Unite Us: How Giving Kitchen is Helping Food Service Workers Thrive
Giving Kitchen’s Kaitlynn Perez-Mockett spoke to Unite Us for their series of blog posts about corporate partnerships, Power of Partnership:
Giving Kitchen is doing something for food service workers that hasn’t been done on this scale before. Building something new comes with challenges! How do we standardize a process for who and how we serve, in a way that is equitable, impactful, and scalable? How do we meet an industry-wide crisis like COVID-19 without throwing all our own guidelines out the window? How can we grow and change to meet our community where they are? These are questions we ask ourselves every day.
When COVID-19 prompted the shutdown of all food service in March 2020, GK Executive Director Bryan Schroeder made the difficult decision to maintain the qualifying crises for financial assistance — meaning that GK would not suddenly start paying unemployment to food service workers laid off due to the pandemic. “It just felt like it would have been a disaster for us,” he said. “That’s not our core mission. It wouldn’t be fair to the guy who broke his leg just before the pandemic.” To meet the demand of food service workers suddenly in need of resources, GK set up a webpage that included information on food banks, community initiatives, and how to obtain federal unemployment support; it was essentially a pandemic-specific Stability Network. The webpage received hundreds of thousands of hits.
During this time, Stability Network reevaluated standard operating procedures. Case managers began filtering inquiries and allowing clients to opt-in for one-on-one case management rather than having case management be the default, since there were so many clients and many requests were for a simple referral that had been shared hundreds of times before. There’s a saying in the restaurant industry: “work smarter, not harder.” Stability Network worked smarter so they could work harder to meet an exponential increase in inquiries; these systematic improvements helped set the stage for a partnership with Unite Us.