West Hartford’s Zephyr’s Street Pizza will be delivering pizzas to Connecticut Children’s Medical Center every month, helping eliminate food insecurity for families of patients.

By Ronni Newton

Families of children who are in the hospital must deal with anxiety along with a host of other challenges – where to sleep, how to care for their other children who are back home, how to manage work schedules – but the mission of a Connecticut-based nonprofit aims to remove food insecurity from the list of worries.

Hospital patients receive three meals a day during their stay, but unless their appetites can be satisfied with the leftovers on their child’s tray, parents or caregivers are on their own when it comes to eating.

Jeff Dorman got a crash course in what happens to the rest of the family when a child is hospitalized when his middle daughter was diagnosed with leukemia just after her second birthday. He and his wife had an older child, and were just weeks away from having their third.

“While food is provided for patients, it’s not provided for caregivers,” he said. “Our main goal was making sure Harper got through treatment, but on top of everything else, we had to figure out how to eat in the hospital,” he said.

Dorman was inspired to make things better for other families in the same situation. “We wanted to drive positive impact in the room without being in the room,” he said.

That led to the creation of the Feeding Families Families Foundation in 2023.

Dorman’s wife, Samantha, stayed at the hospital for the early days of their daughter’s treatment while he stayed home with their older daughter. She was in her final stages of pregnancy, but because she wasn’t really able to eat properly, she actually lost weight. After the new baby was born, they were still “frequent flyers” at Yale. Jeff spent much of his time at the hospital, and at first he barely ate, until he started ordering food for delivery. The costs quickly added up, he said.

“Notably, the two biggest concerns for parents when it comes to food in the hospital are (1) affordability and (2) not wanting to leave their child to go find food,” states the Feeding Families website. “Whether the food is $10/tray or $5, food costs can add up quickly for families already in a tough situation. Moreover, parents are reluctant to leave their child to obtain food. They often fear that they would miss a visit from the doctor or nurse, or an emergency would happen while they were away. Parents also feel that being physically present for their child helps to support and ease some anxiety or stress the child may have about being in the hospital.”

The Feeding Families Foundation’s first program was at Yale, supporting families involved with the pediatric hematology/oncology unit where the Dorman’s daughter had been treated. It now also ]serves families of children at Yale’s pediatric intensive care unit and pediatric cardiac intensive care unit.

Feeding Families has expanded to other hospitals as well – including Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. Dorman said the connection was originally forged through the attorney at Shipman and Goodwin who helped the nonprofit with their 501(c)(3) formation – whose child who had been treated at Connecticut Children’s.

Feeding Families initially launched their mission to eliminate food insecurity for families of children receiving hospital treatment through financial donations to pay for parents’ meals – providing a $50,000 grant ($10,000 per year for five years) to each facility for the flagship “Parent Plate” program.

But then some local restaurants got involved, starting with a connection and partnership forged through artist Michael Pollack, founder of the New Haven Pizza Club and one of the top fundraisers/collaborators with Feeding Families. He helped the organization grow from a grassroots effort to something even more impactful as he donates a proceeds from the sale of select pieces to the nonprofit.

“We started doing these food deliveries at Yale,” Dorman said. Through Pollack’s connection, Billy Pustari, owner of New Haven’s famed Modern Apizza, started delivering donated pizza to Yale on Fridays.

“Then the floodgates opened,” Dorman said, and other restaurants, including Haven Hot Chicken, started delivering to Yale. “We started to find that restaurants, instead of giving a cash donation, wanted to give food,” and the initiative has become wildly popular.

Zephyr’s Street Pizza, which opened in 2021 at 968 Farmington Avenue in West Hartford Center, is the first restaurant to donate to Connecticut Children’s via Feeding Families, and the inaugural delivery was made on Feb. 19.

Dante Cistulli, owner of Zephyr’s, said he was speaking with the state’s former chief marketing officer Anthony Anthony “about pizza stuff,” and was introduced to Pollack, who uses the “lens of pizza – a symbol of togetherness, joy, and culture” and turns it “into a platform for global connection and impact.” Pollack told Cistulli he was getting ready for the reveal of a giant pizza throne at the Big E.

He said, “Would you come and bring pizza?” Cistulli said. “So I brought my oven up there and I made some pizzas for them, and we just kind of hit it off. And with Michael comes ‘Feeding Families,'” he said.

Cistulli’s oldest child was born prematurely and spent three months in the NICU, so the cause hits close to home. “I’ve been the hungry parent,” he said. He started holding fundraisers for Feeding Families at Zephyr’s, “and now it’s just kind of become baked into what we do.”

It’s a dedicated mission for Pollack, too.

“From day one, I really wanted to use my creativity in every way I could, and I also wanted to give back,” Pollack said. “When I met Jeff [Dorman], I wanted to drive pizza into it.”

Toast, which creates and manages software for the restaurant industry, is also involved as a major supporter and collaborator with Feeding Families. Anthony Sousa, a West Hartford resident and principal with Toast, has led efforts to make his company a prime supporter of Feeding Families by implementing a “round up” option on the platform supports the organization.

Rounding up can have a huge impact, raising as much as $50,000 to $100,000, he said.

“It’s unbelievable the number of meals it can support, and it doesn’t cost the restaurants money, it doesn’t cost Toast,” added Pollack. “It’s a large amount of small donations.

On Feb. 19, the date of the first delivery, Dorman, Pollack, Cistulli, and Sousa arrived at Connecticut Children’s with van full of pizza. They were warmly greeted by a team from the hospital that included Dr. Michael (Mike) Isakoff, Division Head, Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders and Interim Physician-in-Chief, Sarah Matney, Senior Vice President, Clinical Services and Chief Nursing Officer, and Tracy Wu Fastenberg, Associate Vice President of Development for the Connecticut Children’s Foundation.

Heading to the eighth floor, the smell of pizza filled the elevator. Families stopped by a playroom to pick up slices, and the crew was greeted with smiles as they also delivered pizzas straight to patient rooms.

It wasn’t just the parents who enjoyed the pizza, but many of the patients as well. “No chemotherapy will stop them from eating pizza,” Isakoff said.

Pollack put his creativity to work on the window of the playroom – drawing the Zephyr’s logo and some other messages. He said he plans to give back in every way he can, including encouraging others to do the same and making connections. “I want to lead with compassion. … All the moments I am creating are ways to funnel back to nonprofits,” Pollack said.

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) came to one of his recent art exhibitions, Pollack said, and they started a conversation. Recently his efforts through the New Haven Pizza Club were honored on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

“We’re trying to create a model. It’s an evergreen strategy that can be scaled to others,” he said. “We invite and encourage other pizzerias and restaurants to reach out about donations and/or deliveries,” Pollack said. Contact information is available on the New Haven Pizza Club website.

Zephyr’s will continue their donation of pizzas to Connecticut Children’s on the third Thursday of the month. March 19 will be their second delivery.

The Dorman’s daughter is healthy now, and in January celebrated a year since her last chemo treatment. “Unfortunately rates of pediatric cancer are going up, but if we’re making a bad situation just a little bit better, that’s a meaningful gesture,” Dorman said. “There’s not another nonprofit solely addressing this human need anywhere.”

In addition to Yale and Connecticut Children’s, Feeding Families has programs at Boston Children’s Hospital, Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Manning Family Children’s, and has newly expanded to New York Presbyterian.

More information about Feeding Families can be found on their website.

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