WEIGHING IN - Benjamin Roundtree could still be in federal prison.
Picked up for selling cocaine at age 48, Roundtree was sentenced to 15.5 years. It was yet another stint behind bars for the Troy native, who started selling drugs in his 20s. His release date had been set for Jan. 6, 2025.
But in May 2020, the now-60-year-old father of five and grandfather of seven was granted compassionate release as part of the federal prison system's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now Roundtree is making the most of his opportunity, helping to rescue groceries and deliver them to food pantries as part of an innovative new partnership between the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York and Tech Valley Shuttle that already stands to benefit approximately 333,000 Capital Region households in the coming year.
It’s the kind of story – full of fortunate coincidence, redemption and optimism – for which we can all be grateful.
“One thing about good is it’s always going to outweigh the bad,” Roundtree told me recently after delivering pallets of boxes containing items like marinated chicken breasts and fresh lettuce he’d driven from stores in Amsterdam to Schenectady Community Ministries (SiCM) on Albany Street. “It might take some time. But good will always win.”
That’s not a sentiment Roundtree always believed. As a younger man, he told me, he was caught up in the adrenaline and perceived power he had in his street life and remained stuck in the cycle of selling drugs, being arrested, and getting released – only to repeat it all again.
Then, about a year into his most recent 15.5-year sentence, Roundtree said, something changed after his mother and wife visited him at the federal prison in Pennsylvania.
They told him, “We love you, but this has got to stop,” Roundtree recalled in a wise baritone. He sported a Regional Food Bank baseball hat and a thick black beard. “My mother was like, ‘I'm getting older; you want me to die while you're in here?’”
Roundtree said while walking back to his cell after that visit he fell to his knees and cried out to God for help. To that point, he hadn’t been a religious man, but Roundtree thought about what his life had become, including all the violence he’d seen in prison. He’d been in fights, been abused.
“You can be the biggest dog out here,” Roundtree said in Schenectady. “But in there, your pillowcase has got so much teardrops on it. In there, it will break you down.”
He’d been wasting his life.
“When you're so caught up in it, you can't see. Because you're so blinded with all the glamour and the glory. And, at the end of the day, when you come to the true realization, when you look back on it, it was like, ‘Damn, I wasted all those years for nothing,’” he said.
That’s when he changed his direction. He started studying the Bible and mentoring younger inmates. It gave him purpose.
And it eventually led to his early release. Because as much as Senior U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Kahn factored into his decision Roundtree’s high blood pressure and diabetes, which put him at greater risk for a severe case of COVID-19, the early release was only possible because of Roundtree’s exemplary behavior in the federal prison in Pennsylvania.
That’s continued in Roundtree’s life as a free man in the Capital Region. Not only has he continued to be a mentor for people in the criminal justice system, his day job now affords him the chance to serve others – and it all came about either via happy accident or by divine intervention, depending on what you choose to believe.
When Roundtree was first released, he began working for Second Chance Opportunities cleaning buildings in Troy. In that job, he met Tom Nardacci, who owns the Troy Innovation Garage.
The two bonded, and Roundtree found himself confiding in Nardacci. Roundtree told Nardacci he was happy cleaning buildings, but he really wanted to work as a driver.
Nardacci introduced Roundtree to Trent Griffin-Braaf, the founder of Tech Valley Shuttle, a Capital Region-based transportation company. As a former incarcerated person himself, Griffin-Braaf makes a point of hiring workers with a record. Griffin-Braaf was impressed with Roundtree, whom he says is “a rockstar because he’s genuine,” and quickly made him his lead driver.
Then, in August, Nardacci became CEO of the Regional Food Bank, where one of his goals was to improve that “last-mile synchronization.” Basically, he wanted to improve connections between sources of food and the people who need it.
Specifically, he wanted to bolster the Retail Store Donation Program, which enables the food bank to collect from stores food that would otherwise be thrown away. In 2022, the program rescued 12.4 million pounds of food, which is equivalent to 10.3 million meals across the Food Bank’s 23-county service area.
Nardacci said the food bank, which distributes food to nearly 350,000 people each month, is short seven drivers. And as CEO, he instituted the idea of contracting out delivery service paid for by a Feeding America grant. This contract idea led him once again to Tech Valley Shuttle and Griffin-Braaf.
“Literally, our mission is to combat poverty through transportation solutions,” Griffin-Braaf told me.
So the collaboration made perfect sense. Griffin-Braaf said his goal this year had been to help 1,000 people.
But with the food bank partnership, his goal for next year is 10 times that amount.
Benjamin Roundtree, 60, helps unloads a box of food off a Tech Valley Shuttle truck at the Schenectady Community Ministries this month.
So now, for about a month, Roundtree has been driving the pilot route of the partnership between the food bank and Tech Valley.
At stops like Aldi and Target in Amsterdam, Roundtree picks up items such as fruit cups that have been mislabeled and avocados that are misshapen. He then unloads boxes full of food from the truck at either SiCM, the AMEN Food Pantry in Amsterdam or the Catholic Charities of Fulton and Montgomery Counties.
Roundtree’s five-day route will result in approximately 1 million pounds of food per year, according to the food bank. That’s enough to feed approximately 333,000 families.
Assuming all goes well with the new partnership, Nardacci said the hope is to add more routes.
“These retail routes are so dense with food. But we can’t possibly serve every single retail store – it’s just such a massive operation to go and rescue food. It’s a scale issue,” Nardacci said. “The more drivers, the more trucks we have, the more food we can rescue.”
Roundtree said he’s found meaning having gone from a “wasted” life to one spent saving food that can help others.
“It’s giving back to the community and serving a purpose, and that's what life is about,” Roundtree said. “And since I've been doing this, and seeing the need for food out there, you know, I knew there were people out there that go to food pantries, but I never knew it was to this extreme.”
The food bank estimates it’ll give away about 48 million pounds of food this year – down slightly from the 50 million pounds at the height of the pandemic but up significantly from the 35 million pounds prior to the pandemic.
“So to be able to be part of that to ease somebody's burden is truly a blessing to me,” Roundtree said.
He told me he visited his mother over the summer. As he was leaving, she shouted from her window.
“I am so proud of you,” she told her son, a far-cry from the worry expressed at the federal prison about a decade before he started his transformation.
Roundtree said he knew he wasn’t a bad person – he just needed time to find his way.
“What I went through in my life, I had to go through. Because now I'm sharing that, and people are listening to what I'm saying because I experienced so much, you know? My story is real. There's nothing false or fake about it,” he said. “And I have the record to show for it.”
It’s a record that now deserves plenty of thanks.