Ganga Stone
One Bicycle.
One Meal.
One Act of Grace.

New York City in 1985 was at the epicenter of the AIDS crisis. In Greenwich Village — the heart of the city’s gay community — the epidemic was not an abstraction. It was neighbors. It was friends. It was the person in the apartment next door who was there one week and gone the next.

Ganga Stone was a spiritual teacher, a student of Eastern philosophy and practice, and a volunteer with Cabrini Hospice on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.^[1] She had come to New York from a life that had taken her through multiple traditions of contemplative practice — she was drawn to service as a form of spiritual discipline, not as charity but as a way of being fully present with another person in their need.

When she encountered Richard Sale — homebound with AIDS, too weak to feed himself — she did not design a program.^[2] She did not convene a committee. She did not apply for funding. She asked what he needed and she met that need. It was the most direct form of human response possible.

Ganga Stone did not intend to found an organization. She intended to feed a man who was hungry. But need, once seen, is hard to unsee. After delivering meals to Richard Sale, she began delivering to others. Word spread. More people needed food. More volunteers appeared. More meals were needed.

The logic of the work was simple and relentless: people with AIDS were too sick to feed themselves, too isolated to shop, often too poor to afford nutritious food even when they could. The medical system was overwhelmed and largely focused on acute care. Social services were unprepared for the scale of need. The community was hemorrhaging people and there was no infrastructure to catch them.

What Ganga Stone created — first informally, then formally — was that infrastructure. Not a hotline. Not a pamphlet. A meal. Delivered to your door. Every day. Free. No questions asked.

She was quickly joined by her roommate and co-founder Jane Ellen Best, and together they began cooking meals in their apartment and delivering them by bicycle.^[3] God’s Love We Deliver was formally incorporated as a nonprofit in 1986. What began in Ganga Stone’s kitchen — quite literally — expanded into a small commercial kitchen operation, then a larger one, then a professional facility. Each expansion was driven by the same force: more people needed food than the previous capacity could serve.

The early years were sustained almost entirely by volunteers and small donations from within the Greenwich Village community. The AIDS crisis had forged extraordinary networks of mutual aid among gay men and their allies — people who understood, as Ganga Stone did, that the government was not coming and that community would have to take care of its own.

Volunteers came to chop vegetables, cook meals, pack boxes, and deliver. Some were friends of people who had died. Some were people living with AIDS themselves, well enough to give what they could on the days they could give it. Some were neighbors who had simply heard what was happening and wanted to help. The organization that grew from Ganga Stone’s bicycle was built from thousands of acts of individual human care.

Celebrities began to take notice. Joan Rivers — a New Yorker who was paying close attention to the epidemic when many were looking away — joined the Board of Directors in 1991 and remained one of God’s Love We Deliver’s most devoted advocates and fundraisers until her death in 2014.^[4] Her involvement helped the organization build relationships with New York’s philanthropic community at a critical time. Designer Michael Kors joined the board and became a signature long-term supporter, later donating $5 million toward the organization’s SoHo home.^[5] The fashion and entertainment worlds — communities hit hard by AIDS — showed up for the organization that was feeding their friends.

Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, as the epidemic grew and the need expanded, God’s Love We Deliver grew with it. The organization moved into larger facilities, hired professional chefs, brought on dietitians, and developed the medically tailored meal model that would become its defining contribution to the field of HIV care.

The name God’s Love We Deliver did not come from a branding session. It came from a conversation with a dying man.

The story God’s Love We Deliver itself tells is this: as Ganga was walking with an armful of groceries to a client’s apartment one afternoon, a minister stopped her on the street and asked what she was doing. When she explained, he said, “You’re not just delivering food — you’re delivering God’s love.”^[6]

Stone took those words and made them the name of the organization. In doing so, she captured something essential about what the work actually was: not a service delivery mechanism, not a social program, but an act of love expressed through the most fundamental human need. You are not forgotten. Someone is coming. You will eat today.

The name has stayed for forty years because it is still true. Every meal prepared and delivered is an act of love made tangible. Every volunteer who shows up to chop vegetables on a Tuesday morning is delivering something more than food.

Looking back at what Ganga Stone built, it is tempting to describe it as visionary. But what she herself has said is simpler: she saw a man who was hungry and she fed him. She saw more people who were hungry and she kept feeding them. The vision was not strategic. It was moral. And it was practical.

What she understood — before the research confirmed it, before the policy world caught up — was that food is medicine. That you cannot manage a chronic illness from a place of hunger. That dignity is inseparable from nourishment. That the most direct form of care is sometimes the most powerful.

She also understood something about the nature of community response in a crisis. Governments move slowly. Institutions require process. But a person on a bicycle can be at your door in an hour. The speed and directness of her response — see the need, meet the need — became the model for everything that followed.

The Food Is Medicine movement that now exists across the United States — with organizations in dozens of cities serving hundreds of thousands of people with serious illnesses — traces its origins directly to the work Ganga Stone began on a bicycle in Greenwich Village in 1985. She did not know she was starting a movement. She was just trying to make sure someone ate.