On Tuesday, Sept. 15, Jeff Dinneen, the founder and moving force behind Cans for Calcium, was honored at Gillette Stadium as a 2026 Myra Kraft Community MVP. This year the awards recognized 26 nonprofits out of 150 applicants. The recipients include programs that support healthcare, hunger, nutrition, and education.
Twenty five of the 26 winners received $10,000 for their cause. Grand prize winner Susie Shaw of Falmouth received $25,000 to support her program for parents dealing with the death of a young child.
Cans for Calcium was nominated by the Needham Community Council, for which Dinneen has raised $225,000 since 2020. He learned of the award while he was — of course — sorting recyclables at the Recycling and Transfer Station.
“It was awesome news,” he said.
Dinneen has earned these funds for the Community Council’s food pantry a nickel at a time. He collects bottles and cans from individuals and businesses at the RTS and at his home.
Community Council says food first
“We’ll definitely use the award money for our food pantry,” said Community Council Executive Director Sandra Robinson. The 400 families that use the food pantry need 300 quarts of milk a week, she said. Since the end of the COVID lockdown Dinneen has provided all the milk the Community Council distributes, as well as vast quantities of eggs, butter and other groceries.
“He’ll bring us whatever we’re short of at the time,” Robinson said. “He’s just an all around great guy. He was a facilities manager at Roche Brothers. When he was retiring, he was looking for a project that was going to be really impactful, and he certainly found it.”
Dinneen said he is fortunate to have an excellent team of assistants that includes family members, high school students and special needs adults. “He has gone out of his way to make it a really pleasant experience for them, and he’s teaching them a way to volunteer,” Robinson said.
According to Dinneen, redeeming the recyclables is the hardest part. “We have to put them in the machine one at a time.” He can fit 2,400 cans into his Toyota Highlander. At least twice a week he fills it with milk and other groceries at Market Basket. “I try to get there at 6:00 a.m. when the dairy cases are being filled when I can swap my trays with the full trays,” he said. Otherwise he has to take the milk off the shelf one at a time. He estimates he spends about 60 hours a week on Cans for Calcium.
A lifelong Needham resident and a Needham High class of 1973 graduate, Dinneen said that, like many people, he was unaware of poverty in town when he was growing up. While working for Roche Bros. he became aware of how much the company was called on to donate to those in need. He also thought sales of cat food were “astronomical” and wondered if people were using these inferior grades of tuna and salmon as part of their diets.
“I’m very fortunate that I don’t have food needs,” Dinneen said.
He began the program in 2020, but was curtailed for a while by the pandemic. Now, he said, there is a loyal group of contributors, including many people who bring cans back to Needham from second homes on the Cape.
Robinson said Dinneen’s work is critically important because fresh items are the hardest and most expensive for the food pantry to acquire. In addition to providing all the milk and most of the butter, the Dinneen family purchased the refrigerators those items are stored in. At his 70th birthday party, the only gifts Dinneen accepted were contributions to the food pantry.
In addition to bringing redeemable plastic, glass and cans to the blue and green barrels in front of the RTS dumpsters, people can drop those items at the Dinneens’ home at 1625 Great Plain Ave.
Dinneen said his wife, Cynthia, supports the program because she sees the positive impact it has on the community — but she refuses to get in his car and uses a separate driveway that is free of used beer and soda cans.
The Cans for Calcium team has collected 4.5 million cans, and is estimated to pass 5 million before the end of the year. Five million 12-ounce cans lined up would stretch from Needham to Baltimore and would weigh more than 156,000 pounds. Many of the recyclables, though, are 16 ounces, liters or double liters.
Dinneen’s efforts demonstrate how small acts, multiplied by millions, make a huge impact.
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