A Fitting Start

With a new app and business to help feed the hungry, Luke Roberts M.S. ’16 asks you to wear your heart not on your sleeve, but on the front of your shirt.

My Phone Feeds Kids invites the charitable-minded to spend $25 to support the Maryland Food Bank and receive a T-shirt that reads “My Phone Feeds Kids. Does Yours?”

It raises additional money as wearers spread awareness and refer friends, family and passersby to the app, while tracking the total amount of money they have helped raise through referrals.

“The app lets people get involved in a social justice cause that they care about by showing them how one small action they can take—downloading an app and buying a T-shirt—can have an increasing impact over time,” Roberts says.

He came up with the idea in 2014, when he was working for a company that sold phone service and donated a meal to a nonprofit every time customers paid their bill. Roberts created the “My Phone Feeds Kids. Does Yours?” T-shirt as a marketing tool for the company.

“I thought it would be a cool way to get more people to ask me about the (promotion) if I wore a T-shirt,” Roberts says.

Roberts later left the company, but took the T-shirt idea with him. With the help of his father John, an IT professional, Roberts launched the “My Phone Feeds Kids” app last month out of his home in Laurel, Md. It donates $7.50 per shirt to the Maryland Food Bank’s Weekend Survival Kit program.

He formed the partnership with the food bank while researching local nonprofits that could benefit from the app’s proceeds. He then got in touch with the Maryland Food Bank, which counts 682,000 people in the state, including 220,000 children, who don’t have enough to eat. It’s the first partnership of its kind—with an app—for the nonprofit.

“This is the first sort of thing, phone-app wise, that we’ve done,” says Amy Chase, director of corporate relations at the food bank. “It’s very innovative for us.”

In its first month, the app has raised money for more than 1,000 meals.

Roberts hopes to eventually expand to other causes, such as cancer and disease research, stopping human trafficking and any others that users want to get involved in. “Our core thing is about empowering people to make a difference. It’s not about T-shirts, it’s not about technology. It’s about how do we empower you as an individual.”