Cole Riley leads Wellfare, a food nonprofit working alongside the best food and beverage brands to deliver donated groceries to food insecure families.
For his Mentor Hours session, Cole will talk about the challenges and opportunities CPG brands face trying to marry social impact with practical business and marketing needs. Cole will also walkthrough successful strategies to activate team members, galvanize new and existing customers and ultimately make an impact.
CEO of Wellfare
Cole Riley is the founder and CEO of Wellfare, a food nonprofit based in New York City. Working alongside the best natural food and beverage brands in the country, Wellfare's grocery subscription service brings healthy snacks, drinks and pantry goods to food insecure families in Brooklyn and Manhattan for free. Prior to Wellfare, Cole led Founders Give, the largest private relief effort at the peak of the pandemic in New York City, distributing millions of healthy donated products to 50+ city hospitals. Cole is a native of Los Angeles and a graduate of New York University and Brooklyn Law School.
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In March 2020, when the pandemic was surging in New York City, Cole Riley, who was running a food content studio, launched Founders Give, a campaign rallying food and beverage companies to donate product to healthcare workers and patients across city hospitals.
Within 48 hours, Cole had brought together over a dozen food brands and had donated warehousing and trucking up and running. What started as a small effort blossomed into the largest private relief effort in the city. Over the next 10 weeks, Founders Give distributed 2.2 million products from over 300 brands to support over 100,000 doctors, staff and patients at 51 hospitals.
After the campaign, Cole saw an opportunity to recalibrate his efforts toward the community. To take this incredible collective of mission-driven brands and point their products, their people and their funds at a much larger, systemic crisis plaguing millions. To build an organization capable of solving food insecurity in our lifetime.
In early 2021, Wellfare was born and debuted the Wellfare Box Program, the first step in our fight against food insecurity.
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