Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Anton Negroni. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Anton, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you come up with the idea for your business?

The idea for Gummybear Foundation began the first time I stepped out of the idea of just working a job and did a side business that I called Gummiebear Basketball. This all started while I was teaching at a preschool that I started working at two years before Covid. I was working with preschoolers for over 14 years, but this was the first time I worked with a preschool that was well funded. The structure was very different, and the curriculum was amazing, but a little confusing. The curriculum allowed the students to pick what they wanted to learn. One day you’ll be learning about vehicles and if the students wanted to switch to insects that’s what we did. The problem that I had with the curriculum was that it did not connect one subject to the next to allow for fluid learning.  However, it gave the teachers a lot of room to execute their style of teaching. When the Board of Education took over the New York City preschool curriculum things sped up, and the curriculum was given to you. I started to grow closer to my students since the curriculum demanded so much of them. I always had a great rapport with my students, but one family took notice of the bond I had with their son and invited me to a gym that was in the same building as the school. The building was also the same building they lived in. Their son showed interest in basketball, and I have played basketball for most of my life as I explained to the parents, but this was the first time I was asked to teach a three-year-old to play. I was just happy to have access to a gym, and I asked the parents if I could stay and play after they left, and they said sure. “How much for the session?” When they asked me that question my jaw dropped because I wasn’t expecting them to pay. I wasn’t sure what to say so I gave them an amount and the parents said that’s it!? I said “yeah” but I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into. The next day, when I went back into the classroom, the other students were interested in coming to play basketball after school. I told one of my closest friends what was happening, and he said to me you just started a business. I realized he was right. Becoming self-employed made me very strategic in everything. I took more pride in my job and the things that I did throughout the course of the day. I became braver with every opportunity that came my way. I even tried new things like writing comic books and even created a song for the kids about separation anxiety which I now want to make the theme song of the Gummybear Foundation educational program. Most people want to know where the name Gummybear came from. It started with my students’ working out during basketball sessions for one gummy bear at a time. By the time we got to 10 kids, I asked the children what would you like to name the team we have? While they were holding a bag of gummy bears, they said Gummy bear’s and I said Basketball and we agreed on Gummiebear Basketball lol. I reached out to my friend and asked him to make me a website called Gummiebear Basketball and he did, and another friend of mine that worked in the school I asked him to draw the logo and he did. That’s the logo you see all over our website till this day. While walking home from a basketball session I got to my neighborhood in the Bronx and a parent that lived in my neighborhood heard about Gummiebear Basketball and asked me why I did not offer the service to our community? The question caught me off guard and I paused. The answer came when I realized I had no gym or access to one that I can use as freely as the one in Manhattan, because we did not have the same opportunities. I also realized that the people in my neighborhood wouldn’t be able to afford the price that I was asking for due to the demand for Gummiebear Basketball. I answered her and told her it’s because I haven’t created the opportunity to do so. After that conversation the pandemic came and shut down Gummiebear Basketball. It also claimed the life of my friend who drew the bear, which is our logo. I was hit with so much emotion, but something became very clear to me during that time. I noticed a huge gap in funding from one neighborhood to the next, and I also noticed opportunities to create jobs, make money and opportunities to collaborate with others was not as accessible in my community as it was in the neighborhood the school was in. So, during the pandemic, I turned Gummiebear Basketball into Gummybear Foundation and expanded on the services that would help the community with not just kids, but families in general. Opportunities will take you out of poverty and poverty is the main crisis of the world in my opinion. I saw that money made a huge difference in the quality of the neighborhood, and the mood of the people. It specially made a difference in how people treated each other. After changing the name, I started to expand the services using four pillars that affects everybody’s life. All while keeping the curriculum that I learned from being a preschool teacher. The pillars are Education, recreation, mental health, financial literacy. A team formed around me while I shared the idea of how I wanted to change the world. I started to learn about nonprofits from one of my mentors and he introduced me to the two that he created and showed me how the process works and how to start one. I love the idea of Non-Profit work because of the nobility and the integrity that you gain through the process of running one. I love the idea of creating opportunities for others, so they can thrive, and hopefully change the lives of their families for generations to come. Creating jobs that have never existed and programs that take education to the next level by teaching the things that aren’t taught in schools but are needed in life. It took us four years to really solidify what Gummybear Foundation intends to do within the neighborhoods that we serve. “Our mission is to bring programs, activities, education, and jobs to each community we touch. They say it takes a village to raise a child let the Gummybear Foundation be that village.”

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Anton Frankie Negroni, and I grew up in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. When I was very young going to the NBA was my dream all the way up until my 20s and from there, I started teaching preschool children with special needs. For the first 10 years teaching preschoolers gave me patience that I did not have before. I am also a huge nerd. I love comic books, Star Wars and anime; and started creating my own comic books and characters. My favorite superhero is Spider-Man and my second is Batman. A lot of those things you see in the work we do at Gummybear Foundation. I wanted our Non-Profit to be unique. I wanted to create jobs that didn’t exist with equipment people didn’t think they could use to create these opportunities. I started to use the concept If I don’t want it in my life, I don’t want it in my business and started to study the work of Simone Sinek and Wayne Dyer. The phrase that changed my life from Wayne Dyer was “if you change the way you look at things the things you look at change”. That concept gave my business a brand of being unique. Everyone who has been part of one of our events our programs are always telling us that what we do has “never been done before”. An example I want to use is the program we created called GTL which stands for (Gummybear Tactical League). This program started out as an activity in the park and was our first activity as a nonprofit organization in our neighborhood in the Bronx, New York specifically the Kingsbridge, Marble Hill and Riverdale sections. The way I had to look at the pandemic and how it affected the children in our neighborhood. I knew for a fact, their parents, the news and the state of the world had them scared and paranoid to go next to one another or even go outside. I wanted to take something they were familiar with and that would allow them to interact with each other but keep their distance. The best way to do that was to dig into my childhood and think about what I could use to connect to them and what they are experiencing as children today. So, I brainstormed with my Vice President, and I decided to get Nerf equipment, barriers, target, and ammo. The reason I chose these things was because of the games they played online. During the pandemic, Roblox, Fortnite, and call of duty were extremely popular. There’s nothing wrong with video games unless you’re playing way too much and you use your anonymity to bully, harass or even torture people online. I noticed kids weren’t communicating as well either because they were always texting. They used text messaging to communicate, and texting is not the same as talking. Most kids and teens would rather text than talk and communication between them becomes harder. Without having an actual field to play on, we used the parks handball Court and baseball field to hold different competitions taken directly out of the page of the games they played online. The four activities we currently have are head-to-head, capture the flag, relay race, and obstacle course. For the past three years we have never seen a cell phone present during the games and to give the games a bit of a twist, we use GoPro technology which allows them to see themselves and hear how they strategize during the games; it’s phenomenal! This is where you see the creativity of the kids play out and how they use the barriers, how they strategize to win, and how they improve their game when they lost the previous one. Using all these things gives the children a new activity that combines two generations’ ways of having fun and giving the new generation a new activity to build on. This program will also give opportunities to veterans to bond with the youth. We are looking for veterans to become coaches and referees while working with different police precincts in the community. To conduct these programs and games and create teams and give these children a sense of camaraderie and the discipline that they’ve been craving. This forms bonds between generations; also gives the kids an idea of who veterans are, and how they’re the heroes of our country. I’m obsessed with the concept of a hero; Growing up everything to me was Power Rangers, Spider-Man, X-Men, Batman, Superman etc, but I asked myself how I could combine all of this so it can make sense that’s when the next set of ideas came to fruition!! Another part of my life is going to Comic con and dressing up and doing cosplay. I started cosplaying around five years ago and went to my first Comic con and haven’t stopped going ever since. For me to keep the structure of GTL and not change it too much by adding characters I use the concept Fortnite uses. Instead of skins that you must purchase it would be cosplayers coming into the game dressed as the characters the children like and giving the kids a run for their money in the activities we have. We are looking to launch our pilot February 2nd at Kingsbridge Heights community Center in our neighborhood. This is the community center I grew up in and stayed there until I was 22. It’s an honor to give back to a place that let me express myself and made me feel safe like a second home while growing up. Cosplay plays a huge part in our Non-Profit as well because our biggest event of the year is in October, where we do another unique activity called an interactive walk-through experience. To explain what that is I’m going to use the example of our Halloween event in 2022 called Escape from Arkham!!! We collaborated with a school in our neighborhood and turned their entire gym and classrooms into Arkham asylum from the Batman comics. We had our volunteers dress up as different characters, including myself, and act out a live action comic book with the script that I wrote. This is our biggest fundraiser of the year, and it allows us to transform any location into a comic book scenario where we take individual groups of people, and they meet different characters on the way to the hero saving the day. This allows cosplayers who work on their costume for months to display it and develop or use acting skills which they either have or they are developing. In 2023 Dracula and the midnight sons was the theme and a storyline I would love to present to Marvel. Each event we did the Gummybear logo wore different costumes created by our Gummybear tailor, which allowed us to open a T-shirt store on our website with each character. This allows us to raise money for our programs and activities. With these huge productions, it allowed not just children, but their parents to participate in either an acting role or behind-the-scenes role. We’ve had entire families come and participate or walk-through and get the full experience. We have taken it a step further by cosplaying different characters randomly throughout the year in different locations throughout New York to create a portfolio for a future program we will call Gummy-Con. Gummy-Con is a program in development which will have a curriculum that will be brought to schools and community centers allowing children to create the Comic con effect in their community, instead of visiting the Javits center to see all these amazing things. The communities will create the  gummy-con event through the curriculum and present it to the companies that go to the Javits center. This will allow those companies to look at the work done in the neighborhood by the youth and display their skills and give them a head start in a career path that is not offered in the traditional school system. Gummybear Foundation has four pillars that we create our programs and activities through. Recreation, education, financial literacy, mental health: For these four pillars to show up in each of our programs, we make sure it coincides with our brand, and how it affects the community. For example, our GTL program is put into the recreational pillar, yet when we set up a Nerf range with targets and speak to the people participating many of them consider Nerf an answer to coping with stress. Stress in turn falls in the mental health pillar. I mentioned Simone Sinek earlier and there’s a video I saw right before I opened the Gummybear Foundation. In the video he speaks of the millennial generation. He breaks down how instant gratification has diminished a lot of patience in the millennial generation, how the trophy system of everyone winning diminishes the person who tries the hardest and humiliates the person who came in last. He brings up how technology has become just as addictive as alcohol and drugs, and how people have access to that so easily at an early age and they will go to that before they will go to an actual person when they have a problem. It was a 15-minute speech that made me realize the gaps in society where one generation failed the next. Gummybear Foundations culture is based on the work he was speaking of during the speech. We don’t just want to help the community we want to leave an Impact that allows the community to transform itself into what it wants to be for the betterment of everybody living in it.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

The lesson that I had to unlearn, and probably to this day, is the employee mentality and falling in line with your employer, instead of with your ideals. Teaching preschool I was working for someone else’s company, and it didn’t require me to make decisions the same way being in the seat of an entrepreneur does. IT’S ALL ON YOU!!!!!! Every decision you make, every time you mess up, everything you say and do. I remember pledging to myself the first time I made the decision to open this corporation that no matter what, I would learn what I needed to learn to move forward and endure all the things that I haven’t experienced in this field with bravery and resilience. Especially during the times, we started doing events and how you don’t have the luxury of laying back. As an employee it was a lot easier to redirect anyone that had questions, but as an entrepreneur, all the questions come to you. Unlearning the employee mindset started at our first Halloween event. It was the first time I hosted an interactive walk-through with a script and actors that were following my lead. The stress was coming from things that were out of my control, and that was the first lesson I learned; only focus on things that I can control. The second lesson was standing up to people who didn’t want to see us succeed and were doing little things to sabotage our event. Standing up to people who would bring catastrophe to the Gummybear Foundation and confronting them right then and there. I had to set the tone so that people would learn to respect us. The third lesson I had to unlearn was delegating without guilt and fear, since I wasn’t used to telling people what to do. I had to learn to trust in myself, and the decisions I make. Things haven’t gotten easier, but you just get better with consistency and discipline.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Being unique with all our programs, events and activities has given us a reputation. Even with our business card, you will never see the word CEO under my title. CVO, the V stands for visionary. I built the culture around Gummybear Foundation through the philosophy of Simon Sinek. A video called “The millennial question” was a breakdown from one generation to the next, and the effects of technology, instant gratification, environment and mindset between generations. That video Helped develop the culture we are building at the Gummybear Foundation. “Our mission is to create programs, activities, education, and jobs in each neighborhood we touch. They say it takes Takes A Village to raise a child let the Gummybear Foundation be that village.” Our reputation was built with our program GTL. (GTL is also part of the four pillars that make up Gummybear Foundation falling under recreation. The Gummybear Tactical League (GTL)was a chance to create a space where we could combine two generations and create an activity that both groups are familiar with. The millennial generation, and the GEN Z generation Both grew up with video games and technology. Gen Z has way more advantages when it comes to technology because they know how to use it better in most circumstances, but due to that technology, socializing for them has become more difficult when they are face-to-face. This has led to the rise of anxiety, depression, and Agoraphobia. The millennials not having patience for the younger generation created a gap that has left this younger generation without leadership from their older counterparts, parts, US! GTL was created to bring the kids back outside with an activity they are used to playing at home. The first day, the Gummybear Foundation went outside to the park in the neighborhood that we are from called Marble Hill (Bronx NYC) We bought Nerf equipment and started setting up the same games (Fortnite, call of duty) they would play at home on their video game consoles. We created activities such as Capture the flag, head-to-head, relay race, and obstacle course, and the kids loved it. We stepped it up a notch when we added GoPro technology that allowed them to record themselves and see how their interactions went with each other. Without any anonymity from the Internet, the kids had to develop their social skills in person without a school setting in a team-based game. To broaden the horizon of what we want GTL to become we are developing job opportunities for Veterans to become the coaches of these teams with activities they are familiar with to connect with the youth of this country. We are also looking to include the youth police across the Precincts of New York City to participate as referees, and even go toe to toe with the kids. GTL has given us the uniqueness to stand out amongst other nonprofits due to the potential it brings, and the fact that we haven’t seen this done before.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.gummybearfoundation.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/guarding_the_throne?igsh=MWhlanFpbXR5OWx0cw%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100028098984713
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anton-negroni-264b0b221?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@gummybearfoundation4760?si=uo1AqRaEyvvxcv4f
• Other: We do not have a Twitter. We are re-creating a new Instagram account because our original account for Gummybear Foundation was hacked and we haven’t been able to get inside ever since so I’m sharing my personal account for now until the other account is finished being made.

Image Credits
I would like to thank the Bronx borough president’s office for giving us a citation of merit from Venessa Gibson, the Bronx borough president. I would also like to thank Tony Edwards president of the Marble Hill tenants association and the Manhattan borough president forgiving us recognition at Marble Hill day during the time we were doing the activity GTL. Most of all I would like to thank my vice president, Kathryn Dallam, who has been there for me even before I decided to open up Gummybear Foundation.