Guest: My name is Richard DiPilla and I am the founder of an International NGO, Global Goodwill Ambassadors Foundation. I grew up in South New Jersey in a town that was technically a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. I was the second of four children. The first major trauma of my childhood was losing my father when I was just four years old. My father was only 36 years of age but the medical world was yet to develop proper imaging to detect the aneurysm that had burst in his brain leaving my mother widowed at six months pregnant with my younger brother and four children to raise at a young age.
How was your growing up?
Guest: We didn’t have much in terms of money, but my mother and extended family provided a lot of love and support. Like all children growing up without the distraction of technologies and social media, I spent a lot of time outdoors riding bikes, playing sports, playing musical instruments, and doing things to help out our family. I attended Catholic school from kindergarten through high school which was pre-ordained in most Italian American families who were but one generation from their native European country.
Along with our religion also came all the wonderful food, traditions, customs, and language from Sicily where my mother’s family emigrated from. If I had to sum it up in a short description, I grew up with a table always full of made from scratch food that we grew mostly in our backyard. The house was always full of people visiting, eating, and discussing every possible subject that every aunt, uncle, cousin, and neighbors had an opinion on and that each determined to be the only truth. In the case of my family, God love them, they all felt the louder they stated their opinion the better chance they could get to win over an ally. This is a craft uniquely honed by many Italians and carried on from generation to generation because if you didn’t learn to talk loud you would never get heard. Even worse, you may get lost in the sea of cousins who often looked similar enough to confuse their own parents. I could write an entire book on growing up Italian but in short, if we were poor (and we were), I never realized it. I never felt like I was deprived of anything. What I could do was spend time reading and learning. Also, even though loud, my family was very practical and loving. I had too many friends to ever remember their names. Our neighborhoods were full of people of every nationality, race, and religion. In my mother’s house, everyone was welcome and the same rules applied to all. Be nice to each other and you had to eat when food was offered. If you were polite and ate you were accepted as a good person. For some reason my family accepted everyone but if you didn’t want to eat, you were viewed with suspicion. As I grew older I had more than a few girlfriends who were viewed with suspicion because “Reechie she-a eat like-a bird!” (God love them). I started working at 10 years old cutting lawns for neighbors. I did this free for older people because my mother wouldn’t let me accept money from them even though I paid for the gas and ended up doing a list of chores in addition to cutting the lawn. Then at 11, I had a paper route. I always recall having to get up every Sunday at 4am to roll the huge newspapers of those times and slip them in plastic bags. Then, they were stuffed into a canvas bag and balanced onto a metal horseshoe shaped brace that fit onto the handle bars of my bicycle. They were piled so high the bike would tip forward if you didn’t shift all your weight onto the back part of the bicycle seat.
Fortunately, I knew my route with my eyes closed because I rode primarily blind the first couple miles until enough papers were delivered to start to collapse the canvas and I could more easily balance my weight on the seat. By 14, I worked summers on a maintenance crew, as a bus boy at an Italian restaurant owned by and named Guiseppi’s, and on weekends I ran fruit and vegetables to the parked customers who pulled up near my uncle’s huckster truck full of farm goods.
Tell us something about your organization and what motivated you?
Guest: All of this upbringing and the lessons learned I carried through my school years and my entire life.
Be kind, be respectful, work hard, be generous, do good for others because it’s the right thing to do. Work hard, listen to your elders, respect your heritage and traditions, and always eat when food is offered as it’s a way to share your life with anyone.
Now about the organization I founded. I started Global Goodwill Ambassadors to highlight the good I saw in other people. Once I started I couldn’t stop. I was driven by a passion to know more about people all around the world. I quickly learned that the media didn’t know much or never cared to learn much about the actual people in other countries. We get fed the view of governments. There is typically a huge difference in the official stance of a government and how the heart of its people live and feel. it became my passion to not only learn about people; I was determined to bring people together.
I was even more determined to build a family. One where everyone respected each other. I gave each person in my new online family my code of ethics “you can come in to eat if you have no hate and have no bias toward each other and always treat each other with respect.” My family grew and
after three years of building this family, Lisa Jones offered to help me with organizing the family and we started to share ideas and unite in running projects to help the people in their communities and countries.
This family started to have structure by adding country chairs, directors, and project leads who hold meetings in person, Zoom, or via WhatsApp. Lisa built our website and I used my experience to do the SEO optimization of the site. Our family grew and along the way we made some mistakes and learned from these. We created an organization chart and defined our mission. Our countries grew to include representatives in every country of the world and also from Island Nations and additional territories. We incorporated the NGOs of many of our members and their families into our umbrella living a motto of “We Love, We Care, We Share.” We run educational programs to give our members certificates of completion. These help people build resumes as many come from countries with very little opportunities to obtain an education. We became an International NGO non-profit, and incorporated last year in 2019, seven years after the day I started to build our Global Goodwill Ambassadors family.
GGA currently has over 16,000 members in 215 nations and territories. Our website outlines many of our projects and goals. We are a part of the United Nations SDG Action Campaign and primarily stick to our core of trying to help others. Because we are all volunteers we have virtually no overhead. This enables us to utilize our donor’s tax deductible dollars to their maximum.
How did you raise the capital to do this?
Guest: We raise money from small donors who want to see their contributions going to help people versus paying huge salaries and overhead. Corporate contributions and grants are specifically earmarked and secured for projects in a very transparent way that often includes direct correspondence with the people who they help. At GGA, we are still building projects on a regular basis consistent with our growth “getting up early and balancing everything on our bicycle.” Our family spends a lot of time outside making friends, helping people, and being grateful for each other and the beauty of our world that God created.
Guest: Because the Global Goodwill Ambassadors are a conglomerate of humanitarians we have a wide variety of projects on every cause and in all parts of the world. We usually put more topical needs front and center such as supporting the homeless, feeding those in dire starvation, and supporting healthcare and first responders during the current pandemic. These in no way take our concerns of of alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, prevention and education of children and parents on the warning signs of child abuse; women’s rights advocacy projects, support for veterans; the mentally challenged, sustainability of our earth, providing basic education for children, and every kind of human rights issue embodied in the UN SDGs.
This is a link to some of our causes.
How can someone support you?
Guest: Those who wish to support our causes can do so knowing that any amount big or small has an impact to the exact cause donated to. Because we are a 501c3 nonprofit, donations are tax deductible. Also because we have virtually no overhead donor dollars are not diluted by the kinds of costs of mega-organizations.
How can someone contact the organization?
Guest: Some key links are:
Our monthly newsletter
Our free online educational courses to gain certificates.
Our My Body is My Body free resources and downloads for educators to run this crucial #chilabuseprevention program.
We are online on Google via
Check out Global Goodwill Ambassadors (GGA) on Google!
A search on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsAp, of Global Goodwill Ambassadors will enable to find us there.
You can reach me through LinkedIn at:
Our LinkedIn company page link is
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