Photo courtesy of Maurice Korish

By Steve Sears

It all started simply for 18-year-old Randolph resident, Maurice Korish, and his good friend Adam Hollander.

They did food deliveries together. 

“We just were simultaneously building a website and doing all these deliveries and we quickly realized,” says Korish, ‘Okay, we actually have an organization here that we’ll further develop and expand and, you know, accrue more volunteers, and help give back to the community.’ 

Then came Deliver Together, an incorporated nonprofit business in New Jersey. “We are recognized by New Jersey as Deliver Together Inc.” says Korish. Deliver Together, currently also applying for 501 c 3 status, has 90 volunteers and has done over 1,200 grocery and meal deliveries in three states. “We started back in March 2020; really like right when the pandemic began. We have had volunteers register that do deliveries. Predominantly we obviously operate in New Jersey – that’s where we’re based and incorporated – and we have volunteers in Florida and Maryland.” Korish is eyeing expansion into New York and Connecticut.

Also, the Stanford-bound Korish is the recipient of the 2021 Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Award, a program of the Helen Diller Family Foundation. He will receive $36,000 to support his endeavor and further his education. He values the award for a few reasons. “The award itself includes me in a network of very incredible individuals from around the country that have also started their own nonprofits. It’s a very broad and very intellectual group of people who have had plenty of their own experience in different forms of volunteerism.” He will use the scholarship monies to further his education, and also will devote some funds to Deliver Together. “To kind of further bolster the organization,” he says, “and then also potentially to my former high school and then my elementary school, just kind of as like a meaningful gift, recognizing the impact that they’ve had on my character.”

The Deliver Together mission is most important. “We put a big emphasis on developing a strong relationship between elderly individuals in the local community and also the high schoolers and the teenagers in the community to kind of bridge that gap,” explains Korish. “It’s really just kind of putting a smile on somebody’s face who’s homebound, elderly, has been immunocompromised, just kind of to communicate with them, speak to them a bit, learn about their history in the community. That’s like a beautiful part of our mission that has been so inspiring.”

There is no one type of Deliver Together volunteer youngster. For Korish and his organization, diversity reigns. “We’ve had public school kids, private school kids, religious kids, all different kinds of kids, and then we also serve all different types of clients from all different backgrounds.”

A key thing now, as Korish and Hollander move on to college, is keeping high schoolers involved. “Because we’re an incorporated nonprofit business,” says Korish, “we also have a board of trustees and we also have our kind of executive team leadership, but a big mission, or a big part of our organization, is to kind of maintain a high school-led team lead leadership. We’re excited that we’re working to continue and further expand and that we really have to have kind of a new group of strong senior leaders ready to take on the leadership roles of the organization.”

For more information about the Deliver Together mission, visit www.delivertogether.org.