Meet Ryan McFadden of WeLuvSanDiego

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan McFadden.

Hi Ryan, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
The story of WeLuvSanDiego is not cookie-cutter or simple. In fact, there’s a scene at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indiana Jones is trying to obtain the Holy Grail. He has to follow the steps that someone else took in order to get through the obstacles that have taken the life of everyone else who has tried. He made it through those steps intellectually, but then he comes to the edge of what appears to be a bottomless pit and there’s no way across. His dad put together this manual on how to get the Holy Grail and shows at this point, the final point in the journey a picture of Christ walking over seemingly nothing across this chasm. He realizes what he has to do, and he has this deep breath where he appears to mouth the words “Oh God”. He knows that in order to obtain the Holy Grail he must take a leap of faith and step out onto a road that he cannot see, but through faith knows it’s there. That’s how WeLuvSanDiego, a self-funded non-profit, that has over the last 3 years has given out over 350,000 diapers and 400,000 lbs. of food to families in need began. 

I can’t even begin to tell you how many people ask us how we’ve been able to accomplish what we’ve done. I wish I had a step-by-step process to give them, but in reality, it was faith; stepping out onto the road you cannot see, through faith you know it’s there. My wife and I were Pastors of one of the largest churches in Arizona, Dream City Church in Glendale, AZ. For nearly 20 years we were connected to the Dream Center outreach movement which serves some of the most gang infested, drug infested, financially troubled areas in the United States. The Dream Center is part of Dream City Church as it was started by Tommy Barnett who is the Co-Lead Pastor of Dream City Church with his son, Luke. Outreach was in our DNA, but in Glendale on a sprawling 126 Acre Campus we weren’t in an area that had the same types of needs that we were used to serving. Thus, we spent most of our time in downtown Phoenix bringing groups from our church to serve at the Dream Center and fill that desire to reach those who were most in need. The Church in Glendale was my dream job, we had doubled in size in just over a year of Pastoring the church things were going great. Then one day, the phone rang. 

There was a church in one of the poorest, drug/gang infested areas of San Diego and they wanted to see if I would be interested in Pastoring that church. Things were going to well in Glendale, that I politely said, “no”. They asked me to at least come take a look at the church, which in my mind I was saying no, but couldn’t think of an excuse fast enough to get out of it, so I said, “ok”. I took one of my best friends, Tim Mcguire, who was also our Outreach Director in Glendale with me, knowing the whole time I wouldn’t be interested. We got to the church, and it was a dump. The church was dirty, small and tucked into this tiny neighborhood where it was hard to know it was even there. It was nothing like the amazing campus I was at in Glendale, where our Youth Ministry Building was bigger than this entire church. But something in me in that moment realized the need of the community. There was so much promise and hope needed that I did what many would see as the dumbest move in the history of ministry and took the job. It was equivalent to moving from a Beverly Hills Mansion to a beat up, small motorhome that has a bad roof leak. It was a leap of faith. 

We took over this church and immediately focused on reaching out and serving the community. Within the first 3 months of being at the church, the church had nearly tripled in size. Then Covid hit. The church was part of 7 Southern California locations all of which were in Orange of LA County and the person in charge decided all of our locations would close indefinitely and we would simply do church online. A couple of months into the shutdown, during a meeting with all 7 church locations we were given a sentence with possibly the least amount of information ever said, “There is a truck coming sometime in the next few weeks, we don’t know what is on it, but who wants to take the truck and distribute whatever is on it into their community?” The questions started flying, “what’s on the truck?” When will it be here? How can we plan an event when we don’t know what is coming or when it’s coming? All extremely valid questions and the person in charge seemingly knew nothing. Of course, no one was willing to say yes to this, but again I felt like I had a phone ringing inside of me that I needed to answer, so I said, “We’ll do it.” I felt like there was a lot of disbelief that our San Diego campus could do something like this as we were the smallest of all the locations, historically had no volunteer support and we were brand new to the church without any relationship foothold in the community. All of this was true, but in the end, I didn’t know what we were getting, it may be a box truck full of pens for all I knew, so we went forward. 

We rallied volunteers in the church to distribute whatever was on the truck, which felt silly since we had no idea what it was. We had maybe 7 or 8 people willing to help when the truck arrived. It was full of food, toiletries and drinks, all items that were in dire need at that time. Finally knowing what we had, we also had the dilemma of needing to get it out within a few days. That’s when the concept of WeLuvSanDiego was born. We realized the handful of us couldn’t give out the over 30,000 lbs. of food, drinks and toiletries as an event of this magnitude you typically want 30-50 volunteers and at least 1-2 months to plan out. We had only a few days. So, we decided to partner with people. Next door was one of the largest Spanish Churches in Southern California and amazingly there was never a relationship between the two churches. I met with the Senior Pastor, and he was all in. He told me just give him a number of how many volunteers we need, and they will be there. We also were able to use their parking lot, which was much more conducive to pulling off what was now going to be a “drive thru” event. I then decided, “let’s make this even bigger.” So, I called my friend Peter Whittet who was one of the main leaders of the San Diego Dream Center and knew he had diapers. He was all in. He brought 50,000 diapers with him as he said, “far more than we will need.” So, we had the volunteers, we had food, toiletries, diapers…but we still had to figure out a way to get the word out and only had a few days to do this. Afterall, you could give away gold, but if no one knows it’s happening, no one will show up. I was a former actor who shared the screen with Don Johnson, Robin Williams and was part of the MTV Comedy tour, so I used that angle to send out press releases for our event to all the television stations and a few of the major radio stations to help get the word out. All the television stations were willing to show up to the event, but we still needed to get the word out. I took out Facebook ads, Instagram Ads, but still didn’t know if it would be enough. That’s when I got a call from a radio ad executive asking me if I wanted to put ads on all the radio stations in San Diego. I said yes! He then asked what my budget was…I said, “0 dollars” as everything was coming out of my own pocket. I figured that was the end of it, but then he introduced me to Dan Fulkerson of Batta Fulkerson Law Group, who in my opinion is one of the most generous, impactful people we have in San Diego. Site unseen, Dan was willing to not only bank roll the cost of the commercials, but also voice the commercials for us for free. I know the cost that he paid, which I will keep private, but can honestly say whatever you think it costs, it cost more than that. 

The day of the event came, May 4th, 2020. The event was starting at 11am and I knew we had close to 100 volunteers showing up that I had to rally and explain what and how to do what we are going to do. My brother-in-law and myself wanted to ease into the day so we decided to arrive at the church at 7am while everyone else was set to arrive at 9am. During the whole drive to the church, my nervousness was that despite all of our efforts, what if no one shows up. What if we didn’t do enough to get the word out quickly enough and how embarrassing it would be to have 100 volunteers, 4 News Stations, 30,000 lbs. of food, 50,000 diapers and say only 10-20 cars show up. These are these “fear vs. faith moments” that regardless of who you are, you question and doubt. My silent prayer in that moment was, “God, please let enough cars come so that the work that these volunteers are doing, the money Dan Fulkerson spent on ads wouldn’t go wasted.” I kid you not as we turned onto Rio Dr., which the church was off. We saw a line of cars at 7am (4 hours before the event) that stretched over a mile long. That day within 1.5 hours we gave out 30,000lbs of food and 50,000 diapers. In fact, Peter Whittet told me during the event that the most diapers they had ever given out was an event that Miles Mcpherson, who is a legend here in San Diego, put on and it was around 29,000 diapers. I told him, “Lets break the record,” and we did. WeLuvSanDiego had started. 

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I know that was a super long story, but I think it’s important to see the behind-the-scenes events that take place. I feel like in a lot of ways things that seem successful have a ton of behind the scenes struggles that if you do a good job go unnoticed. Kind of like watching a duck on the water peacefully drifting along the water, but not realizing that what you don’t see if the ducks’ feet frantically paddling to help him move in that direction. When we did the May 4th event, our first event, there weren’t just obstacles, there were mountains in our way that we were trying to overcome. It would have been so easy to throw in the towel and to be honest, it probably would have been the smart thing to do. But we didn’t. After the event I had a note from a lady named Rosanna who said she had lived 18 years in Paradise Hills (where the event took place) and had never seen anything like what was done that day before. But, again, this all started by saying yes to potentially a box truck full of pens for all we knew. 

We’ve had countless obstacles along the way. First, Covid had such a dramatic impact on our 7 church locations (6 of which were leased buildings) that in order to keep the other locations afloat the had to sell the 1 building they owned. Guess which location that was? San Diego of course. So now we were a Non-Profit, without any financial backing outside of our own personal finances. We still wanted to do outreach, so we decided to create a “Church without Walls.” We would continue to do outreach events, and I would do a Sunday morning message every week on the radio, which I still do to this day. 

Losing the church location and any potential financial backing of the church would sink most groups and our intent was to be much bigger and do much more than we did May 4th, 2020. In fact we were now working in partnership with our friends who run Thrive Arizona, which is a massive outreach ministry where they support families who are at risk of losing kids to the foster system because they don’t have say a bed for the kids as well as housing aged out foster kids who without Thrive would be on the streets. The problem was we didn’t have the infrastructure to pull that off of the scale we wanted to, so we were at a bit of a standstill wondering what we could do to help those in need. 

But see there’s this moment in the Bible when God is talking to an 80-year-old Moses telling him that he’s going to be the one to deliver the Israelites out of Egypt where they’ve been slaves for 400 years. He was 80! You know he had to have an arthritic hip or something. You’d think his best days were behind him. So, he asks God, “how am I going to do this?” And God asks, “What’s in your hand?” In his hand was a stick. In short God was telling him that’s all he needed. That’s the question we asked ourselves, “what’s in our hand?” Not what do we want to be 5 years from now or what is the grand dream of WeLuvSanDiego, but what can we do now? I feel like for many people you get paralyzed with fear and thinking that you don’t have enough to do the thing you are called to do, when in reality God provides all that, we need. What was in our hand was diapers and food and we knew that we could give those out. Through the May 4th, 2020, event, we learned that we could partner with organizations to pull off events that are so much larger than us and we’ve done that through partnerships with Churches, The Hope Clinic in Fallbrook and other non-profits such as It’s All About The Kids. When you don’t care who gets credit, you can do things much larger than yourself because you’re willing to give the spotlight to those you partner with. That’s what’s allowed us to give out 350,000 diapers and 400,000 lbs. of food without ever receiving a financial donation. We were never going to let our size determine our impact. 

As you know, we’re big fans of WeLuvSanDiego. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
WeLuvSanDiego is a 501 c3 organization to help those in need. It’s a broad statement, but we are here to help the single mom that can’t afford diapers and doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from. We are here to help the family unit that has no other issue outside of poverty, but because of this is at risk to losing their kids to the foster care system, or to provide household items for a family that is reuniting with their child through the foster care system. We are here to support that person who just aged out of the foster care system and doesn’t have anything beyond a bag of clothes slung on their back. Recently we gave 4 mattresses to a family whose mom was moving out of rehab and into her first ever apartment with her kids. Last Thanksgiving, we gave out 250 turkeys to the community. On a monthly basis here in Fallbrook, we give away food and diapers to those in need. There’s never any strings attached, it’s simply a show up and tell us what you need type of event. There’s really no limit to what we would do or not do to help. We live by the motto find a need and fill it. Find a hurt and heal it. 

Genuinely we can do so much more than we are doing now, the sky is the limit. We would love to have our monthly distribution events take place in at least 10 cities throughout San Diego County so that anyone in need doesn’t have to drive far to get help. Afterall, if you are struggling financially, it’s not realistic to drive an hour to go get free diapers or food. We would love to get a box truck so that we can pick up donated items to give to families in need and ultimately since I’m so bad at asking for donations, open a thrift store so that we can help grow WeLuvSanDiego into a national organization, with new “WeLuv’s” sprouting out all over the country, WeLuvLA, WeLuvArizona, WeLuvDetroit etc. 

I do realize at some point, now for example, We will have to solicit financial help from the community to pull this off and fully turn potential into reality, but I am still always looking for ways to partner, to build businesses such as a thrift store that can become the financial funnel to support this dream or speaking at churches and events to help raise money for the organization. In every day, in every moment we are taking that leap of faith onto a road that we cannot see, but by faith know it’s there. 

Who else deserves credit in your story?
First and foremost, not to sound cliche, but God deserves the credit. None of this happened because we are smart enough or talented enough or had the money or resources to pull off what we’ve done. It’s genuinely been God meeting us along the way and providing what we need for each situation. 

Steve and Terri Vogel who run Thrive Arizona. We really the models we were trying to replicate in fact, our organization would have been called Thrive San Diego, had that name been available. They’ve shown us how something can start really small without resources and grow into something so much more than you could imagine or think. 

Tommy Barnett is known worldwide for his outreach efforts. He and his son Matthew started the Dream Center in Los Angeles that houses over 1,000 people every day who would be on the streets if it wasn’t for them. He’s been someone that I’ve looked up to since I was a teenager. 

Carolyn Koole, who runs the Hope Clinic in Fallbrook, has been an amazing partner for us because she shares the same heart and mindset. Not caring who gets credit and just wanting to serve those in need. 

There’s really so many from those that I mentioned earlier Dan Fulkerson coming alongside of us without even knowing us, just because of who he is and his heart for San Diego County. Peter Whittet, who I’ve tried to ask many questions to over the years to figure out how he does his outreach events. Angela who runs It’s All About The Kids here in San Diego as she really helped us with food and structure when we got started. Of course, my wife who runs the organization with me along with family and so many volunteers over the years that have made our giveaway events that we do every month a success. 

Sorry, I know that sounds a bit like an Oscars acceptance speech, but there’s genuinely so many people that influence and help you in so many ways. But again, I can’t stress enough that this is just the beginning, not the destination. There is so much more to do, so much more that we will do. It’s simply always looking at what God has placed in your hand and using it to serve the needs of others. 

Contact Info:

• Website: www.weluvsandiego.org
• Instagram: weluvsandiego
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/weluvsandiego