Jayson Conner and Jeffrey Newman, a Queens couple who spent years walking the streets of New York and handing out tens of thousands of backpacks filled with supplies — toiletries, socks, notebooks — to people in need, died within days of each other.
Mr. Conner, 48, died from a heart attack at their home in Queens on June 28, his daughter, Jewlia Conner, said.
Mr. Newman, 58, died four days later, on July 2, according to his brother Glenn, who did not provide a location or cause.
Mr. Conner and Mr. Newman began their efforts in 2018 with a few armfuls of backpacks. By 2026, they and almost 40 volunteers had distributed more than 180,000 packs to people living on the streets of Manhattan.
Once a week, a few dozen people would gather at a rental space in Queens, and Mr. Conner and Mr. Newman would lead them in organizing items into more than 100 backpacks that were loaded onto a moving van.
They would then drive the van to Manhattan, and, over the next several days, the volunteers would fan out, backpacks slung over their shoulders. Mr. Conner and Mr. Newman trained the volunteers on the best way to approach and engage with people who might be experiencing extreme physical or emotional pain — or might just want to talk to a friendly face.
“It was fascinating to see how well they managed to communicate with people on the streets,” Kristina Kashtanova, who began volunteering with them in 2020, said in an interview. “They taught me how to be a better human and how to talk to people who were so different from me.”
Giving away the backpacks was initially a side project of their nonprofit, Together Helping Others, which provided a range of social services. In moving from place to place, they discovered, unhoused people often lacked something as simple as a container to hold their belongings. What people in that situation needed, the two men figured, was sturdy backpacks.
They announced the idea on social media, and within three days nearly 100 backpacks had been donated, along with countless supplies. They called the program Backpacks for the Street.
In loading up the backpacks, they gave significant thought to what homeless people might actually need — like Slim Jim beef-jerky sticks, for example, because even unhoused people without teeth could suck on them for protein. Every flashlight they distributed came with fresh batteries. In the winter, they included wool socks.
“We take what we do very seriously,” Mr. Newman told ABC News in 2020. “We’re not making little goody bags — we’re really thinking out what it is people need the most. It’s a labor of love.”
During the pandemic, when shelters were believed to be hot spots for viral transmission, the need for the backpacks became more acute.
“The city has great programs for the homeless, but there are many reasons why someone might not want to go to a shelter right now,” Mr. Newman told “Good Morning America” in 2020. “Every bag we deliver can go a long way, especially during this crisis.”
In addition to requesting monetary donations, they listed specific supplies that people could donate on the organization’s Amazon wish list.
Ms. Kashtanova said that she and other volunteers were discussing how to continue the program but that no decisions had been made yet.
For Mr. Conner, the effort was personal — he had experienced sexual abuse, drug addiction and homelessness himself.
“It was soul-crushing,” he said on the Backpacks for the Street website. “You never know where you’ll find respite day after day, or if you’ll eat or find warmth.”
Jayson Conner was born on July 4, 1977, in Stockton, Calif. He attended culinary school and worked in restaurants.
His marriage to Leslie Manfre ended in divorce.
Mr. Conner began using drugs and doing sex work to pay for them, a spiral that led to a two-year period of homelessness that continued after he moved to New York.
He and Mr. Newman met in 2004 and began dating. Mr. Conner found work in restaurants but did not get clean of drugs until 2015.
Along with his daughter, he is survived by a son, Andrew.
Jeffrey Lawrence Newman was born on Sept. 27, 1967, in Ardsley, a village in Westchester County, N.Y. His father, Ted, was a real estate investor and restaurateur; his mother, Joyce (Fishkin), managed the home and, after the family moved to Florida, served as the first female president of the Jewish Federation of Broward County.
Mr. Newman graduated from Florida International University in 1991 with a degree in communication and media studies.
Along with his brother Glenn, he is survived by his parents; another brother, Ric; and a sister, Beth Newman.
Before starting the nonprofit organization, Mr. Newman worked as a journalist for ABC News and as a financial consultant, and was the founding president and chief executive of Out.com.
One Thanksgiving in the late 2000s, he and Mr. Conner volunteered at a soup kitchen run by a church in Brooklyn.
“The pastor said she thought it was wonderful that we wanted to do this, but that Thanksgiving gets a lot of volunteers,” Mr. Newman told The New York Amsterdam News in 2018. “What she needed were people for the other 364 days of the year. We were sold.”
After eight years of working at the soup kitchen, they decided to start their own organization.
“Everything about the backpack is about hope,” Mr. Newman told Fox News in 2020. “We understand that it’s not going to cure homelessness; we don’t pretend it’s going to cure homelessness. But it does say to somebody, ‘Hey, you know what? We care.’”
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