Bill Ayres

William J. "Bill" Ayres (January 14, 1941 to August 22, 2026) was an American talk-radio host, former Catholic priest, author, and lifelong anti-hunger activist. With singer-songwriter Harry Chapin he co-founded World Hunger Year in 1975, the organization later known as WhyHunger, and spent decades building Hungerthon, community food networks, and national nutrition policy from a belief that hunger is solvable when communities lead.

Ayres grew up with a grandmother who, he later said, taught him to keep an open heart and to "try and see the good in everyone." In 1963 he joined roughly 250,000 people at the March on Washington, hearing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver the "I Have a Dream" speech. The experience shaped his view of race, poverty, justice, and power and set a pattern of showing up for social-justice marches across his life.

He attended St. John's University for two years, then studied philosophy and theology at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, New York. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest for the Diocese of Rockville Centre in 1966, he served about thirteen years in parish ministry, including a decade at St. James Church in Seaford, New York. In 1968 the diocese asked him to host a Sunday radio program. As Father Bill Ayres on "On This Rock," he mixed rock music, interviews, and conversations about faith, compassion, and social issues. Cablevision founder Charles Dolan later gave him a television platform as cable news was emerging.

His on-air work drew him deeper into commercial radio. Beginning in 1973 he hosted and produced a weekly talk show on New York's WPLJ 95.5 FM. First known as "On This Rock" and later "The Bill Ayres Show," the program took thousands of calls about personal, relational, spiritual, and social questions while featuring artists whose outlook he admired. He became the longest-running continuous host in WPLJ history and aired his final live show in May 2019, after about forty years on the station. Along the way he was the first person to interview Bruce Springsteen on network radio, beginning a lasting friendship with Springsteen, manager Jon Landau, and Barbara Carr that tied music to anti-hunger work.

Radio interviews with Tom Chapin and then Harry Chapin revealed a shared outrage over hunger and poverty. Around a kitchen table with Harry and Sandy Chapin, Ayres helped sketch what became WhyHunger. In 1975 Ayres and Chapin, with radio personality Pete Fornatale and WNEW-FM general manager Mel Karmazin, launched the first Hungerthon, a 24-hour radiothon that grew into a Thanksgiving-season tradition on outlets including SiriusXM and New York radio, raising tens of millions of dollars over decades. Ayres and Chapin also organized benefit concerts, opened a Washington policy office, and backed efforts that supported a Presidential Hunger Commission, a National Hunger Hotline, expanded school meals, and other federal nutrition aid. They helped establish Long Island Cares and New Jersey's Center for Food Action.

Ayres left the active priesthood in the late 1970s or early 1980s to marry Jeannine; they raised daughters Michelle and Suzanne in Huntington Station, New York, and later welcomed granddaughter Jaida Blatt. After Harry Chapin's death in 1981, Ayres kept the promise of the work they started, serving as WhyHunger's executive director until retiring in 2015, when he received the organization's Lifetime Achievement Award at its 40th anniversary. He partnered with Hard Rock International and with Yoko Ono Lennon on the "Imagine There's No Hunger" campaign. In 2025, at WhyHunger's 50th anniversary gala, he helped present the inaugural Bill Ayres Social Justice Award to CNN's Laura Coates.

He co-authored All You Need Is Love: And 99 Other Life Lessons From Classic Rock Songs (1998) with Pete Fornatale and published The Journey Into the Mystery: Finding God in Your Everyday Life (2021). He also helped found counseling work through At the Water's Edge on Long Island, spun off the Medford Group of national hunger organizations, and served on boards including Long Island Cares and the National Jobs for All Coalition.

Ayres died on August 22, 2026, at age 85. WhyHunger remembered a co-founder who taught colleagues "to listen before acting, to lead with hope, and to keep going even when the road ahead looms long and difficult." Memorial gifts were directed to WhyHunger, Long Island Cares, and the Harry Chapin Foundation. His legacy lives in Hungerthon, in community food programs across the United States, and in the idea that music, radio, and grassroots organizing can turn compassion into lasting change.