90. ‘The Crayon Initiative’ and Recycling Old Crayons into New Ones for Kids at Children’s Hospitals (with Founder and President, Bryan Ware)

Bryan Ware was out to dinner with his family one night when he wondered, could someone do something with all the restaurant crayons kids use and repurpose them? After pondering that question for a couple years and doing a little research, he finally started his nonprofit ‘The Crayon Initiative.’

Using his manufacturing background, he slowly figured out a way to collect recycled crayons, remake them into new crayons with a unique design, and donate those new boxes to children’s hospitals all over the country for sick kids to use.

At the end of this month, March 2025, ‘The Crayon Initiative’ will celebrate 1,000,000 boxes distributed. That’s a pretty amazing feat for something that started with just a simple idea. 

Listen to this episode to learn from Bryan about how his nonprofit is able to navigate all the logistics of what they do, and also get the reminder that what can feel like failure is really an opportunity to learn and move forward.

Links mentioned in the episode:

The Crayon Initiative Website

The Crayon Initiative Instagram

The Crayon Initiative Facebook

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Transcript

Melissa: On this episode, I am featuring Brian Ware. He's the founder and president of the nonprofit called the Crayon Initiative. This is a really cool nonprofit. They are donating boxes of crayons to children's hospitals all over the United States.

But the cool part about that is that those boxes are made from recycled crayons.

So they get donations from restaurants or from schools that do donation drives, and they've developed a whole process to take those recycled crayons and make them into these boxes that are then donated to these hospitals at no cost to them.

So it is really fascinating in this episode to hear how he developed and worked through that whole process.

So if you are someone who needs to hear the reminder that having a good idea, trying to do good things doesn't mean you won't face challenges and to just keep navigating those challenges and believe in your idea and keep moving forward, I think this is the interview for you.

Welcome to the Do Something More podcast. The show all about service, where we highlight the helpers who inspire us all to do something more. If you're passionate about nonprofits or looking for simple ways to volunteer and give back to the causes that matter to you, this is the podcast for you.

I'm your host, Melissa Draper. Stick around and I'll show you all the many ways anyone can truly make a difference in our world today.

Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Today we are featuring, really, I think, a fun nonprofit that's called the Crayon Initiative. And I just shared with our guests that I have been practicing how to say that.

And we realize everybody says that in a different way, but I love what they do. They give kids in hospitals free crayons, and they make those crayons from donated recycled crayons that they get from all over the country.

So they're not only supporting a great children's cause, but repurposing materials that would otherwise end up in landfills. So today on the podcast, I have the founder and president of this initiative, Brian Ware.

Brian, welcome to the podcast.

Bryan: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Melissa: So let's just start off by having you kind of give us a little background on you and then the story behind your nonprofit.

Bryan: Sure. I mean, my background is I do a lot of consulting and manufacturing, supply chain stuff like that. But the creative art has always had a touch in my heart, so to speak.

Kind of got me through school.

It's always an escape to do artwork. So that. That's kind of. Kind of why the art was so important to me.

Melissa: Right. And I think most children would agree with you on that perspective. Well, what's the story? I. Your, your non profit has a great story behind it and so I'd love to have you just share that for a little bit.

Bryan: Absolutely. So the story behind it, the way it started, as I mentioned, I was big into art growing up, kind of kept me in school. So jump ahead. My wife's a school teacher and art was cut from the California state budget back in 2011.

We have a My birthday is at the end of summer. Nor previously used to be the first week of school. So this happened. We were out for my birthday, it's the first week of school, and the conversation is always, what's cut from the school budget this year and what's it going to take?

So, you know, the discussion was that art was cut and I said that was unacceptable. How do we get back to the arts? What do we do?

My kids at the time, I want to say were 6 and 8. So it wasn't like we were new to the crayon usage at restaurants. But the conversation was, what do you do with these restaurants?

How do we reuse these crayons? What happens to them? And they basically said that they threw them out. So that kind of spurred me into investigating a little bit into what it would take to take these crayons from all these restaurants.

How would we collect them and then do something good with them to give back to the creative arts?

Melissa: So watching your kids color there in the restaurant was kind of what spurred this idea.

Bryan: Yeah, now to be fair, I was coloring too, but you know.

Melissa: That'S great. So where did you go from there? How did you organize ways to get donations and then how did you go about being able to actually turn all those crayons into a product that you could give and donate?

Bryan: Yeah, it was definitely a long, long road.

First two years were kind of, I was busy with my consulting business and so it wasn't really a front of mine, but it was always there to kind of investigate more.

And I, over the time, thank God for Google, did a bunch of searches of somebody's gotta be doing this. Like how? How could nobody be not doing this at this point in time?

So we discovered that there really wasn't anything out there. And so that kind of, you know, drove me to figure out a way to do this. Jump ahead to 2013 when I was asked by a friend that I had bounced the idea off of, you know, are you going to do this?

Are you not going to do this? What's the deal? Let's go. So in 2013 is kind of when we really started kicking it off, formalizing it as a nonprofit,

starting to investigate how it would work both on the collection side with the manufacturing background. My concern really was about the manufacturing side and on the donation to hospital side, the manufacturing in the middle.

I was like, we'll figure that out. How hard can this be?

Melissa: Yeah, I know how to do that part.

Bryan: That's my livelihood, so how hard can it be? Right. But restaurants signed up immediately and hospital said, if you can prove that you're killing the bacteria on the old crayons and making new crayons, we're in.

It's like, okay, so we'll do the manufacturing now. Which turned into the. The problem child, so to speak, of the three steps. But going back to the restaurants, it was kind of a.

I had a friend that worked for BJ's Brewhouse Restaurant, and he basically went to court. He worked for corporate, so he went to the president, said, hey, my friend's got this idea.

What do you think? He said, yeah, I mean, let's do it. So we had a. Basically build a supply chain of how we would get them from the restaurants because we didn't want to hinder the restaurants, basically, you know, their business and how they operate.

So we had to work with. I worked with the very, very local BJ's Brew House and said, I want to pretend like you're in Florida, as far away as possible.

Like, if we do X, will this work for you? No. Okay, how about Y and Z? And, you know, we kept coming up with new ideas until we came up with a system that.

That worked for us and worked for the restaurants all across the country to.

Melissa: Make it as easy as possible to.

Bryan: Get donated as possible. Yeah. For them to a. Collect the crayons as part of their routine when they're cleaning tables, as well as how do they get it back to us?

They're willing to send it, but we just need to know how. How that would work.

So we figured that out. We figured out the cran side of it. And then from the manufacturing perspective, then it was like, oh, now we got to figure out actually how to do this.

So we played in my garage and in my kitchen for, I don't know, six months a year of trying to figure out what the best way. Because conceptually you have some ideas.

But then when you start going, oh, we're not going to have like 10 crayons. We're going to have like 10,000 crayons.

Melissa: Right.

Bryan: Going to Have a hundred thousand crayons. Concept A did not, you know, is great. We can make five, no problem. But how do we go from there and scale it up?

So, you know, to be honest, we're still evolving today. 12 years, whatever that is, 12 years later, or going into our 12th year. So we're actually developing a new melting process right now to go faster.

Melissa: Wow. And you even also developed your own unique design for the crayons, is that right?

Bryan: That is correct. We worked with an occupational therapist I knew from a childhood days of the little rubber guy that you put on your number two pencil to learn to hold it properly, that triangle shape.

So I knew I kind of wanted a triangular shape that made it easy for small kids as well as dexterity issues. With hospitals, you never know what they're going through, you know, can they really grasp it, et cetera.

So I knew that I kind of wanted that shape. But then I worked with this occupational therapist, and we modeled it with 3D models, basically thicker, thinner, longer, shorter. And we had the occupational therapist work with children and say, okay, hold this model.

What do you think? Does it feel right? Is it too big for your hands, too small for your hands, et cetera. So that was kind of how we came up with the special shape.

And then we heard back from the hospitals after we started shipping them that it was great because they didn't roll the triangle didn't roll like a normal crayon does off the bed table that the kids would have, because that was a huge deal for the hospitals and the fact that it was complete side effect.

But from it was a huge win from their perspective because they do rounds with the kids, they're coloring in bed. And so if something falls onto the ground, it's there until an hour later, two hours later, three hours later, when the next round comes through into their room to pick it back up.

So this allowed the crayons to stay on the hospital bed tables. So that was a big win for them as well.

Melissa: Yeah, all around a great design.

Well, I just think it's so fascinating to hear this whole process from the moment you got that idea to you sat on it for a year or two, to going back and forth with every step of it.

I just think it's a good reminder that even though we're doing good, even though what we're trying to do is 100% beneficial for other people,

there's that give and go, and there's things you gotta try, and there's challenges and setbacks, and you just. You just keep Moving forward with that idea and that desire to do the good that you had thought of.

Bryan: Well, I appreciate that. And it is interesting talking with. I call them kids, but even adults as well of like, why and how and do you. I'm like, don't give up.

If you have a good idea, just keep failure's learning. It doesn't mean that you failed. So that's something that I kind of believe in. And I talk to a lot of people about of trust me, what we started with is not what we're doing today.

And if we went down the path that we continued going down at the very beginning, like this would be done. So you constantly got to take what you learn, try it.

If it doesn't work, try something else. If you truly believe in what the. What your mission is.

Melissa: Right. Yeah. Those setbacks don't need to be discouragement. They can just lead you to new ideas.

Bryan: Definitely.

Melissa: Well, I. We also love to hear stories on this podcast, so I'm sure you've gotten feedback or heard what. What are of the more personal stories that you can share that show the effect that the good work you're doing has had.

Bryan: Besides the personal visits, we don't hear a lot, but I can tell you when we first started and the hospital started getting the crayons to begin with one, you know, the shape and all that other stuff they were very excited about.

But the big thing that came back from the hospitals was we give each kid a pack of crayons and that pack has eight colors in it. With the budgets the way they are at the hospitals, they would normally buy crayons in bulk.

So you would get two colors. You would get two colors, maybe three, whatever. But you might get purple, brown, and blue. I don't know. Right. Whatever was handed out that day is what you got.

So when each kid got a whole pack of colors, the first comments that came back to us was, this is awesome. They get all the colors they can design superheroes and fairies and princesses and draw actual things versus here's your blue crayon.

And that's all you get to play with today. So that was definitely a good story that drove why we were doing what we were doing and hammering it home.

Melissa: Right. And they get to take it home with them too, along with that.

Bryan: Absolutely. We actually get back, I would say, less than a percent of the crayons that we give out. We have hospitals doing collections, but within those collections, it's really not our crans that come back.

They either the pediatric patient takes them home because it's the one good memory of their hospital visit,

or if the pediatric patient passes, the parents normally bring it home. And we hear from them that it's the one time within the hospital life or living that they were doing that they saw their child smile.

So it was a good reminder of not the pain, but the good smiles that the kids were getting by doing this creative art.

Melissa: Yeah. Lots of tender stories and experiences there, definitely. And I saw on your Instagram page that you are almost going to be soon hitting a million crayon packs that you've given out.

I think that's amazing.

Bryan: That is correct. It's a big, big, big milestone. It's one from my perspective. You know, the question's always like, is that what you imagined? Is this what you wanted to grow it to, et cetera?

But when I go do something like this, I. I'm kind of all in, so as big as I can make it great. And so early on, I would have conversations with grant writers, or not grant writers, but foundations that were providing grants to us, et cetera.

I'm like, wow, we're only at 150,000 packs or only at 200,000 packs. And I, I vividly remember one of the executive directors of these foundations was like, stop. Listen. Hear what you're saying.

You've impacted 200,000 children. Yeah, but we can do so much more. No, no, no, stop, listen. What you're telling me is you've impacted 200,000 kids. Okay, yes, but I still think we did.

Melissa: Not for a minute.

Bryan: But the million to me is kind of like, oh, that's a real number. That's a legit number. So I'm now like, okay, we've done something here, and I'm very proud and happy that we've hit that number.

Obviously, I'm looking forward to 2 million because that's how my personality is. But the volunteers that made this all happen is how we do it. I mean, we. We live and die by our volunteers.

So this is amazing work from the entire team.

Melissa: Yeah. What do. What did. What is some of the work your volunteers do there?

Bryan: The entire operation is volunteer run. So everything from the sorting, we either do that through team building exercises with corporations, people bring home the boxes to sort. Once that happens, we do all the melting within our facility here in California.

And so we have many teams that come in on a regular, weekly basis and melt them down, make new, make the new crayons, and then we have other teams that come into the facility to do the packing and shipping, pack them into the eight count little cartons, then those go into the bigger boxes and then get them ready for shipping to the hospital.

So 100% volunteer run.

Melissa: Yeah. Wow. Hundreds, even thousands of volunteers I'm sure you've had there helping you keep it going.

Bryan: Definitely, yeah. Pre Covid, we actually were running about 5 to 700 people per month through our facility.

Covid allowed us, actually was a, you know, blessing, so to speak. Blessing in disguise of, okay, slow down a little bit because all you're doing is managing people we're not really producing to.

During COVID many of the leads that were running these shifts came together and said, I'm comfortable if you're comfortable and it's only us here. So we were allowed to operate when the hospitals needed us most.

So that was. But then we also learned, hey, smaller groups that are dedicated to coming each week and they learn all the skills are way more efficient than just being completely open to anybody and everybody to just walk in and volunteer.

Melissa: So anytime.

Bryan: Yeah, we've kind of pivoted. That allowed us to pivot to create these very efficient pods to come in and do the various jobs that we need to be done right.

Melissa: And in turn they're getting all the benefits of volunteering, of building those relationships and all the good feelings that come with coming and helping and putting time towards a good cause.

Bryan: Absolutely.

Melissa: I loved on your website because now you accept donations from all over, people can drop em off at a Staples store, even ship em to you. But beyond that, I love how you have different initiatives and things that schools or youth groups or communities can use if they wanna sponsor their own drive or even things that you offer for restaurants.

So do you wanna just kind of go over some of that of how people can donate and some of these things that you're doing to help encourage these crayon don donations all over the country.

Bryan: Sure, definitely. We, as I said stated earlier, we started with restaurants and within two months schools had said, hey, we saw that you're doing this, can we donate?

So I was like, yeah, it's a used crayon, I don't care where it comes from. So schools and boy scout, girl scouts, community groups, church groups, temples, all that type stuff I would say is the, the biggest owners now over the restaurants.

But online on our website you can download resources, playbooks basically for each of these, for schools, for restaurants, and it'll tell you exactly, play by play of exactly how to do a collection.

Now we partnered as you mentioned, with Staples, which has been a game changer for us. So basically that was one of the big stumbling blocks, so to speak, of the shipments to us, if you were fine to pay for to us, it was great.

You know, we gave you our nonprofit discount, which you can still get through the website ups and so you would directly ship it to us. But a lot of schools said that, well, we don't really.

We just did this collection. We did great. We did bigger than we expected. We collected whatever. We don't have the funds to now ship that to you. So now that we have this partnership with Staples, you can walk into any staples, and under their writing instrument program, recycling program,

you can drop off the crayons and they will make sure that they get back to us.

Melissa: Wow, that's great. Makes it easy, really, for anyone that wants to get involved in that way and do it well. Brian, what has continued to be the biggest why for what you do or the biggest benefit that you've seen in your life, in your family's life?

I see that you and your wife are involved with this initiative. What. What has you seen be the biggest impact and the biggest why.

Bryan: And the biggest why is definitely the. The kids. That's. That's why we do this. You know, we hear some stories about the kids, as I mentioned earlier, about the. The kids bringing their pack of crayons home because it's the one light, so to speak, at the hospital, or the parents bringing it home because it is the light that they.

They saw in their child before they passed. And that. That's why we keep doing this. I mean, we want to get more efficient and faster at everything that we do so we can support more and more children.

We have crayons coming in faster than we're being able to process them. So everything that we're working towards is how we process and get crayons into more hands. And from there, we want to expand into other things to help with, on the creative art side of things, to give other escapes for these kids.

We hear all the time from child life, through doctors, et cetera, on how important it is for the child to relax in the hospital while they're going through whatever procedures or recovery that they're going through in the hospital.

So by giving them this outlet to escape into that's relaxing for them, it actually allows them to heal better and faster. The more of that we can provide, the better we're doing.

Melissa: And it. It almost seems like with your background, your manufacturing background, you were kind of prepared to do this because someone like me might have gotten this idea, but I wouldn't have Even known the first place to start.

But I just think it's amazing to see that, that some of your life experiences before this kind of prepped you to put that idea into action a hundred percent.

Bryan: It was definitely a balancing act because normally my background is in giant factories, like huge, huge factories. And it's like, well, we can't really afford that. So how do we dumb it down to something that we can do but is also not just so small that it's not productive?

So it's been a balancing act. But, yeah, constantly tweaking, constantly learning. It is definitely interesting when we do have corporate events and various people like that into our facility and they look around and they're like, who knows manufacturing?

Because clearly this didn't just show up like this.

Yeah, that's me. I can vision. I can envision something or I replay it in my head over and over again until I can see the path forward and then try it.

Melissa: Yeah. See every detail that needs to be done.

Well, we always love to end the podcast with kind of general advice since I do have listeners from all over the country and world. So what general advice would you give?

I think just in kind of maybe what we talked about earlier and just stepping forward when you have a good idea and how to work that out, or even advice you would give for how to repurpose things for a good cause, I think that's another great part of your initiative,

along with what you do to help the children in hospitals.

Bryan: Yeah, I think that the biggest advice is if you believe in something, continue down the path. Don't let people tell you no. Figure it out. Prove people wrong by, you know, taking the time to create.

But again, as I mentioned earlier, don't be afraid of the failure. Trust me, I failed many, many, many, many times through this whole process. But it's a learning. It's like, oh, that didn't work.

So how do I make it better? What can I do to make it better? So constantly learn by what you're doing. Constantly evolve. That's big thing that I push a lot to people of.

Don't be comfortable with the status quo. Definitely keep pushing it forward. And if you truly believe in something like, you know, go out and make it happen, whether that's recycling crayons, whether it's something for the environment, if it's got something to do with whatever you're interested in, definitely make it happen.

Melissa: And I love the good advice you got from that foundation member to sit in those wins as well and celebrate those.

Bryan: Definitely celebrate the wins. No matter how big or small that they are. It re energizes you if you take the time to take those wins. And it also proves to you that you're going down the right path.

Melissa: Absolutely.

Well, do you want to just share quick where people can find you if they want to learn more or how to get involved or donate to your cause?

Bryan: Definitely. You want to go to thecraninitiative.org you can pretty much find everything on the website there through. You know, our social media links are on that website as well as donations.

All the programs that I was talking about for schools and restaurants, et cetera, you can download all that from the website.

And the one thing that I do like to point out is a lot of people do the donations of crayons and they do big drives for that. But it does cost us funds to be able to convert those crayons that you have just sent us.

So we do not charge the hospital a dime, not even for shipping. So everything we do is we have to fundraise for. So that is just as important as the crayon donation side of things.

Melissa: Most definitely. And I, I love on your materials I, I saw it's just a $46 that gives a pack of crayons. So even every little bit can help towards that.

Bryan: Absolutely.

Melissa: Well, thank you so much Brian for taking the time to come on the podcast today. It's been great to hear from you and learn more about the Crayon Initiative.

Bryan: Well, thank you. I appreciate you having me on.

Melissa: That was my interview with Brian Ware, the founder and president of the Crayon Initiative.

And I think it is so cool that they are closing in on that number 1 million boxes donated to children's hospitals all over the country. It's a really cool milestone.

But I did especially love how he shared that that member of that foundation reminded him that even when he was at a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand, that was something worthy to celebrate too.

And I think that's a good reminder for all of us that are trying to do good things in the world. You can celebrate and recognize every small step and milestone along the way.

So great interview. Really fascinating nonprofit. Love all the good things that they're doing. If you were inspired by this episode of the podcast or liked hearing about the story behind this nonprofit, please share it with a friend or someone else who you think would love to hear this story.

And also I want to give you the friendly reminder that I will always love to have a five star review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can also follow the podcast on social media.

The links for those are always in the show notes. And of course I will have links for the Crayon initiative as well so you can get involved with them and learn more about their nonprofit.

And as always this week, I hope that you can find a way to do something more to help lift, inspire or make a difference.