Living on a Prayer may have been just a song to many people, but the story told by the lyrics aren’t pure fiction. The story of Tommy and Gina was pretty true to life for John Francis Bongiovi Jr, and his life and future work only cemented that truth even further.
Speaking to People TV, Bon Jovi and wife Dorothea Hurley opened up humbly about their marriage and fight against poverty, hunger and homelessness. We’re not talking about the commonplace celebrity charity you see everywhere. Bon Jovi and Dorothea are dead serious and committed to this.
This isn’t unusual to see at all from Bon Jovi, when one of his biggest and most iconic hits touches on working class people living paycheck to paycheck.
Bon Jovi may have more than a handful of songs about love and women, but make no mistake, there’s only one woman his heart belongs to. Dorothea Hurley met him more than several decades ago, and they’ve been together ever since.
Dorothea jokingly declares herself “shallow”, over her infatuation with Jon Bon Jovi because “he’s cute”. It’s obvious she’s joking. There’s no shame in talking about how attractive your spouse is.
And together, they run the nonprofit JBJ Soul foundation to give people homes, food and a better life.
He did say “It’s now or never, I ain’t gonna live forever” so may as well make a big difference in the world while you have the time.
Most people won’t live forever either, and they deserve the best quality of life and care they can get. The power couple finds it just as unfortunate and slightly depressing that so many people can’t afford the stable, normal life they deserve.
In fact, Bongiovi even remembers the exact moment he set his goals towards creating the JBJ foundation. On one eventful day in Pennsylvania, 15 years ago, where he owned a football team.
To show everyone how grateful he and his co-workers and employees were, Bongiovi was hit with the determination to be as philanthropic as he could at the time.
Not long after, he looked out an apartment window and was greeted with the sight of a homeless man sleeping on the pavement. That was all he needed to see.
Since then, Bongiovi and Dorothea have worked long and hard to make sure anyone they come across won’t have to sleep on the pavement or go a day without meals. To do this, he used his rockstar salary to build affordable houses from coast to coast, with his personal estimate being around 1,000 of them built.
They aren’t stopping at homelessness either. People need meals, and a home is no use without warm food on the table.
So soup kitchens and the like were the next order of business.
Thanks to Dorothea, these kitchens and restaurants have a unique model to them. Volunteering gets you a meal, and paying customers are asked to pay a little extra to cover the meals of those who can’t. Wash some dishes and help around, and you get your food.
Although the pandemic has forced them to adjust things quite a bit. Not even the biggest rock stars can do much about a deadly virus.
So they were forced to take their small staff and make it even smaller. It may put some extra workload on the few, but minimizing transmission was way more important.
Correspondingly, there were far fewer hands on-board to wash the dishes. So Bongiovi took matters into his own hands (literally!) and took on dishwashing duty.
Talking about this, Bongiovi mentioned intentionally keeping a low profile in the back of the kitchen. This time, he really did want to be just a face in the crowd.
The idea is that he didn’t want to draw attention to himself as a famous rock star, and wanted people to visit the restaurant for the right reasons. Not to just catch sight of Jon Bon Jovi.
Dorothea snapped a pic of Jon doing the dishes for Instagram, although not for mere likes and attention, in case it needed to be said. They wanted to let people know that their soup kitchen was still up and running to help people during the pandemic.
The photo of Bongiovi doing the dishes went up on their Instagram page, with a caption that read “If you can’t do what you do, you do what you can”.
Jon thought the words very eloquently spoken and did the natural thing. He wrote a song about it.
Some time after, Long Island was hit with low supply from their food banks. It was time for Jon and Dorothea to do their thing once again.
The pandemic drove a spike in demand for the food pantries to handle, and the pantries’ couldn’t keep up with it due to locations and short supplies.
So Dorothea and Jon got to talking and working, and in some time got a food supply up and running. Now tens of thousands of food packages made their way from Montauk to Southampton.
That’s quite a distance to cover, so good thing his heart is like an open highway.
“Never once have we let anyone down, and we’re both very, very proud of that.”
Now I’m going to appreciate Bon Jovi’s songs a whole lot more, knowing that the man behind them has a heart bigger than any record he’s made. He and Dorothea have helped more lives than any person can count in a lifetime, and that should put a smile on anyone’s face.
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