Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Today's talk is part of our brand new 2025 TED Fellows Films adapted for podcasts just for our TED Talks Daily listeners. We will be releasing these special episodes showcasing our amazing fellows on certain Fridays throughout the rest of 2025 and into the new year.
So stay tuned. TED's fellowship supports a network of global innovators, and we're so excited to share their work with you. Today, we'd like you to meet food equity champion and TED fellow Dion Dawson.
Chapter 2: What inspired Dion Dawson to create Dion's Chicago Dream?
For Dion, it all started with a fridge, a community fridge to be exact, that was set up on the sidewalk in his home neighborhood of Inglewood on the south side of Chicago.
Stocked with fresh, free food every day for those who need it, Dion shares how that fridge was the impetus for him to start Dion's Chicago Dream, which today has grown into a multimillion-dollar nonprofit social enterprise that fights food deserts and food insecurity in Chicago while creating jobs and empowering individuals, but not in the ways you might imagine.
After we hear from Dion, stick around for his conversation with TED Fellows Program Director Lily James Olds. It's coming up.
If you look historically at food responses, the pantry model has been unchanged since the 1950s. Everywhere in places that looked like mine, it was inefficient. It didn't champion quality or the end user experience. And it just bothered me. I'm Dion Dawson, founder and chief dreamer of Dion's Chicago Dream.
We're a nonprofit social enterprise that focuses on providing access to healthy food consistently, making sure that your zip code does not determine how long you live. We deliver a 10 pound box of fresh fruits and vegetables to more than 4,300 households in the Chicagoland region per week.
It could be everything from a pineapple to different types of apples, citruses, Swiss chard, spinach, pomegranates. Since 2020, we've provided a little over 3.5 million pounds of fresh produce that we've purchased, packed, and delivered. And we've never charged any of our recipients to date. Our produce and our quality is top notch. We've never taken a single piece of donated produce.
We purchase everything. It may cost us a little more, but that's fine. You don't want to dictate what people think they deserve. If we're thinking about people living longer, healthier lives, you want to give them the best opportunity to be healthy. You can't do that with expiring food. One of the things that we wanted to do a little different is make sure that we're talking to people.
We do a biweekly touch point where we collect scores in six different areas like ease of delivery, quality of produce, staff treatment, and even stress after delivery. And so we can see that we're lowering stress levels daily by more than 80%. It's quite simple, just serving people and delivering quality food, produce. When this all started, I was working overnights at Amazon.
I knew absolutely nothing. I didn't know any statistics. I'd never done nonprofit management or grant writing, none of it. That blind ignorance will get you way further when you just don't know what you're up against. On Juneteenth in 2020, a Gen Z-er came up to me that I had grown up with and said, hey, what are you doing for Juneteenth? And I had no idea.
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Chapter 3: How does Dion's Chicago Dream differ from traditional food pantry models?
I try to look at it like a product, right? And so if you look at it like a product or a paid service, then you would see that the end customer is not highlighted or illuminated in the process. And so if we're just talking about bettering our product, we would ultimately better our product if we had user feedback.
And the problem is, is this in its entirety has been created, uplifted, and sustained without any modifications or improvements based on the experience of the people it serves. as opposed to the people that control me. I had to be critical of something that was created for good. And that is extremely difficult when you talk about the human experience.
Most things that are created for the social good, without truism, for the betterment of humanity, There's less judgment on the efficiency and efficacy of the thing. And it took a lot for me to kind of get there. So I think the first thing that's missing is having that questioning attitude around if this is working and this be better. What are we missing?
Because what we've seen is the human predicament society right now is it requires so much nuance to just survive. And yet the things that are created to serve us are really, really one note because they're so outdated. It's almost like, you know, pulling out a floppy disk. Not only would, you know, a lot of people not know how to use it.
But more importantly, it would immediately show how dated that thing was. You know what I mean? And I just think that if we look at it, you know, food emergency, it's a floppy disk right now. And I just want to kind of find ways to improve it and innovate in it.
No, I think that's so smart. And I think this also makes me think about when you say, who am I to fight capitalism? And I feel like you're working in such strategic ways within this system and economic model that we all exist in. I'm curious to hear you go a little bit deeper and hear how you think about how you do think about working within that system strategically as a social entrepreneur?
No, absolutely. You know, one of my favorite quotes is basically saying that when it comes to entrepreneurs, I think that they're just too much on execution. And when it comes to social entrepreneurs, I think they're just too much on intent. And I think that we have to find a balance there.
And so when I speak about the role in the relationship of capitalism and philanthropy, I think that a lot of times we spend so much time and language on trying to dismantle this thing that is deeply rooted and foundational in the American experience. And so, you know, what I say is, OK, cool.
Let's not look at it from a dismantling place, because I think that if I focus on my emotional response to it, I'm wasting my time of figuring out how within this thing can we serve people? Because that's the key thing. If you're wondering, you know, what is the underlying theme? It's immediacy. I don't have time. This will not be solved in my lifetime.
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Chapter 4: How does Dion's organization ensure the quality of food delivered?
for our users and clients?
Well, I think the first thing is, you know, I'm a comms guy, you know what I mean? And so none of my communication is by accident. When thinking about that game board, first and foremost, I made the decision early on to do all of this out in the open. You know what I mean? I don't have to code switch. I don't have to tailor everything
All of my messaging to that specific audience, because, number one, I want to build trust. That's with anyone that interacts not only with me, but with my organization, with our model, with our impact, with our community, with the job creation, everything. I don't want this to be something where. Someone who's in my community on the south side of Chicago has one understanding of who I am.
And someone with a billion dollars have a different understanding. And so I think first and foremost, what I decided to do was I decided to focus on how I showed up on that game board. Because a lot of times we don't take power and control in how we show up. What role can we play independent of all of the bureaucracy? And how can we show up even when things are pretty heated and we don't agree?
And I think that, you know, for me, what I try to boil it down to is. Our core product and program has to be so great. It has to add so much value that it cannot be dismissed. It has to be viewed as an option. It has to be an option for everyone and understand that it's not personal. Granted, do I feel like there are strong systemic issues that we have to get a hold of and fix? Absolutely not.
but I also can't only lean to my emotion. And so I think when we started talking about the bureaucracy in food and when we talked about nonprofit and for-profit and social entrepreneurship, After the emotional visceral response, now I have to figure out, OK, well, what are we going to do and how can we be the best at it?
So if you're looking at that game board, first and foremost, we're in supply chain and delivery. And so in supply chain and delivery, how can we be the best at what we're doing, continue to innovate, continue to scale and grow? And so that more people can be motivated and inspired by it.
Before we continue to go back out and look at the thing as a whole, the bureaucracy and the politics will be there. But I really, truly believe that anybody that is going to stop and or beat me has to work as hard as me and as often as me. And I just don't think that's possible.
I don't know if any of those people exist, actually. Yeah. I want to get a little bit in the weeds because I feel like this has been so fascinating to me from our conversations about that bureaucracy and specifically some of those revenue streams as it relates to food as medicine programs, how that relates to hospitals.
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Chapter 5: What innovative strategies does Dion use to address food insecurity?
Imagine how detrimental it is if this market that's already here is not viewed as a market or market opportunity for the very communities that it says it's trying to help.
So when you say it's that, you said $26 billion industry, right? Right.
Chapter 6: What challenges did Dion face when starting his nonprofit?
The food is medicine. Can you define for those of us just what that encapsulates? Do you mean how much people want to be buying healthy food to live longer lives like that market? Is that what's embedded in that?
So food is medicine. Basically, like that is the amount of money when you're talking about procurement, contracting and delivery of services from end to end, from the prescription being written from the doctor to the actual produce being provided throughout that supply chain. Right now, that market is twenty six billion dollars.
So that the prescriptions are written by the doctors saying that their patients need a certain kind of food to live healthy, to recover from illness, etc. So that's what's encapsulated in that $26 billion industry. Yes. Fascinating.
So, you know, help with blood sugar, different things like that. And so, you know, what we stumbled upon is understanding that, OK, cool. Outside of food as medicine, you have Dionne Chicago Dream, which is here. And our model is not only procuring the food, but delivering. Whereas in most other companies, you can procure it, but you don't have the ability to deliver.
And so now we're collapsing two parts of that supply chain into one contract and one opportunity. So for us, we're shortening the amount of players that's involved. And we're also representing the very communities that we're trying to save. We're not waiting for someone to give us a piece of the pie. We're contracted to provide not only this product, but these services when we deliver.
As a result, we're able to make earned revenue to sustain what we're doing. And so now you're talking about a $6 million business that one third of the earned revenue has come not from grants, not from independent donations, but from earned revenue through food as medicine.
Yeah, that's so fascinating and so strategic. And I'm curious, with that in mind, you talked about you can't scale a volunteer organization in that same kind of way. How do you think about either scaling or evolving this model, growing it? What are your plans or hopes for that in terms of continuing to fight hunger in many communities?
We have something that we've been working on in the background that is going to be announced in the next few months. But I think the biggest thing is, you know, if you're asking, where has this led me? It's actually quite clear. We don't have a universal system. where everyone is speaking the same language.
There is no core product or platform where all of these food organizations and companies can connect their people to their inventory and then connecting the people in the inventory to potential delivery. So that's something that I've actually been working on in the background. What a certain product is going to be launching fairly soon. What I learned is that this is not complicated.
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Chapter 7: How has Dion's Chicago Dream achieved financial sustainability?
You know what I mean? And I think that my acceptance and other leaders acceptance of this moment and taking the responsibility of it is extremely important. The moment that it clicked for me was. When I decided to stop wrestling with whether or not I'm a leader, I would hope that the moment that we're in, we're understanding that we have to take responsibility.
Now is the time to really dig deep because it's a lot going on and I leave it up to that individual to decide what they can take in this moment because it's not for everybody to do everything, but everything is so interconnected right now that I would hope that a lot of leaders kind of take the moment to recognize that, okay, leadership looked different a year ago.
And now the idea of that has evolved. And I would hope that we can kind of continue to meet that moment because it's not easy. I find myself as a food leader in a lot of conversations that aren't food-based, you know what I mean? But I think that the thing that has made it
A little bit easier for me is accepting that leadership is not only leading where you want to lead, but it's leading where you have to and where you don't want to.
Thank you so much for this conversation, Dion. As always, it's such a joy to get to talk. Thank you.
Of course. Definitely. Appreciate it.
That was Dion Dawson, a 2025 TED Fellow. To learn more about the TED Fellows program and watch all the TED Fellows films, go to fellows.ted.com. And that's it for today. This episode was fact-checked by Aparna Nathan and Eva Dasher. The audio you heard at the top comes from the short film made by Divya Gaudengi and Owen McLean, story edited by Corey Hajim and produced by Ian Lowe.
Production manager is Sering Dolma. Additional support comes from Lily James-Olds, Leonie Horster, and Allegra Pearl. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little and Christopher Fazey-Bogan. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tansika Sangmarnivong.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.
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