“Right now we’re feeding 700 meals for lunch and 700 meals for dinner,” he says, “and we’re moving through the city with four different vehicles. Each vehicle has 30 families per van, so we’re feeding like [hundreds of] families a day right now.
“I literally went from living at my mom and dad’s house working on my nonprofit, sleeping in this room I was sleeping in when I was 16 years old to [overseeing a] multimillion-dollar budget and feeding [close to] 200 families a day. [By] activating the Corner Boys Project, we’ve employed 50 high schoolers and paid them $50 on every occasion [to] work and sell the water and sell food and teach them entrepreneurship with our corner curriculum.”
In addition to providing meals for nearly 1K families per week, Lewis is actively promoting a book, The New Norm: The Desensitization of the Black Family, which is eerily timely for its title and message given our current climate.
“[The New Norm] doesn’t talk about my story because it’s not personally about me,” he explains. “It just talks about how we as Black people could be so desensitized that we would hurt and kill our brother or sister. My dad raised me [with] the mentality that until we care about ourselves, no one else can.”
