A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Food Bank comedy benefit, which was held on Feb. 13, 2021, raised more than $11,000 for food banks and kosher food pantries in Cleveland and around the country.  Having secured sponsorships (including the Cleveland Jewish News, members and local businesses) to cover all marketing and presentation costs, every dollar gathered from the $18 registrations and other individual donations was distributed to food banks.  Our partner Congregation, Tifereth Israel of Columbus, supported our efforts as well. More than 700 people on 415 virtual Zoom screens from Ohio and 19 other states, as well as Canada, enjoyed nearly an hour-and-a-half of performances by comics from across the United States to raise funds for 14 food banks nationwide.  This event gathered professional talent who donated their time and allowed all of us the opportunity to do our part to directly support our community organizations to help people in need during this pandemic. 

The original idea for the event was to gather support for the Greater Cleveland Food Bank and the Cleveland Kosher Food Pantry. But when word spread to out-of-town relatives and friends, we immediately saw enthusiasm about the project we hadn’t anticipated.  Add to this the ease with which the event could be watched anywhere in the world on Zoom.  And before we knew it, we were identifying and advertising registrants’ local food banks, which allowed opportunities for both registration funds and individual donations to go to those as well.  So our single comedy event served as a fundraiser for many food banks around the country.  Rather than each food bank hosting and paying for its own entertainment, they all shared our event!  This model can also be replicated by your clubs and regions.

The show itself featured comedy sets by Cleveland’s Josh Kramer; Chicago’s Sy Jacobs, and T.J. Shanoff and Katie Klein of The Shalom Collaboration (Chicago); New York City’s Ester

Steinberg and Ali Kolbert; Louisville, Ky.’s Mark Klein and Washington, D.C.’s Ian Bardenstein. Ed Weinstein served as our entertainment coordinator for the event, while Joel Herman handled marketing and Mitch Lauer with our tech needs.

Certainly the event was both a lot of work and a labor of love for each of the men involved.  The team developed several technological innovations for programming of this kind including:  the emceeing by the professional team (The Shalom Collaboration), the flow of back-to-back entertainers, designated live laughers, and marketing and distributing donated funds to food banks and pantries around the country specifically where pods of people were registered. 

For further information on how you can develop this program or something similar for your Club and community, contact Jerry Brodsky at jerrybrodsky2@gmail.com or 330-998-2283.