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Brae's Brown Bags

Family Interview with

Christy Mannering (Mom) &

Brayden Mannering

The mission of Brae’s Brown Bags is to provide healthy snacks to homeless and low-income individuals. Every bag includes a letter from Braeden, contact information for additional services who can provide further assistance, three healthy snacks (each one is below 180 calories), and a bottle of water.

Brae’s Brown Bags has given Braeden a platform to speak about food insecurity, homelessness and poverty at schools, conferences and legislative sessions. In September 2015, he launched 3B Ripples, which helps schools and youth organizations to launch their own 3B student chapters in their local communities.

Our belief is that every person regardless of their financial situation deserves to have access to healthy food. This helps to balance the paradox between obesity and food insecurity.

What started as one brown bag branched off into multiple important directions including: three specialty bags, giving talks to groups about food insecurity with a special interest in talking with youth at schools and youth-based organizations about food insecurity and public service. 3B also raises money to help other hunger relief organizations.

Brae’s Brown Bags provide hope and nourishment to each person who receives one.

Christy, tell us a little bit about you, Brayden, and this incredible business.

My name is Christine Mannering, and my son's name is Braeden. When he was 9 years old, he started Brae’s Brown Bags. He has a mission of fighting hunger, and his goal is to ensure we get healthy food options out to low-income populations around Delaware, which has extended across the country. He works in these populations, with shelters, kitchens, and schools, and also to raise awareness and educate other young people that food insecurity is an issue and they can help fix the problem.

We saw a homeless person with a sign on the street in Delaware right near where we live. I was driving, and I have two other younger kids. When we got home, Brayden went into the kitchen and was packing food, and he said Mom, I want to take this food to the person we saw. I want to do what Michelle Obama asked me to do. In his 9-year-old mind, he took her decision to want people to have a healthy lifestyle and his desire to help people, and he merged them, which became Brae’s Brown Bags. And it took off because it was so simple he could tell his friends about it. Somehow, it got back to the White House, and they invited him back! Because of that, he could see that sharing that story with other young people made them want to get involved.

How did he become interested in entrepreneurship or being an entrepreneur?

Braeden was interested in social good. Former First Lady Michelle Obama encouraged Braeden to think about ways to pay it forward. He won a food competition called the "Healthy Lunchtime Challenge" when he was 9 years old, and we had incredible luck being at the same table as Michelle Obama. She talked about eating healthy and living a healthy lifestyle, which was really important. She spoke to kids from every state of the country. It was a kid's State dinner, and Brayden represented Delaware.

She told him this was an excellent opportunity for him to think about how he could pay it forward. He didn't really understand that. Washington, DC, has a very high homeless population, and he asked questions like "why people were asking for money?" and "Why were they sitting at the train station"? He wanted to give his souvenir money away.

I told him, why don't we think about what Michelle Obama asks of you and about how we can pay it forward and find a way to help these people without giving away money because we don't have more money to give them.

What challenges have you and Braeden struggled with?

Healthy food is expensive. When you’re working with soup kitchens and shelters, they prefer non-perishable food, so finding healthy supplies that are affordable is really difficult. Another challenge was school, family, and work balance. He was young when he started, and the teachers and principal were open to working with him. But as he got older, it became a little bit harder because his academic demands increased. There would be instances where he would get invited to talk somewhere and it was an unexcused absence since the school wouldn’t approve it. From then, it was up to me to say “Okay, his grades are good. He can handle missing this one day,” or having to turn down an invite.

When we went through COVID, a lot of our work - which was mainly in public schools - got shut down and we are still struggling to get back into schools. Which, understandably so, since school protocols have changed and Braeden’s in college now, so his classes are during the day.

There’s been a number of challenges one after another, and one that was harder for me to understand was that he didn’t want to be a superstar. He wanted to be Braeden. He wanted to be the kid who played video games and rode on his scooter. It was hard for him to have that limelight sometimes, but he’s been given so many opportunities to attend different events - like meeting Gwen Stefani at the Disney Radio Music Awards in Los Angeles.

As his mom, I want to protect him and I want him to have a happy life, but I also see that this is important to him and has become important to all of us. This includes the community, which was another challenge since people knew where we lived. People would leave toiletry items and we would come home to see that - which was a good thing, but we needed a storage unit since we lived in a townhome. Fortunately, I lived close to family and my parents, who opened their basement to become our Brae’s Brown Bags storage area. Again, we did not anticipate how this would take off and also had ignorance to the problem. I learned that, just in Braeden’s school district, there were over 700 homeless families. I’ve been privileged to always have food on the table, so that was a challenge too, when places we knew of - like the woods and other areas - people would be out in 18 degrees. There was one time where we drove four people who were sitting outside at an unopened shelter. They asked us to take them home and we drove them to the woods.

I cried the whole way home because when you immerse yourself in that environment, you realize you can only help so little. We put our contact information in these brown bags containing healthy food with bottles of water, and gave them to shelters or soup kitchens where they can get help. But, even then, they ask us to leave them in the woods. Everything was very hard to breathe in, but the concepts that he had to learn at such a young age have really impacted many including myself, so there have been many challenges.

Getting him involved in leadership was also important to me, so I connected him with the Jefferson Awards in their Lead 360 program. This helped us get connected to other like-minded people across the country, including many youth leadership conferences and schools. Once I could connect with them, they would invite Brayden to talk and I made sure to get my background checks and things alike since I was obviously an adult. So, it’s just learning all those intricacies to enjoy putting my best foot forward in order to get Brayden through the doors. It still is hard to filter emails and phone calls - and it was much harder in the beginning - but he can do a lot of that now on his own.

As a parent, how do you support your child in their entrepreneurial endeavors?

The scheduler, the transporter, the grant writer - I learned all of those things. It was hard to know what grants to qualify for because, as I said, one of the challenges is the expense of supplies - in particular non-perishable healthy food. We started with a website called “Start-a-Snowball,” and they gave us our first $100 grant. They also connected us with other organizations that work with you to make positive changes in the world. So, for me, definitely keeping a record of our finances and filling out the 990-N form for tax purposes. We always made under 50,000 a year by a landslide, so we never had to do expensive tax preparation. It was a lot of networking, and once people met Braeden, I didn’t have to do much at all. He’s always been the heart and the voice of Brae’s Brown Bags - I just scheduled the appearances. I also did a lot with legislative calls because I knew that, if I could get Braeden in front of the right people, he would get more support from the state. So, I definitely helped with the finances, networking, scheduling, driving, sending emails to companies like Welch's fruit snacks to ask for snacks for our bags, and I would see what other grant or funding opportunities will be available.

How do you balance your child’s entrepreneurial activities with their academic and social life?

I will say, it was easier when he was younger because I was controlling it more due to him being little and not having after-school activities. Once he got into middle school, he was part of the BPA (Business Professionals of America), wanted to spend time with friends, including high school, but COVID hit. I just had to be present in what was happening. He came home and if life was not treating him right that day, we wouldn’t talk about Brae’s Brown Bags. I would let people know that Brayden was off the clock. If there was an emergency shelter opening for bad weather, I would handle it. Whenever anyone wants to take a photo, want him to respond to an email, or want him to talk, I always ask him if he’s comfortable. He’s really good at saying no and that he’s not into it right now, and I appreciate him for being honest. It wouldn’t be something he would love if I were to push him. I also have to come outside of myself like “Christy, you’re 43. Your life experiences have been so great. He is eight - remember what you were like when you were that age.” But, again, being a single parent and having two younger siblings, Braeden and I’s relationships relies on raw, transparent honesty. It doesn’t matter if it’s going to hurt my feelings - I gotta know what you’re feeling right now and I just have to own that. That is number one, I always have to make sure I’m asking him how he’s feeling, if it’s comfortable for him, and listen.

Are there specific skills or lessons your child has learned through entrepreneurship?

Braeden has taught me how to be a public speaker. It;’s not something I was ever comfortable with before since I was a web developer and liked working behind the scenes. If anything, I think the roles are reversed since he taught me. But, one of the things that I had to help him with was being more concise - like an elevator pitch. Another would be empathy because a lot of times you can see people strung out or going through withdrawal. When we would work in colder temperatures, hypothermia sets in really quickly. There would also be people who looked drunk but weren’t, and in fact couldn’t walk. He needed to learn to “poker face it”. You never want to be fake to people, but you also don’t want to be judgemental since it’s very easy to judge with things you may not understand. You need to be compassionate and genuine, and realize that everybody is on a different journey that you may not see. So I think emotional intelligence is a skill he got to learn at a young age and he has carried that forward. He is one of the calmest, young people I know that can handle mental health and high tense issues and be able to hone it in.

Have you seen any positive changes in your child’s confidence or leadership skills since starting their business?

It’s easy for me to see the changes now that he's 20 years old. He’s a completely different person than when he was a little kid, but as a child, his leadership skills were incredible. He would be in charge of a room of 400 kids - grabbing the microphone, jumping down the stage, and be in the middle of them and talk. He was talking to his peers, he knew they would listen to him and knew that they would be excited about what he was talking about. But, the leadership aspect of it, he wanted to create more leaders. It was never about “Let’s see how many people I can get to follow me,” and I feel like there’s a lot of young people these days that are all about followers. Social media has kind of forced that upon everybody, but Braeden was never about that. He was all about the ripple effect of sharing a story and watching people run with it - whether they wanted to help with food insecurity, shelter animals, or help recycle. He loves seeing them become leaders, and he has so many friends now around the country because they just lifted each other up.

How has the experience been with him teaching his friends and encouraging entrepreneurship?

One thing Braeden made very clear was that he never wanted to be a speaker for whatever class he was currently in. So, he has gone back to his schools and talked, but while he was in middle school, he did not. He separated his personal life in that way from his 3B light. I respected his decision and like I said, he just wanted to be Brayden to those people. It was a little tricky since the schools did want to hear from him, but I didn’t want to take that world away from him where he could just be himself. He doesn’t talk about it as “You can start this,” he doesn't use the word entrepreneur. He uses the words “change maker,” “Bro,” and says “If this bothers you, go be the change.” He did start 3B Ripples, which were student chapters. So, we would provide a bit of funding if the school needed it, and they would build an application to see how many students were interested. We would provide a starter kit, he would talk with the students, and then they would become their own chapter. We had a reporting form they could fill out and say where they took the bags, like taking them to a church or soup kitchen. Working with the 3D Ripples, I think it was a neat idea. I came up with the “3D Ripples,” but he likes describing that to young people. I think it's more fun for him now as a twenty-year-old to talk to seven-year-olds, where he gets down on the tiny chairs and explains the ripples from throwing a little rock into the water. He’s so calm and chill that you can’t help but believe him.

How do you address setbacks or failures with Braeden in the context of their business?

When he was little, I think it was harder. He wanted to make sure he was getting everything right, and we still didn’t really know what we were doing and what would be right. I think in many cases, he taught me to let it go. That might be more now since he is older, but when he was little it was more about reflection. When something’s happening and you’re not sure - like technical difficulties or forgetting something you needed - at that point it’s out of your control and it’s just realizing that “I’m going to do my best. I can always do better next time.” There’s never really a failure because even when something doesn’t go right, it’s a learning experience. I think we both taught each other that not everything’s going to be perfect, but at the end of the day, if you’re sharing your mission and more people want to hear more from the ripple effect, it won’t be a permanent setback. It gave you something to learn from and to improve next time. I feel like it’s always been about what’s working and not working, then improving it.

Braeden: I think it’s good to address it as what you can learn from whatever setback or failure was made and the recovery. “How can I quickly reflect with what I realized was a mistake? And how can I cover it and make it seem not so bad anymore. I think recovery is very important when it comes to failure. Like when I messed up with something public speaking-wise, I was able to bring it back in and just focus.

How do you involve Braeden in the decision-making processes related to his business?

For some parts, he did that on his own - like once he could drive, I wasn’t transporting him everywhere. For example, a code purple - which, in Delaware, it means that the temperatures have dropped below freezing and we’re opening emergency locations for people to go stay if they don’t have a place. I used to do the transporting and he would pack the bags, but he does that now on his own. I would give him the location, sometimes he would take his girlfriend, and they would both go deliver. He has seen me doing things and now he’s like “Oh, well I can do that.” When it comes to responding to things, he normally will check with me like “Mom, did you see that email? Is it okay?,” and I would say, again with my number one question, if he was comfortable with this. When he was younger, it was more like “Do you want me to write an outline for this speech and you fill in the rest? Do you want to practice this?,” and then it would get to the point of “No I got it, I can write it. I’ll read it through with you.” It just naturally happened. I think him seeing me struggle as a single mom, made him always want to fill in.

Have you noticed any specific interest or talents in your child that align with entrepreneurial pursuits?

Brayden: So, I do like any interactions I can have with the youth and teaching them new things. I’ve read books to my sister’s elementary school and taught many classes of people on food insecurity. I would also say what my mission is and how they can pay it forward in their hometown. I really like that and it goes perfectly with the message I want to spread and helping more people.

Christy: Well, I echo what Brayden said, and I see that he’s very good with young people. I think I might have said before that I believe he is even better now at 20 with young people. It’s incredible to see how they literally latch on to him. If he walks into a kindergarten room, eight kids are going to be attached immediately. He just has that calming, happy personality. With specific interests, I would say that he is just a natural networker. Even if he’s not working for Brae’s Brown Bags, he would help other people network. If his friends had an idea, they would go to him. Whether it’s a good or bad thing, Braeden is their number one person to go to as a confidant or somebody to get advice. He connects those pieces and almost outlines what they should do and start with. Not just in the nonprofit world, he can naturally connect the dots like a menu for a restaurant or interpersonal issues. For his friends, he is the number one person to go to.

Christy: He did a TED Talk once when he was 12 or 13, and he was the youngest to have done this TEDTalk. He ended up being closer - the last person to do it. You’re not supposed to look at anything when you do a TED Talk, and there was a moment where he froze and didn’t remember. He had clicked through the slide, but fortunately everyone in the audience were saying “You got this!” You could see him on stage how he breathed, composed himself, and then moved forward. He gave himself the time to do that instead of panicking or crying like I would have, he paused, then moved forward. For me my heart would race, my palms would get sweaty, but not Braeden.

What resources or organizations have been helpful in supporting your child’s entrepreneurial journey?

Braeden: Dosomething.org helped us out at the very start. From multiple grants and word of mouth I believe. They helped us with more exposure and the start of my non-profit. After that, we got a lot of support from the YMCA and the Boys & Girls club - where we hold our annual and now biannual celebration of how long 3B has been around. They gave us a place to hold that celebration. The Food Bank has also helped us a lot for the same reason.

Mainly, we would hold events wherever we could hold them sometimes. When it comes to classes, the only class I took while in middle school would be BPA (Business Professionals of America). It helped my organization - what I was doing at the time and my class went hand in hand with public speaking.

Christy: I work at the University of Delaware and I used to work for the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. They have Delaware Cooperative Extension, which has a while unit that focuses on food insecurity. They were speakers at some events, so having that connection was really great. They also have an annual day event where we could have a table and people could pack brown bags and take them home in the car. So, if you see someone on the street when you’re driving, you have a bag and can hand them out the window. The Jefferson Awards were also a big thing year after year. They would help both of us with our leadership skills because they had events where Braeden could work with the young while I worked with the older people. Kohl’s, the shopping department, had an award called “Kohl’s Cares” which helped too. There was Mazda and NBC Universal as well in doing a lot for helping nonprofits where Braeden received the “Mazda Drive for Good” Award one year. They had him go on “The Today Show” and, at the Christmas tree lighting, he was able to be featured on TV at the Rockefeller Center.

So, having those local connections, working with the Food Bank of Delaware, and the Jefferson Awards, they would then share with us “Look at Kohl’s Cares, look at this “Mazda Drive for Good”. Dosomething.org was the same - where they help people and kids all over the country to do something good.

How does your child balance the financial aspects of their business, such as budgeting and reinvesting profits?

Christy: Well, as you know, our first donation from Start-a-Snowball that was $100 was gone immediately just because, again, non-perishable healthy foods are so expensive. The brown bags we use aren’t plastic bags they’re just brown bags, which is something that Mazda helped us with a lot. It’s been hard because, as Braeden is getting older, he doesn’t qualify anymore for the youth grants. But, we do have a following now - I hate saying “following”, since I think we’re all leaders - and we have people who regularly donate once a month. So, really, it’s basically what the demand is. When we were working with the schools, they had a summer program where kids who didn’t have food at home could go get food, and we would help with that. We look for sponsorships when we hold events. That would just be us going to a local mom and pop shop and saying “We’re getting ready to do a hunger conference, and we need some money to get this off the floor. Would you like to be a sponsor? Your logo will be on the website and your logo will be on the banner.” So, learning how we can amplify local places to make them more visible and to also help us in our initiatives. Working with already existing organizations was also very helpful because they had connections too and we would learn from them like the Food Bank of Delaware.

Humans, in general, want to do good and be told “Your donation 100% goes to this mission.” Braeden doesn’t get paid, I don’t get paid, and we don’t do mileage reimbursement - it all comes out of us and our money. When people realize there’s no overhead and basically know “we’re not using your money for anything, but helping other people,” they give, and we’re really lucky. When former President Trump was in office, some changes he made like itemized deductions or alike, we hurt from that. We have less donations now that that change is made. So, it’s important to know what the policies are and what we can do to incentivize bigger donations like “we’ll make sure we tag you on Facebook” or “your logo is gonna be on the email we send out,” so things like that. But again, it’s never really been about profits, it’s just been about being careful with the money and being honest about where it’s going.

Brayden: Along with what my mom said, it was a lot of grants and donations that we depended on along with making promises to those who gave us the donations that it would be for good use. If they were a brand or company, they would be included and there’s no money-making out of it. Anytime I was on TV, there wouldn't be profits coming to me from that, but I consider the exposure that we got as profitable. We got more good donations and had more people be aware that we are here and helping people.

What advice would you give to a teen or kid entrepreneur who wants to start a business?

Braeden: Something that I always said was to always dream big and that anything you want to do can happen. Not everyone may feel like they have the support they need, especially when they are young, but I’m sure there is at least someone you could talk to about all the things you may or may not want to do. Something to look out for is anyone that you can take your ideas to as long as you know that they will listen and will take your words in account. I think it’s always very important to pitch your ideas, or plans for the future, to someone to get other opinions.

Any mistakes that you may think are unforgiving, you can bounce back from almost anything. Always keep at the back of your mind that no matter how hard you fall, you can always get up just as strong as you fell.