Joel Madden: Giving Back Brick-by-Brick

When it comes to giving back, Joel Madden has no time for talk. Don't bother him with an idea you can't actually get done. He'd rather get to work on something and see it through, start to finish, to actually do some good in the world.

"How many times do you hear people talk about something and see it all the way through to fruition? It's not often in LA," says the Good Charlotte rocker, who's more famous than not (at least in tabloid magazine world) for his relationship with Nicole Richie — with whom he has two children, Harlow, 2, and Sparrow, 5 months.

"Everyone loves to get together for meetings and talk about doing this or that. But the key is brick-by-brick, building something. Even if it's a playground — do it! Phone call by phone call, dollar by dollar, our foundation gets things done physically," Madden says, referring to the Richie-Madden Children's Foundation, which will, in fact, open a brand-new playground at a Beyond Shelter Neighborhood Resource Center in South Central Los Angeles today.

The playground is just the latest in a string of get-it-done projects the thoughtful musician and his actress/designer wife have accomplished since setting up their philanthropic collaboration nearly three years ago. Right at the start, during Richie's first pregnancy, "We said we wanted to provide for mothers, and we had a baby shower — instead of having one for Nicole, we had it for mothers, and we got $250,000 in baby products to moms in LA. In their homes. Physically got to them!" Madden says with the enthusiasm of a kid who just learned a new trick on his bike. "So that's the whole thing. Let's do it brick-by-brick, one thing at a time, and let's really do things. Let's really get things done."

At this moment, Madden is just as enthusiastic about a new 7-Eleven campaign to raise money for good causes month-after-month in 2010. The company's "7-Eleven Coffee Cup With A Cause" campaign is introducing limited-edition 20-ounce coffee cups designed by celebrities and athletes to be sold nationwide. Proceeds from the cups sold benefit celebrities' charities of choice with a guaranteed donation of $250,000, and a possibility of $300,000 per organization depending on how many of the cups are actually sold.

The Richie-Madden Children's Foundation is the first recipient.

"It's such an awesome thing for 7-Eleven to do, whether they were giving any money to our foundation or not," Madden says. "In each month they're doing a different charity, and it doesn't get any better than that, man."

A lot of big, profitable corporations seem to be bending to public sentiment to "give back" in these trying times (just look at some of the big firms on Wall Street that have upped charitable giving to new highs in recent months). But 7-Eleven took the initiative all on their own, without any of those pressures, Madden points out.

"For me it's a really big statement for them to do something. It wasn't like someone called them out and said, ‘You need to do this.' They came up with the whole thing. And it's really cool of them."

To infuse some Tonic opinion here, it's just as cool that Madden and Richie set up a foundation in the first place — and that they did it not only to help others, but to try to make a positive impact on their own children.

"It's become just a very big part of our life," Madden says. "It's something that we do. Just like our jobs. It's something that we expect of ourselves and of our family. We started this foundation for a reason. One: Me and Nicole — we don't work together. We're not involved in each other's work at all. I can tell you roundabout what she's working on, but I couldn't tell you [exactly] what she's working on. It's the same with her: She knows I'm working on things, but doesn't know exactly what I'm doing. And we like it that way.

"But the foundation is something really fun and important that we get to do together. And I think it's important that our kids grow up around something. Some families have a family business, or a family store or whatever. We wanted to have something like that. We wanted to have a foundation that they're responsible for, that they have to be a part of — that they'll grow up with and it will just be something that they do, just like anything else that's expected of them, because that's what we do. That was the whole idea of it."

Passion ProjectsWhen asked where Joel derives his personal passion for giving back, he replies, "Man, I don't know! I've always wanted to, [but] never had the opportunity. I don't know if people ever knew that I was into it. I tried to get involved with Unicef, but it seemed hard to get involved. It was hard to get through to people. But over the last three years..."

He stops himself, realizing there's one really big reason he's been able to break through and get involved more than ever at this point in his life: "I feel like it's Nicole," he says, crediting his wife with her ability to get the ball rolling and make things happen. "She just for some reason gets through to people."

Madden has realized his dream of working with Unicef. In fact, the Richie-Madden Children's Foundation threw a fundraiser last March for Unicef's TAP Project that raised $150,000 for clean water — a particular passion for Madden, who has traveled to Africa to witness the clean-water crisis up-close-and-personal.

"That $150,000 — that built a ton of wells," he notes, "and the water physically went to one of the places I went and visited."

Madden was already planning a trip with Unicef to Haiti in 2010. Now, after the earthquake, he's even more anxious to go and do whatever he can to help the Haitian people — especially the children. "With Unicef, as much time as you want to put in they'll take it. It's great. I love it. Ever since I've had kids, I just can't walk away from kids. I just can't. It's hard to leave ‘em. It's hard to know that they're out there suffering. It's hard to go to sleep at night if you're not doing everything you possibly can."

"I could live with myself knowing I'm doing the most that I can, but I can do more," Madden adds. "I couldn't live with myself if I didn't do anything — short of moving out there and being the field. That's the thing. When people try to pat me on the back and try to congratulate me, I don't know how to take that, because I've been out there with doctors who graduated from Johns Hopkins who are living in tents among refugees, and that's what they do. Those are the people who deserve attention and being thanked. Don't look at me like I'm noble. There's nothing noble that I do! I have a conscience, a feeling like I need to do something. It's almost selfish — that I can't live with myself unless I'm helping these kids. But these people are giving their lives to save lives. Those are the people I admire the most. I'm just doing what I feel like I need to do."

Tabloid Magazine Avoidance Therapy

Saying he doesn't deserve thanks gets Madden thinking about another aspect of his life that has changed greatly in recent years: He's chosen to slow the number of press interviews he gives to a trickle — because the celebrity press doesn't want to hear what he has to say. "There's nothing exciting about me saying ‘don't thank me,'" he notes, pointing out the fact that he and Nicole do everything they can to keep celebrity magazines (and their influence) out of their home.

"There's got to be an overkill at some point," he says of the tabloid-press world. "The sensationalism of entertainment now is so boring to me, and so unreal, and so lame. I don't like doing press anymore at all, because they don't want to hear the truth. The truth is not exciting. ‘This is the foundation. We do the best we can.' No one wants to hear that. They have to put a spin on it so it's exciting, that it's gotta have a headline or an angle. There is no headline. We have a family with two kids. A big part of our life is this foundation. We love it. And we're trying to do best we can to raise our kids consciously so that they're conscious citizens of the world — and that's kind of boring to people."

So what is it that the tabloids and even the so-called "legit" celebrity magazines are after? "They want to hear [that we started the Foundation because] ‘we wanted to make up for all the bad stuff we did!' Like they need a juicy line. So we both feel there's just no point in doing that much press anymore."

Instead, brick-by-brick, he and Nicole are staying focused on the good they want to do — and making sure to get that good accomplished.

Which gets Madden to a point that may not be headline-worthy anywhere else besides Tonic: "Every mouth you feed and every person you help is just as important as the big picture," Madden says. "That one child that you get water to, or that you gave diapers to, or whatever you did; that one child, that one family, that one person is just as important as the overall big picture," he says. "When you think of it in a Zen way, it's all a piece of each other. It's all connected. Their well-being is just as important as mine, because their well-being affects mine."

"I believe in all of that," says Madden. "I believe that we're all connected — that someone's suffering is an extension of me, and we have to do something. So there you go."