Our Central Floridian of the Year
Dave Green led his charity to recruit 54,000 volunteers to package 4.4 million meals for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, earning the Editorial Board’s annual honor.
Dave Green was a hotshot sales manager for a tech firm in downtown Orlando — barely 30 years old — when he marked yet another breakup in a series of relationships with a night of hard partying. He awoke the next morning to a gray, cold December day, looked out the window of his condo and thought: There has to be something more to life. Then he set off to find it. He booked a flight to Los Angeles, rented a car and drove to the Mojave Desert with nothing more than some camping gear, a stash of granola and an inexplicable inner compass. Along a dirt road through the valley, the midmorning sun casting a reddish hue along the mountains, he pulled off and began to hike up a rocky hill. The view brought him to tears.
“It was the first time in my life I felt peaceful,” he says. “All my life, even if I was around a thousand people, I felt this crushing loneliness — like I never really fit in. But as I stood there, processing all the brokenness of my life, all the mistakes I had made, I was just grateful that I had an opportunity in that moment to decide who I was going to be moving forward.”
Looking back more than a decade later, Green — the man who now runs the Longwood-based nonprofit Feeding Children Everywhere — can trace the origin of his metamorphosis to that moment on the hilltop. It was there that he committed himself to pursue a life of purpose.
Had there not been that epiphany, he might never have come to the helm of a charity that is trying to reinvent the way hungry people are viewed, treated and helped in the United States and around the world. He wouldn’t have led the delivery of 1.5 million meals for Hurricane Irma victims in Florida and Georgia or 600,000 meals for Hurricane Harvey victims in Texas.
And he would have never recruited 54,000 volunteers over 19 days to help package 4.4 million meals for Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria — an unprecedented effort that clinched his selection as the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board’s 2017 Central Floridian of the Year.
“I knew my life was on a different path then,” Green says of that morning in the desert. “All the partying came to a complete stop, and I began to focus on what this was going on inside my heart.”
It is noon on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Dave Green is at a vegan café in Orlando,
four tall shot glasses before him. Each bears a thick, dark-colored liquid that does not necessarily resemble food.
“This is called E3. It’s an algae that only grows in one lake in the world — in Oregon,” he says. “This one is a blend of jalapeño and ginger — it’s a little spicy. This one has a turmeric base — it’s an antiinflammatory. And this one is like superfruits. I try to drink these at least two or three times a week. They’ve done a really good job of keeping me healthy.”
For a guy who spent his first four years eating mostly whatever his dad could shoot in the woods of Ocala, the conversion to a largely vegan diet a year ago might seem radical.
But if Green, now 41, has one constant in his life, it is change.
“He is somebody who is unafraid to say, ‘This isn’t working. What else can we do?’” says his wife and best friend, Debbie Piccirello Green, who met her future husband just weeks after his epiphany in the Mojave. “I think part of it was growing up in the situation he did. Of the different ways people could react, his was to get out and create a different life.”
Born in Gainesville, Green grew up knowing poverty, uncertainty and family volatility. He left at 16, moving in with a teenage friend and bumming change at school so he could hustle up enough for a vending-machine lunch. Though he started drinking young, he still managed to earn good marks in the classroom and won a math scholarship to the University of Florida. He dropped out after one semester. “I just wasn’t ready for college,” he says. Instead, he took a minimum-wage job with a pool company and started working his way up — first to a sales job, then to management. By the time he was 21, he was general manager of a $2 million-a-year business and paying his own way to earn a college degree in business.
Though soft-spoken and introspective, he was unafraid to take risks and hungry to climb the ladder. Over the next nine years he would launch — and lose — his own pool business in Georgia, then move into sales management for office technology products and financial services, relocating to Orlando. But inwardly, he says, he was a mess. “My whole view of the world was distorted, and substance abuse was my coping mechanism, which of course didn’t work. Eventually I had to face all of it.”
He returned from the California desert only to plan a much longer and more daunting trek — the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, from Mexico to Canada. He hiked much of it solo.
“It was so life-changing,” he says. “There would be times I was hiking, and I would think of something horrible I had said to someone 20 years earlier, and I’d hike to the next phone I could find and call that person. Some of them didn’t even know what I was talking about, but I needed to get a sense of grace and to be able to forgive the things that had been done to me in my life. I had to unpack so much garbage.”
Don Campbell, the former youth minister who started Feeding Children Everywhere in 2010, wasn’t sure what to make of the ambitious young man who came to his office in 2012. Dave Green had heard Campbell talk about his fledgling nonprofit at a Christian men’s group, and he wanted to hear more.
Campbell and wife Kristen had developed a simple rice-lentil-dehydratedvegetable casserole that could be mixed, packaged and shipped to those in need both in developing nations and across town