Interview With our Founder
by Blair Tidwell
Tony Bellizzi can eat fire. “It was the only circus skill that I had any talent for naturally,” he says. “Oh man, I couldn’t do juggling, the tightrope walking; I couldn’t get the unicycle—couldn’t even get the balloon sculpting. But sticking the flaming torch in my mouth, that I was good at.”
Bellizzi doesn’t travel with the circus. He’s a middle-aged New Yorker who traveled to Cleveland for a clown convention and learned how to eat fire for one reason: to entertain the kids in his youth ministry programs. In fact, for the hundreds of kids and teenagers he’s nurtured over the years, you get the feeling that Bellizzi would walk through fire for them. Bellizzi has been working in youth ministries for as long as he can remember. “I’ve always done that. Since I was out of the womb,” he says, joking, “definitely the first thing I did was start youth corp.”
As a youth minister for various churches and groups, including the Relig Youth Ministry of New Rochelle (the youth dubbed it Relig, short for religion), Bellizzi, who considers himself to be “more spiritual than religious,” has run workshops and roundtable discussions to discuss life and spirituality with teenagers for more than 26 years. He describes himself as an adult mentor who’s “not parental, but cool.” In other words, ‘cool’ means he’s the uncle-type that kids feel comfortable talking to, not only about spirituality, but also those pressing issues that surface around puberty: love, high school, family, the world, and sex. He also mentors teens to give to others. “They have service projects where they put love into the community,” Bellizzi says. “The kids want to. It’s pretty amazing.”
With a personality that’s part philosophical and part frazzled antics (a la Weekend at Bernie’s), the energetic Bellizzi seems to be a prime candidate for work in the youth field; his shaggy, graying hair is mostly covered with a baseball cap, and his sweatshirt and jeans ensemble bespeak a youthful, informal irreverence within his reverence.
Bellizzi says his motivation for working with teenagers probably goes back to his own unhappy youth, growing up on Long Island; “It gives me a chance to give others what I didn’t get: a little bit of guidance, a little bit of direction, a chance to stay out of trouble, be part of something positive.” Also an artist and music aficionado, Bellizzi puts a little bit of his creative soul into his job as a youth minister. Years ago, he once convinced the iconic punk-rock band, The Ramones, to play for some teens at a church. “Yeah, that was the highlight of my life,” he says, with a hint of lingering awe. “It was a big Ramones haven, the whole community was, so the kids got such a kick out of the Ramones playing right at the local church. Joey Ramone probably died an early death because he really couldn’t quite handle that he was playing in a Catholic school!”
Fire-Eating, Punk-Rocking Youth Minister is only a day job for Bellizzi.
Not only did Bellizzi learn to eat fire at that clown convention, he also met a priest from Africa who invited him back to his country for a visit. And that visit, in 1991, changed Bellizzi’s life.
Deeply affected by the rich culture and community he encountered in Africa, Bellizzi came back to America charged with inspiration and ideas. “Every village I visited, people came out and sang and danced and drummed and told jokes and stories, and I remember just being really touched by it…you know, it was very civilized to me, and I realized that if someone came to my town, how would anybody know what anyone could do, because we don’t live like that,” Bellizzi says.
Ten years ago, to create a similar cultural forum for New York artists and performers, Bellizzi opened up the first floor of his Queens home, and called it The Vault. The Vault, like the individuals that attend its performances, is very much a collage. The walls are adorned with artwork, some by Bellizzi himself, but most by his fellow artists from around the world. Colorful paintings from painters in Nicaragua hang next to a subdued charcoal drawing of two dancing figures, with a flash of red on the shoes of the dancing woman. A piece made from a mannequin head sits on a table near the front door. And a collage of pictures, all people from Tony’s ministries and philanthropic projects, hang on the wall near the kitchen, where one can see the fridge, covered in little magnetic words form funny sayings and poetry. Spelled out on the door to the freezer—“Talk is cheap, free speech isn’t.” A mannequin leg hangs from the corner ceiling of the kitchen; Bellizzi explains that its job is to catch leaks.
Bellizzi’s experiences in Africa also led him to create Hope for the Children, a non-profit organization which funds projects in impoverished countries, is about “finding ways to work for justice, provide charitable assistance, sharing resources to provide opportunities for youth, educational, spiritual, whatever. It’s also to help young people, who want to make a difference, have the resources to be able to do that. And it’s to mobilize this younger generation to come together and build bonds of understanding.”
The funds, donated and raised by “working class people, artists, kids…and churches,” as well as by Bellizzi himself, go to several projects that give power to the underprivileged in the Navajo Nation, Peru, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Albania, among others. In these nations, the funds are used to “empower the people,” as Tony says. Bellizzi says funds go to the building of community centers and homes for people who live in “plastic-bag houses,” running camps and summer schools for poor children, and creating homes for sick and physically-challenged children.
And there’s more: Belizzi also founded the youth-run, youth-oriented publication, Crossings Magazine, in 2004 to promote discourse among young people in the world. He also created a violence prevention program for his local community, Underground Railroad, in which he speaks to teens about street violence, as well conducting one-on-one mentoring with juveniles in jail.
Motivational Speaker, Youth Minister, Philanthropist, Artist, Performer, Fire Eater—it’s all part of the vibrant collage that is Tony Bellizzi. “I believe a person’s ultimate work of art is their life...My art is about pasting together different things in ways that you can make it something new.”
