Part Two - Joe Cianciotto Interview

This is part two of my interview with Joe Cianciotto, who was just one of many individuals to step up during COVID by leading efforts to provide PPE to Long Island hospitals and support local businesses in his hometown of Garden City. You can fine Part One here.

Q: Seeing this financial impasse at local hospital systems, can you specifically describe the role that you played in this effort to overcome this barrier?
So, seeing that the only way we could continue to provide PPE to the hospitals was to donate it. I think that’s where my own background in advertising and in various cause marketing fundraising might have been helpful.

In exploring possible solutions, it became very clear that, so many of us saw the heroics of health care workers in very much the same heroic light we saw firefighters during 9/11. It’s terrible that it has to take catastrophes to recognize the heroes among us, but when we wake up to this, folks are incredibly grateful and eager to lend their support.

Usually advertising, is so much about creating conjured narratives, with this I feel like I had the chance to do the opposite. Just simply share the hyper-truth of the vital nature of our healthcare workers, the sacrifice they were making and just how much they needed our help. Craig Geiger still gets all the credit for the tagline, #ShieldTheseFaces, which we used to increase awareness for this effort and was the springboard for the short video that I hastily threw together that went out on Facebook.

The second element, which I think, is how we gained so much traction, is my community here in Garden City. As someone who has spent the majority of their life here, I know that the people of this town, care very much for our home here on Long Island and at their core are very charitable. I also think there was also a collective sense of helplessness that everyone felt, and this was an opportunity to overcome that.

To activate the ask I created a GoFundMe page and we focused our efforts very close to home at Winthrop Hospital. To get the word out I posted frequently on the Garden City Residents Facebook group and in the Garden City News.

Fortunately, with face shields, workers could get one or two days use out of them so we could address the needs in a very manageable way. Out of the gate, we were able to secure a batch of 2,500 shields in a matter of three days and made arrangements to drop these off at Winthrop.

Q: That’s not the whole story I understand?
A: Yes, I wish it were, but unfortunately bureaucracy would raise its head once more. When we dropped our shipment off to Winthrop, we thought we would be greeted by workers. Instead, it was the administration, who were wonderful people and very grateful for the donation, but as part of the NY Langone Hospital System, were bound to add this to the inventory for all hospitals in their network across New York, which would eventually turn a targeted one-hospital solution into a smeared thin blip on an already overly cumbersome network.

So, while I am certain some of these got to the doctors at Winthrop, I know a fair amount didn’t. To be fair, this was not anyone’s decision, just the trappings of process and protocols that never imagined a situation like this.

Regardless, I did leave feeling like perhaps the impact was minimized. However, as a happenstance of this effort, word had gotten out and I was being contacted by local healthcare workers directly to help them individually get access to this PPE. These people, were some of the most inspirational individuals I have ever met in my life and to see the conditions they were working under, knew we had to keep the effort going but it had to evolve.

Donations were still coming in, and it just took a bit more effort and we were able to secure enough funds for another 4,000 units. Except this time, we packed them in increments of 50 and built out a network via word of mouth so that we could be delivering this PPE directly to doctors at ER rooms and hospitals all over Nassau County. With the prolific demand, shipping became a challenge, so I began setting up drops at my house instead. It wasn’t much of an inconvenience because no one was leaving their house in those days! Anyway, over the course of the next two months I got to elbow bump in my driveway, the heroes who stepped up for us all and I’d like to think we made a dent in some of their shortages.

I do want to be clear, what I had come across wasn’t corruption, or lack of empathy that stymied us, rather the crippling inflexibility relying solely on a system. The silver lining is that this did awaken an understanding of the tremendous potential that everyday citizens have to change society when we all come together. This was very much the inspiration for the Support GC Local effort we launched for small businesses in my town, but that’s a story for another day!