This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, and we love your stories.

Send them to Our American Stories.com.

And today we have Ben Berman's story.

He's a second-year MBA student at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

When the COVID pandemic swept this country, he got an idea to start making pizza and drop them out of his apartment window.

This led to his nonprofit called Good Pizza that is raised over $30,000.

Ben grew up in Portland, Maine, with his parents and two younger brothers.

Starting from a young age, Ben was getting involved in his community.

Here is Ben's story.

When I was in middle school, I was on a school board subcommittee for wellness in the town.

And one of the jobs that we were tasked with was renovating the cafeteria.

And so I actually spent the freshman year of high school touring local cafeterias to try to understand how we could improve our operations and food service.

And as part of that program, the administration let me earmark $2,500 for a program that I'd come up with called

the Chef of the Month program. And my idea was that we would ask local chefs to take over our cafeteria for the day

once a month and they would serve their food at school lunch prices and it worked so we would have

you know a nice hotel from Portland come in and the chef would do paella for the whole school

and serve it for $2.75.

There was a local pasta company that came in every year to do the service.

And the owner came in one day and his manager called out and he asked me if I knew how to cook

and if I could help him on the line. And I grew up cooking with my mom and really enjoyed that.

So I sort of felt confident enough to jump on the line with him

and just serve pasta for the day.

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