Good News York by Growth Mode Content - GNY EP.127 | Lu Heart from Erin's Angels

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Spotlight on Erin's Angels: Combating Food Insecurity In this inaugural post-Thanksgiving episode of Good News York, host Mike Brindisi interviews Lindsay, a representative from Erin's Angels of CNY, a nonprofit dedicated to addressing food insecurity among children. Founded in 2017 and named after Erin Maxwell, a neglected child who tragically died, the organization provides food to children in the Phoenix Central School District and aims to expand its reach. Lindsay shares personal stories, the impact of the nonprofit's work, and upcoming fundraising campaigns, including a Giving Tuesday event and a special collaboration with a local distillery. 00:00 Welcome to Good News York 00:35 Special Guest Introduction 01:17 The Story Behind Erin's Angels 02:31 Erin's Angels: Mission and Impact 05:19 Campaigns and Fundraising Efforts 08:22 Community Involvement and Future Plans 11:05 Final Thoughts and Farewell

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and Unirold's 50th anniversary summer specials. Hello and welcome to Good News. York sponsored by Ads on the Go. Get Ads on the Go.com. I'm your host, Mike Brindisi. Follow me on all socials at Mike B. TV. I am very excited. This is actually our first show back from the kind of small Thanksgiving break.

Matt, out of the office, actually out of the studio, he's here. I don't know what he's doing. I think he's buying cucumbers on TikTok shop. I don't know what's going on. But anyway, it's just me today, but I'm joined by a very special guest. Before we get to my guest, quick shout out to my friend Hank Tar at Whites, W-H-Y-T-E-S. It is a repair shop, auto shop in the outskirts of Ithaca. I go to them for everything.

I drove here in a snowstorm, and I was coming. completely safe because of the tires that I bought from whites. Whenever I meet people that move to Ithaca, I feel like you always need a good dentist, repair shop, and a good doctor. Those are three important things to have. I'm telling you, whites is where you want to go. No BS. Fair pricing. They're fast and I just love them. I'm not getting paid to say it. Anyway, enough about that. I am joined now by a very special guest from Aaron's Angels of CNY, which was founded in 2017. my new friend Lindsay or Lou as I've been told is your nickname. Yes.

And I didn't know which one to call you. I said, before we went on, I said, should I call you Lindsay, Lou? And you said, well, there's kind of a good story behind the Lou. Tell me the Lou story. So I changed my name on Facebook due to work reasons. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So when I met Sheila and we got together and talked, she thought my name was Lou, because that's what my Facebook name was.

And so it's stuck. Yep. And it's been my nickname for a long time anyways. I love that. Yeah. Because when I first met you, you don't look like a loo. But now that I'm starting to know you, I think that's an adorable nickname. And it's great.

Well, thank you. And what else is great is the company or nonprofit or not for profit? Nonprofit. Nonprofit. Aaron's Angels of C&Y, which was founded in 2017. You guys are doing amazing things. You are feeding children who may be. going through things like food insecurity.

And I think it's absolutely wonderful. Tell me a little bit about yourself and about Aaron's Angels of CNY. So Aaron's Angels was actually named after a child named Aaron Maxwell. She was in the Phoenix School District. She was neglected. She was eventually killed by a family member.

She showed lots of signs of food insecurity well in the school that school staff had seen. Sheila Diod, our founder, realized that Phoenix was the only school district that didn't have a weekend food program. So that's kind of how Aaron's Angels came about and that's what's named after. That's equal parts beautiful and devastating. My wife is a teacher and she works in the Newark Valley School, the Tioga County.

And she comes home with these awful stories about, she says, Mike, some of these kids, they come in and their last meal was when they ate at school yesterday. Yeah. Sometimes it goes farther than just providing them an affordable or free lunch at school. Sometimes that's all they can have. So I understand the importance. Also before I took this job, I worked as a substitute teacher in the Ithaca school district.

And that really opened my eyes to not only how important it is to have affordable or free lunch, but just how much people need it. And I just think it's absolutely wonderful what you guys are doing. So how did this all come together? So Sheila started building. Erin's Angels. She started the, we just were sending home food on the weekends and then it grew to holidays. Like we have a two-week holiday coming up next month for all these kids. So we're sending extra food home for that. So we'll cover that since they won't be in school to have access.

And we've even branched out to summertime. So not only are we doing weekends and holidays, but now these kids are getting food during the summertime when they are out of school for how many months? Yeah, three, four months, whatever it is. I think it's about three, so that's a big time period. Now, you do currently serve children in the Phoenix Central School District, but I know it talks about your long-term vision to expand and provide food to kids experiencing food in security across Central New York. Talk a little bit about that. Have you been able to do that, or is it something that you guys are working on? So we're working on it. Phoenix was our main goal to start, and then we started branching out. We actually have an outreach program, and the

outreach program recently got a grant from the Oswego County Community Foundation, and it was $2,500. And that was divvied up between all of the weekend programs in Oswego County. So each of the school districts got a little bit of it to fill the food needs. That is absolutely wonderful. I mean, you guys are feeding thousands and thousands of kids, which is so important, especially around the holidays we see it's a stressful time for families financially. you guys have some campaigns coming up. What I love about this is not only are you obviously feeding children in need,

but you're out there doing it with a lot of different campaigns. The first one I want to talk about is your Giving Tuesday fundraising campaign. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so Giving Tuesday is, it's a nation or a global campaign, and it's about giving back to charities and non-for-profits. So we have Angel Cutouts, which you can go right on our Facebook. you can donate a certain amount. You will get an angel.

We want you to sign those angels because they are getting displayed all over storefront and Phoenix. That's awesome. Like all throughout the windows and the walls and wherever we can put them. And you can do it online,

but you can also go to Monterey's Generations Bakery and Fat Man's Treasures. Great name, by the way. I love that. If I can get them there today with the weather. Oh gosh. Barring that Lou is not on the side of the road, God forbid.

Parked because of the weather that you can get it there as well. Some other things. that are going on. Right now, you can go to Lock One Distillery in Phoenix, and they have partnered with you for a special purple drink, which, by the way, sounds delicious. It is. What is in this purple drink? And what happens when you purchase it? How is that supportive financially? So part of the money comes back to Aaron's Angels. So when you buy one of these drinks, a certain percentage of it comes back to us. Excellent. And this drink is actually made.

from the vodka that they make in house. It's called rice vodka. And it's delicious. It's got a little bit of cranberry juice. It's got a splash of lemon lime soda. It's got some grenadine. And I know I'm going to murder this because I always do, but it's called blue curacao.

Blue Curacao. Thank you. I bought it for many years. And for the first couple of months, I used to call it blue curec-eco. Yeah. Kurokaho. I couldn't know.

You got it. It's Blue Curiselle. It sounds amazing. And I love the tagline. Every sip helps us feed more children in need. So if you're looking for more reason to have a few cocktails during the holidays or anytime, you're doing it for a good reason. And let me tell you the best part about this drink. It's got a bubble on it.

A bubble. They have a little contraption that puts a bubble on top of the drink. You pop that bubble, smoke comes out. Whoa. And it smells like berries. Okay. It's a whole experience. I'm in my 40s at this point.

Like, I remember growing up and it was like, we have Labat, Bud Light, Miculob, and then some, Bush. Or Bush Light, if you want to get crazy, if you want to cut some calories. And now it's unbelievable. You've got beer that tastes like pumpkin pie, cocktails that are smoking. So this isn't just your run of the middle, like, hey, order this gross purple drink. It's to help charity. Just drink it.

You're going to really, really enjoy this. Oh, absolutely. Did you have any, did anyone from your organization, have a hand in the recipe itself, or was this something that they came up? It was something they came up with. I love it. Also, we have the Giving Tuesday TV commercial campaign, which apparently was shot in your parents' basement. Correct. Which I love. We're going to pull the curtain back, a little behind the scenes. Talk a little bit about that because it's running on the ABC News affiliate WSYR News Channel 9 here in Syracuse. How was that experience? And tell us what that's all about.

Um, so we, we recruited a local child, a friend of mine's child, and we shot a commercial in the basement. And it's her writing a letter to Santa. She drew food on her letter and asking Santa for food for Christmas. Um, and then at the end, it shows that Aaron's Angels was able to deliver that food to her home. Oh, that's beautiful. So she was a great little actress, too. She had some great facial expressions. See, I'm at an age where I am now crying during commercials. And I think you've just leveled me up to now. I almost just cried with you talking about a commercial.

That's how effective it is. Listen, what you do is absolutely amazing. Tell me a little bit more about Lou, a little bit about Lindsay. Your background and how you were inspired or how you got involved. I'm from Phoenix. Born and raised, grew up there. I live in the same school district now. I have children in the same school district now.

It's funny because my mom always told me that growing up, find a job where you help people. So I do that. I work in the community now. And then I wanted to continue that once I saw Sheila doing all these things in the community. I had to reach out and talk to her. Yeah. Absolutely. It's so important.

And it's amazing what you guys do. I don't know if there is a God, but if there is, you are doing God's work. Tell us some of the plugs. Where can we find people? Where can we donate? Where can we come to any events just to get involved? Oh, so we have events going on literally year-round. Our next one is our Purple Party.

So that is a celebration of Aaron Maxwell's birthday. And we usually have guest bartenders. Like we had the mayor of Fulton and the Mayor of Phoenix kind of do a little competition last year to see who could raise the most money for the Purple Party. And that goes to our scholarship program. Oh, that's amazing. So that's our next one. We also have an appreciation dinner, and we have bingo for bags for any of the women who like their high-end scale bags.

You can come play bingo and win a bag. Look at this. Any websites or social media that we can find out of all that. We are on Instagram. We are on Facebook, Aaron's Angels of C&Y. Our website is www. www.ironsangles.com. Amazing.

And I'll make sure that we flash that on the screen. I do have to ask, obviously, I'm not going to bring up politics. We don't talk about that on this show. But with the new administration, there has been some changes in funding for some schools in some states. Are you guys noticing, are you feeling the squeeze of that at all? We did, especially when the government shut down. We do Amazon giveaways as well from our storefront. So we get products from Amazon, whether it's food, it could be clothing, it could be hygiene, cleaning supplies.

And we do a giveaway. We try and do it at least once a month. So we saw an increase of the amount of people probably, I think it was like an extra 25 people coming in at our last Amazon giveaway to get whatever they needed. That's amazing. Yeah. Anything else that you want to add to talk about, to promote, to plug? I just want to let people know that one in five children in central New York go to bed hungry. And that's about 5,000 kids in a Swiggo County that have food insecurity.

It's a huge issue. And it's very concerning. And we're going to continue doing whatever we can to try and bridge that gap. I love that. I just thought, you're hearing the term food insecurity a little bit more these days. And there might be some listeners or viewers wondering what exactly that means. How would you define that in the food insecurity? Well, it's pretty much when children are going without food. Sometimes families don't have the means to get it.

Poverty is a big issue. that I don't think if you're not in it, you don't know about it. That's right. So these kids will go to school, which is great now that they can get breakfast and lunch in school, but without that, what would happen? Right. Without that safety net, it makes you wonder what else is out there that would be able to provide that for these kids? And you're doing that. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

You have so much going on. Aaron's Angels of CNY, absolutely amazing. They've been around since 2017. We'll have all the links up on this episode. They've got the cutout campaign. You can head to Purple Drink. You have an excuse to do so. Grab fun.

And look for their new TV commercial on WSYR ABC affiliate here in Syracuse. Lindsay, Lou, thank you for all you do. And come back anytime to promote this stuff. I'm a father. and more importantly, I'm a human being that cares about this kind of stuff. We all do here, and I understand the importance and no child should ever go hungry,

whether it's for a day or a minute. So thank you for all you do. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. You're very welcome. And with that, it is Mike Brindisi saying goodbye on this, what is today? Tuesday?

Tuesday. Giving Tuesday. It is. A giving Tuesday edition of Good News. You're sponsored by Ads on the Go, get Ads on the Go.com. Follow me on all socials at Mike B. TV. It's a gentle cruising.

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