Veteran New York Jets tackle Kelvin Beachum was flipping through the channels in his New Jersey home on a rare day off when a local news story caught his attention.
How Jets tackle Kelvin Beachum is helping families during Newark’s water crisis
Beachum is going the extra mile to help thousands of families in Newark, New Jersey, who don’t have access to clean water.
Concerns about lead contamination in nearby Newark have been growing for years to the point the city gave thousands of free water filters to residents in 2018. The situation escalated in August when tests showed the filters weren’t working, leaving as many as 14,000 homes with potentially unsafe water.
“Where I stay at and where [the Jets’] facility is at, the water comes from the same place as Newark,” Beachum says. “But there, the pipes haven’t been fixed, whereas the pipes in suburban towns like Madison, Morristown, Chatham, and Livingston have. I took issue with that.”
So the day after the Jets’ last preseason game, Beachum took it upon himself to try to help fill in the gaps where just about every tier of government was failing. He donated $10,000 to the United Way of Essex and West Hudson and helped them set up a distribution center in Newark’s South Ward where he stayed all day, handing out water.
Beachum, who grew up in a small town outside Waco, Texas, had never done community work in Newark before. The Jets tend to stick by their New York name when it comes to service, according to Beachum, even though the team is located in New Jersey and exclusively flies in and out of Newark Airport.
“I knew it was an area that was underrepresented and underfunded, but not to this level,” Beachum says of New Jersey’s largest city. “You just don’t see this happening in very rich, Caucasian neighborhoods. I’m not trying to get into race relations, but people of color are the ones that are being affected by this the most.
“I’m a person of color. I have three kids. This isn’t an issue that’s going to affect other populations in this country. Flint hasn’t affected other populations in this country. We live in one of the richest countries in the world, and we’re not making sure that people have one of the most basic human rights: access to clean water.”
For families who weren’t able to come to the site to pick up their allotted cases, Beachum and others brought the water to them. One grandmother with two young boys told him she was preparing to spend her last $20 on water before he arrived.
“It’s a help, but we gave that to them on Friday, and if you’re rationing water out, that might have gotten them to Wednesday or Thursday,” Beachum says. “Then they’ve got to go get more water. I don’t think people think about it in that context.”
As he plots more relief efforts for a problem with no clear end in sight (the city just announced an expedited plan to replace the toxic pipes, which is still a three-year process), Beachum has been taking the news into the locker room and encouraging his teammates to learn about what’s going on.
More broadly, he’s asking his team and the NFL as a whole to step up.
“I am going to ask and I’m going to keep asking,” Beachum says. “Where people are being affected by this is 15 to 20 minutes from the practice facility that we visit every single day. The NFL headquarters on Fifth Avenue is maybe a 35-minute drive away.
“If it was your water, wouldn’t you want somebody to say something? But it ain’t your water, so you don’t care that much. That’s how I see it.”
Here is a list of Newark organizations accepting donations.
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