Every week we tune in for an hour to watch Noah Wyle as Dr. Robby and his team work tirelessly saving patients at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, lovingly referred to as The Pitt. The show has dominated the ratings and the awards circuit, due to its bold portrayal of the messy and complicated work of taking care of a city and its least fortunate members. While Noah Wyle isn’t a doctor, he just plays one on TV, he has all the same been dedicated to helping the marginalized members of his own Los Angeles community.
For the past two years Wyle has given his time to supporting Every Day Action, a small Los Angeles nonprofit fighting food waste and food insecurity at the same time. It is an unglamorous, deeply practical form of philanthropy, the kind that says less about celebrity and more about the entertainment community. Often we forget that the entertainment industry is more than glamorous stars with bright lights, but rather a huge cadres of professionals tackling every detail of the production. Their presence is deeply embedded in and connected to Greater Los Angeles.
Two such veteran professionals, Hillary Cohen and Samantha Luu had been working as assistant directors and producers for over a decade. Year after year they watched catering companies deliver beautiful, expensive meals meant to feed a cast and crew, only to see whatever was left over get thrown directly into a dumpster at wrap. When they asked why, the answer was always the same. It’s too complicated, someone would say. Best to just throw it out. Meanwhile, barely a hundred feet from some of those same sets, Los Angeles’s unhoused population kept growing.
While the industry as a whole had made great efforts to become more “Green” in recent years, with recycling programs for paper and plastics, Luu and Cohen felt that more could be done for local people. In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the two friends took a risk and launched Every Day Action. The idea was simple: take unused catering meals from entertainment production sets and deliver them to the neediest of Agenlinos. Drivers pick up leftover catered food from productions across the roughly ninety mile radius that defines the Los Angeles film industry and deliver it to a network of beneficiary organizations already running food programs. Some of these organizations are delivering meals directly to people sleeping on the streets and skid row. Other organizations are providing groceries or raw ingredients to families in low income communities and housing developments. The variety of catered meals allows for this flexibility. One of the core principles of EDA is to ask people what they need first, then work to deliver it.
Today, Every Day Action has redirected roughly 140,000 pounds of food that would otherwise have gone into a dumpster, delivered by a fleet of drivers the organization employs directly. Even the way EDA designed its driver network is helping their community members. EDA Drivers come from the entertainment industry, and this work gives struggling production assistants and background artists supplemental income between gigs. It is, by any measure, a lean and remarkably effective operation. It is also, like nearly every nonprofit in America, chronically underfunded. Every Day Action has no full time staff, and Cohen recounted the difficulty of their yearly fundraising efforts. The team leaned on its entertainment industry connections where it could, auctioning off signed memorabilia from shows like NCIS and hosting a celebrity gala. Both efforts were effective but, but neither reached much beyond the organization’s own Los Angeles based network.
At one year’s Gala, EDA was honoring an early supporter of the organization, R. Scott Grimmell. Cohen and Grimmell knew each other from work on NCIS Los Angeles, and Grimmell has gone on to start a little new hospital drama called The Pitt. The show’s star Noah Wyle agreed to do the introduction and thus became connected with EDA. Wyle himself had been passionate about fighting food insecurity, so he immediately understood the value of the work of EDA and wanted to help. Cohen, never one to pass up an opportunity, jumped on the offer and asked if he might be willing to auction off a lunch on the set of The Pitt. Wyle was in.
By spring 2026, a lot had changed for both EDA and Wyle. Wyle and the Pitt had gone on a legendary awards show run. Wyle had won numerous acting awards for his role as Dr. Robinavitch, and The Pitt won the Emmy for Best Drama. EDA had also been named California’s non-profit of the year, continued to up their fundraising efforts, and began collaborating with Charitybuzz to extend their reach. So when it came time for EDA and Wyle to auction off their lunch, the scene was quite different. What happened next surprised even Cohen. Hours after the auction for the lunch opened, the bidding passed $40,000, and ultimately closed above $120,000. Cohen has described watching the final number come in as an out of body experience, sobbing next to her husband as the total kept climbing. It wasn’t only the size of the number that moved her. It was the reminder that people well outside her own small circle, scattered across the country, cared enough about Every Day Action’s mission to bid on it.
EDA’s collaboration with Charitybuzz now makes up nearly a quarter of their fundraising revenue. It is Cohen and Luu who are the heroes of this story and this organization, finding ways to leverage their existing relationship to create high quality lots to be auctioned off to support their important work. Charitybuzz provided reach and relief, a way to connect the auction to a national community of bidders, and a team to handle the operational load, so that Cohen and Luu could spend their own limited hours doing what actually matters to them, which is feeding people.
Both EDA and Wyle continue to garner recognition for their respective works. But there is a common foundation with both the Pitt and EDA. Each is dedicated to everyday people working in and for their community. Two women couldn’t stand watching good food get wasted while their neighbors went hungry, so they built something to fix it. An actor who spends his working hours pretending to save lives also dedicates his time to his real city. It’s a small reminder that generosity doesn’t need a script. Sometimes it just needs the right people willing to show up, and enough of a community willing to meet them there.
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