Allan Law Handed Out 520,000 Sandwiches on the Streets of Minneapolis Last Year

Allan Law is on a mission to feed hungry people in his city, one sandwich at a time. The retired schoolteacher has spent the last 14 years making and delivering sandwiches, along with other essential supplies, to the homeless and hungry on the streets of Minneapolis. Law works the night shift, leaving his home (a tiny apartment filled with refrigerators) around 8 p.m., returning at noon the following day.
“He is a rolling, problem-solving care center on wheels” says Steven Aase, who works with Law at his non-profit Minneapolis Recreation Development Inc.
Law estimates that he gave out 520,000 sandwiches last year.
Watch Law’s story here, and check out the feature film The Starfish Throwers, in which he is featured alongside two others whose individual efforts to feed the poor are igniting a movement in the fight against hunger.

These Sisters Created an Incredible Place to Help Veterans

Sisters Melissa Spicer and Melinda Sorrentino joined the family business straight out of college—working along with their father and other family members to run Campus Hill Apartments in Syracuse, N.Y. When their father sold the business in 2007, the sisters decided to use their real estate and renovation acumen to benefit veterans, whom Spicer had been concerned about for decades. At age 16, she saw a homeless man holding a sign that said he was a veteran, and she told Marnie Eisenstadt of the Syracuse Post-Standard, “I thought, ‘Oh, my God. How can this be?'” Spicer began a charity that trained service animals to help veterans, and by the time the family sold their business, her non-profit needed more space.
So the sisters and other family members put up $700,000 to buy a vacant, squirrel-infested lodge in Chittenango, N.Y. near Oneida Lake and renovated it to serve as headquarters for Clear Path for Veterans, a nonprofit focused on all aspects of easing veterans’ transition back to the civilian world. Clear Path offers veterans a place to enjoy natural beauty, a dog training program, peer-to-peer counseling (the Wingman Program), acupuncture, massage, free meals and culinary training, a “Saturday Warrior Reset” program and more.
Clear Path serves 230 veterans each month through the help of volunteers. Spicer and Sorrentino do not take pay for their work at Clear Path, so most of the donations they receive go directly to helping vets. Spicer told Eisenstadt, “If what you hope to do benefits the greater good of the community, from beginning to end, never quit.”
MORE: How One Veteran Discovered the Healing Power of Art and Made it His Mission to Share With Others