LI's Ashanti donates 'breakfast for champions,' 30,000 N95 masks to hometown hospital

Ashanti, the Grammy Award-winning singer/actress, is providing “breakfast for champions” at Northwell Health's Glen Cove Hospital to the front-line doctors, nurses and other workers. She's also donating some 30,000 N95 face masks.

The breakfast is for the teams who work on the overnight shift from midnight to 8 a.m.and who are often hungry when they leave the hospital as well as for the health care staff who arrive in the early morning.

“It makes my day to be able to say I was born in this hospital and I will always rep Long Island people who are going through such terrible times. Honestly, I’ve been looking at the numbers of deaths and hearing the stories about the front-liners and being from Long Island, well sometimes it seems people forget about us,” said Ashanti, 39.

So, what’s for breakfast? Ashanti, who doesn’t eat meat, has teamed up with Dunkin' to deliver hundreds of Beyond Meat sausage sandwiches and coffee for four days over the next two weeks. She chose the sandwich, which is made with a plant-based "meat," cheese and egg on an English muffin, because, “I try my best to live a healthy lifestyle. And to me, it’s a much healthier choice. So I just felt that this was a kind gesture to keep it in a healthy sense and still make people happy."

For the record, the sandwich is touted as having 29% less total fat, 33% less saturated fat, fewer calories, cholesterol and sodium than a traditional breakfast sandwich from the company. Ashanti is a big fan of the plant-based product and spotlighted her BBQ and jerk sauce Beyond Beef burgers recipe on Instagram recently, much to her fans’ delight.

The hospital's leaders are grateful. “Oftentimes, the overnight people get overlooked," said Susan Rassekh, the director of customer experience and communications at the hospital. “I love our doctors and nurses, but there’s also an entire army behind them that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Breakfast fills a void, Rassekh said. “We’ve been very fortunate with lunch and dinner,” she said of the many meal donations for the staff. “We’ve received a gift of great generosity, which comes in the form of pizza and pasta. So I think it’s great having something a little different and thoughtful. And we all could use becoming a little more health conscious.”

As for Ashanti, in this case at least, giving is much better than receiving. “I feel amazing," she said. "If you ask me about awards and Grammys those are all cool, but when you’re actually able to help a person that’s the best thing ever.”