, from his point of view, ending global hunger is really only a matter of finding the right distribution system.
Bill Clark, president of Philabundance, Delaware Valley’s largest food bank, says Kellermeyer’s on to something. The problem is that the food bank system we rely on here and in other First World countries doesn’t work when applied to developing nations.
“I spend every waking hour trying to feed people, and I can tell you that my job, as difficult as it is right now, is entirely different than if I was in a developing world dealing with a drought,” says Clark. “I couldn’t fix that with my tools.”
Here at home, the demand for food has spiked 31 percent in the last year. Meanwhile, corporate donations to food banks have plummeted. Everywhere you turn the recession paradox rears its ugly head: As demand goes up, resources go down.
There is one sliver of data that transcends this paradox, and it’s showing up in the books at both Philabundance and Ayuda: Individual donations are skyrocketing.
Philadabundance, which distributes food to 600 local agencies, reports that food-drive donations are up 70 to 80 percent. Individual donations to Ayuda shot up 24 percent this past December.
Kellermeyer says that being kind of broke—he picks up freelance work and DJ gigs whenever he can—didn’t matter once he realized that from a worldwide perspective, he’s actually rich.
“My combined income is about $35,000, which a lot of people would say is kind of low. Whatever. It puts me in the top 4.6 percent of the world, so that means 95.4 percent of people are more poor than I am,” he says. “Globally speaking, I’m the rich guy in the room.”
Keep updated on Kellermeyer’s project at simplesizeme.com. Go get rich at globalrichlist.com.
Guest post on Flavia Colgan's Citizen Hunter blog at the Philadelphia Daily News:
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/flavia/Mosquito_Bytes.html
-
Project Noise TV - Preston Long
-
Hannah Yi, Columbia School of Journalism
-
Local man takes action against world hunger
February 17, 2009 by Christeen Vilbrun
LINK to Temple University News
Ryan Kellermeyer hasn’t eaten a proper meal in almost two months. Living on just water and one bowl of brown rice per day, he has already lost 35 pounds and will continue to lose more as the weeks go by.
What’s the cause for his significant weight loss?
Ryan Kellermeyer began a hunger strike Jan. 1, in part to re-evaluate his eating and spending habits. So far, he has lost 35 lbs. and counting.
Kellermeyer, 31, is taking a stance against world hunger by going on a hunger strike.
The strike began on Jan. 1, when he pledged to drastically cut back on his food consumption until $1 million is raised for organizations fighting world hunger.
Using the fast food documentary Super Size Me as inspiration, he came up with the “Simple Size Me” campaign. So far, he has raised more than $3,350 and is slowly on his way to meeting his goal.
His campaign includes the Web site simplesizeme.com, on which he periodically posts videos on his progress. It also has a page on the Causes application on Facebook.
Kellermeyer, who works at the Ayuda Community Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping families in North Philadelphia, was troubled by the number of people who die from hunger and related causes – approximately 20,000 to 25,000 each day – and wanted to do something about it.
“We’re talking about a whole lot of people,” Kellermeyer said. “Right now, we have a bailout plan that’s putting all our money toward the rich, banks and the economy, when nobody really knows what that’s doing anyways. And there are so many people who don’t even have enough food to live on. To me, that’s troublesome.”
He also had other reasons to follow through with the project. Kellermeyer was struggling to figure out how to live on his current salary and had received a warning from his doctor to watch his diet. He wanted to re-examine his personal life, how he spent his money and what foods he ate.
“As Americans, I think we’re trained to want as much as we can get for ourselves,” he said. “You have to wonder if that’s really good for yourself and if it’s good for the world that you live in. I think there’s a lot of evidence that would say that it’s not.”
Kellermeyer, who used to be an avid coffee drinker, struggled during the first few days of the fast, suffering from severe headaches due to caffeine withdrawal. Except for the headaches, he said the first month was somewhat easy – he actually felt normal with the exception of the first day.
Lately, he has been feeling famished, and his nose has become sensitive to surrounding food, making him feel hungrier at times.
“Just the other day, I was walking through the park and suddenly I could smell McDonald’s,” Kellermeyer said with a laugh. “When I looked around, I saw a guy about a hundred miles away holding a bag with the logo. I was pretty amazed that I could sniff it from so far away.”
But even with his recent hunger pains, Kellermeyer is determined to continue his mission until his goal is reached. Although he admits to thinking about what his cutoff point should be, he is trying his best to stick it out.
Kellermeyer said society has become unresponsive to images of starving children in developing nations, and it would be useful to put a new face on hunger. He hopes that once he gets really skinny, people will take notice, and it will build momentum for his project.
He said he expected the campaign to start slowly, but he doesn’t think his goal of raising $1 million for world hunger organizations is too ambitious.
Kellermeyer is not interested in donating to domestic organizations. In his opinion, starvation is not as big of a problem in the United States as it is worldwide. He said the United States has the opposite problem, as 32 percent of American adults are obese.
“I’m not saying [hunger] doesn’t exist, but I’m certain that there is nowhere near 20,000 people dying a day from hunger in the U.S.,” he said.
Kellermeyer said the United States is a rich country, filled with rich people. To him, poverty is a relative thing, and anyone who can afford to go to college is rich.
“Don’t let anybody tell you different,” Kellermeyer added. “You are one of the wealthiest people in the world.”
He draws this conclusion from globalrichlist.com, a Web site that allows individuals to type in their annual incomes to see how rich they are from a global perspective. Most Americans will probably find that they are at least in the top 10 percent, if not higher – meaning 90 percent of the world is poorer. To him, that’s a very empowering position to be in.
As a Christian, Kellermeyer said his job is to help his neighborhood.
“I believe that my neighborhood will be most healthy when we’re helping other communities who are even worse off,” he said.
Perhaps the best explanation for his mission is the motto written on his Web site.
“Hunger sucks. We’re rich. Giving is fun.”
Simple words for a cause with a simple solution.
Christeen Vilbrun can be reached at christeen.vilbrun@temple.edu.
-
Starvation Riot
A Hunting Park activist takes a stand against global hunger.
by Tara Murtha, LINK to Philadelphia Weekly
Ryan Kellermeyer, who grew up working farm fields of rural Indiana, is the unlikely resident-activist rabble-rouser of North Philadelphia’s Hunting Park. The neighborhood, anchored by its notoriously dangerous namesake park off Roosevelt Blvd., is a grid of tightly packed rowhomes with small front porches secured by locked iron cages jammed with takeout menus.
Looking out from Kellermeyer’s house on Ninth Street, the park looks downright Currier & Ives on a recent afternoon, covered in blankets of snow and dotted with barren trees twisting up into a clear February sky.
The tall, baby-faced 31-year-old bought his house eight years ago at a time when he was sick of “Christian campus suburban living” at Eastern University.
Now he’s dug deep roots here. As head of the civic association, Boy Scout leader and director of development at the Ayuda Community Center, he’s dedicated the last eight years of his life to making Hunting Park a better place.
On Jan. 1, Kellermeyer took his can-do activism to the next level by starting a one-man campaign to eradicate global hunger.
“Simple Size Me,” Kellermeyer’s new project, is inspired by Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary Super Size Me. The campaign is similar to the film, but in reverse: Instead of chronicling a skinny guy growing fat by eating junk food to raise awareness about the fast-food industry, it stars Kellermeyer as a big guy—called obese by his doctor, though he doesn’t agree with that—shrinking by subsisting on only brown rice and water to raise money to eradicate global hunger. His motivation? It’s estimated that between 24,000 and 30,000 people around the world die each day of starvation.
Kellermeyer raises awareness about the crisis by posting project updates at simplesizeme.com, and he generates money for the cause using the Network for Good Facebook application. Each day, in the spirit of what he calls “charitable democracy,” Simple Size Me Facebook group members vote on which organization will receive the next day’s funds.
So far, Kellermeyer’s lost 35 pounds and raised more than $3,100 for global hunger organizations. The website, emblazoned with the motto “HUNGER SUCKS, WE’RE RICH, GIVING IS FUN,” has garnered more than 2,300 hits.
He plans to keep going until he gets sick or raises a million dollars, whichever comes first.
It hasn’t been easy. The charismatic Kellermeyer, who smiles a lot and quotes Scripture without coming off creepy, readily cops to wolfing down a few slices of ham and knocking back three whiskeys in moments of weakness. There’s also that glass of O.J. he feels bad about. But other than these few transgressions, he’s stayed strong.
Kellermeyer says the jump from living on mostly Taco Bell and Dunkin’ Donuts—a bad habit he picked up partly from living in a neighborhood lacking real restaurants—to rice and water was a shock to his system at first, and he suffered the usual headache and fatigue symptoms of detox. Now, other than the occasional bout of hunger he tries to quell by loading up on more rice—he’s up to about 126 bowls—he’s feeling pretty good.
Though he hasn’t formally studied the problem of global hunger, Kellermeyer says, “If you can sit in a Phillies game and recognize that an amount that large will die from hunger tomorrow, most of them children, you don’t have to be an academic to grasp that or feel inspired to want to change that.”
The activist and Christian in him—he attends the Spirit and Truth Fellowship church across the street from Ayuda and quotes Isaiah when he really gets going—dictates the first of his two goals: to make people see that a human being starving to death matters. The second goal is to make people understand that they can do something about it—especially since, from his point of view, ending global hunger is really only a matter of finding the right distribution system.
Bill Clark, president of Philabundance, Delaware Valley’s largest food bank, says Kellermeyer’s on to something. The problem is that the food bank system we rely on here and in other First World countries doesn’t work when applied to developing nations.
“I spend every waking hour trying to feed people, and I can tell you that my job, as difficult as it is right now, is entirely different than if I was in a developing world dealing with a drought,” says Clark. “I couldn’t fix that with my tools.”
Here at home, the demand for food has spiked 31 percent in the last year. Meanwhile, corporate donations to food banks have plummeted. Everywhere you turn the recession paradox rears its ugly head: As demand goes up, resources go down.
There is one sliver of data that transcends this paradox, and it’s showing up in the books at both Philabundance and Ayuda: Individual donations are skyrocketing.
Philadabundance, which distributes food to 600 local agencies, reports that food-drive donations are up 70 to 80 percent. Individual donations to Ayuda shot up 24 percent this past December.
Kellermeyer says that being kind of broke—he picks up freelance work and DJ gigs whenever he can—didn’t matter once he realized that from a worldwide perspective, he’s actually rich.
“My combined income is about $35,000, which a lot of people would say is kind of low. Whatever. It puts me in the top 4.6 percent of the world, so that means 95.4 percent of people are more poor than I am,” he says. “Globally speaking, I’m the rich guy in the room.”
Keep updated on Kellermeyer’s project at simplesizeme.com. Go get rich at globalrichlist.com.
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