From Crisis to Care: How Hospitality Action Helped During COVID-19

Sarah Kettel
00:00:43.525 - 00:00:45.825
Talking Hospitality

Timothy R Andrews
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Welcome to this our podcast, Talking Hospitality. I'm Timothy R Andrews and this is my co host Sarah Kettel.

Talking Hospitality is a podcast looking at issues within hospitality, solutions and inspirational stories within the sector. The podcast is shared on all major platforms, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, YouTube, and now Audible.

Sarah Kettel
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Episode 7 Hospitality Action Today we are talking to Jeremy Gibson who is the Marketing Director of the charity Hospitality Action. Welcome to the show, Jeremy.

Jeremy Gibson
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Thank you very much.

Timothy R Andrews
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Who are Hospitality Action and what do they do?

Jeremy Gibson
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So Hospitality Action is the benevolent charity for the hospitality industry and we've been around for nearly 200 years. We've kind of risen in prominence recently, but Hospitality Action has always been the kind of the industry safety net.

Predominantly we're a grant making organization, so we provide grants to people when life's taken a wrong turn and that's, that's often the result of physical illness. It could be as a result of being a victim of domestic violence or it could be just people are a bit down on the look, as has been the case recently.

We also are involved in providing mental health provision. So we have an employee assistance program which is effectively a kind of an employee care package that an operator can subscribe to.

And within that package they have access, all their employees have access to expert counseling, legal advice, debt advice and things like that. More recently, prior to Covid, we've also been making more in-roads into the mental health space.

I think that, you know, inherent in many of the calls for financial help that we have is a mental health issue. You know, people find themselves in very difficult situations and quite often you know that there's a mental health issue folded into that.

And also via having a clinicians within our EAP, we're more to place to kind of understand some of the issues that are, you know, unique to our industry that kind of drive down kind of mental health.

So over the last couple of Years we've been very heavily involved in just trying to break down taboos, really, just trying to make that initial mental health conversation that bit easier to have and to listen to.

Sarah Kettel
00:03:03.225 - 00:03:34.299
Brilliant.

I think you've actually done a really good job, Jeremy, because I know that coming into this industry or coming back into this industry seven years ago when I did the, it was very much thought of as one of those industries where it was hard. It was hard on you emotionally, it was hard on you physically.

There were, you know, images I think most people had of things like bullying cultures and, you know, big shouty chefs on the tv. Didn't help with what people outside of the industry thought. But there was always a bit of a taboo about mental health issues.

Jeremy Gibson
00:03:34.387 - 00:04:09.427
It's a journey that the industry has been on for quite a long time.

I think that, you know, you've had a series of quite high profile people talk about, you know, mental health issues or addictions and stuff like that. So I think that gradually the barriers have come down.

I certainly think that, you know, what's been interesting the last few months is that in a funny kind of way, Covid's been the great leveler and organizations that weren't, weren't particularly plugged into the mental health conversation before have kind of, by virtue of shared experience, I think that we're all a little bit more open to it and a bit more open to being just a bit kinder.

Sarah Kettel
00:04:09.581 - 00:04:26.055
So, Jeremy, Lockdown took us all a little bit by surprise. It all came around very quickly. It sort of punched us all in the face and was just there. You had to react very quickly as an organization.

Talk us through from the start of lockdown to now. What exactly have you been doing?

Jeremy Gibson
00:04:26.215 - 00:08:07.379
Yeah, of course. So initially we, like you say, like everyone else, were quite taken by surprise and we kind of, you know, we entered crisis mode.

So the first thing that we did was mobilize an emergency appeal. We didn't know how successful it would be. We didn't know how many people would need our help, but we knew that people would.

So the first thing was kind of the financial piece. So we launched an emergency cash appeal asking the public and people in the industry to make donations.

A few days after that, we opened up that fund for applications. We got over 20,000 emails asking for our help on the first morning, which, you know, that's several years of applications in a day.

And we very quickly redeployed most of our fundraising team. In fact, most of the whole organization was redeployed into processing and paying out grants.

So we launched a 250 pound emergency grant which just the idea of that was to help people keep a roof over their heads while they were waiting for government help to kick in. You know, quite. At the very start of this, before furlough was even a word, lots of casuals are just laid off.

You know, in our industry there's lots of casual zero hours contract people, there's lots of people who are self employed and lots of people's livelihoods just went overnight.

And you know, we were getting, we were getting calls from people who literally just had a couple of quid left in the bank and didn't know how to put food on the table or, you know, electricity on the electricity meter. So it was really important for us to kind of get out there quickly and do as much as we could. That went incredibly well.

So we were able to distribute £500,000 in a very short amount of time. The other thing that we did is that part of what Hospitality Action does is that we have about 1200 industry retirees who we support.

And these people are often quite vulnerable, often on their own.

And what we noticed was that lots of social media groups sprang up in the local community offerings, kind of get bread for people and stuff like that, but it was all on social media and the people that we help aren't on social media.

So we recruited a big gang of excellent volunteers within an industry and we buddied people up with vulnerable elderly hospitality retirees so then we could be their social media conduit, basically.

So we would, we'd have a buddy, we'd find out kind of what they needed, whether it was shopping or prescription collecting, and then we would connect them to local volunteer networks, which is kind of really simple, but it was a really effective way of helping people.

And then as things kind of progressed, so as furlough kicked in and as places started to open again, we are continuing to give out emergency grants, but we've also added a couple more grant streams. So we're able to help people with slightly more than 250 pounds to provide additional bridging while people are waiting for help.

And then our normal inverted commerce grant program of helping people who can't work due to disability and things like that. So there's kind of bigger, more involved projects has always been going on in the background.

We get referrals from people in the industry, but also we take referrals from organizations like Macmillan or safa. So we've been working really hard to kind of make sure that our grant giving network has maintained itself.

And then the other thing that we have been doing and will continue to do is looking at our mental health provision. We're working on some resources for both managers, leaders and staff who are going to be going through redundancy processes.

So just trying to kind of one of the things that we're really concerned about is the mental health impact on the HR person or the manager of having to let potentially some of their really good friends go. And, you know, that's really hard. And in some organizations those cuts are quite far reaching.

So we're really mindful of the mental health of the person having to do that.

Timothy R Andrews
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What are some of the issues that the hospitality industry is facing right now?

Jeremy Gibson
00:08:13.955 - 00:08:42.355
I think right now it's the existential fear of being able to continue trading. I think that, you know, eat out to help out was incredibly valuable in terms of getting people back into hospitality.

But, you know, the world has changed.

People aren't going back to city centres and I think that lots of operators are having very difficult conversations with their landlords and with their teams about having to restructure and close. And I just think that that, you know, will be, will be really traumatic for the people have to influence it.

Timothy R Andrews
00:08:42.655 - 00:08:58.461
So in our last set of podcasts that we've just recorded, we covered mental health in hospitality and one of the things that drew our attention was your COVID 19 wellbeing hub. Could you talk us through a little bit about that?

Jeremy Gibson
00:08:58.573 - 00:10:59.521
Yep.

So one of we did several things when the kind of the crisis first started unfolding, one of which is that we just realized that the mental health implications were going to be probably quite big. I think that lots of people in hospitality are very defined by their job.

You know, you can be "Joe Bloggs" the chef, restaurateur, hotelier, before your Joe Bloggs the dad, brother, son.

And I think that, you know, that kind of loss of self that came with suddenly being stuck at home would often, you know, people can hide a mental health problem by working really hard. And we just really felt that that isolation and that sudden change in pace for people was going to be a real shock.

So we'd already been working in the mental health sphere and we quite quickly kind of redeployed our mental health section of, and started to focus on producing practical resources to help people with everything from the financial implications of furlough through to the kind of the stresses of homeschooling or losing a job or literal bereavement, as opposed to just the bereavement of losing a job.

So we just wanted to really quickly develop accessible free resources that just triggered a conversation, got people thinking that they, it's okay not to feel okay that you're not alone, that people have been through this before.

We kind of, we grabbed the Zeitgeist and we produced a mental health film entirely on Zoom that was done from people's kind of, you know, spare rooms, as I am now. And we managed to get a really good range of spokespeople who from the industry had experienced their own mental health episode.

And they were able to just kind of give some insight into what their triggers were, what they, you know, what, what the things were that made them realize that they were going to have a bad day and the steps to try and mitigate that.

And we just thought that by doing stuff like that, it was just A, it raises the profile of our helplines and others in the industry and B, it just, it just created a feeling of solidarity. It just kind of made people feel a bit less isolated.

Timothy R Andrews
00:10:59.713 - 00:11:18.139
It's an incredible piece of work. And the toolkit that you're offering, I mean, it's very friendly. You can go through it, it's not daunting. It guides you through very well.

And I absolutely, if I come across people that need it, will be recommending it. It's a great piece of work.

Jeremy Gibson
00:11:18.267 - 00:11:55.417
And we always try and flag, you know, we have our own helplines that we can help people, but we'll always try and flag people to what other organization is best suited to help them.

I think that what one of the positives about the last few months is I really feel that many of the organizations who have a stake in mental health and industry are collaborating far more than ever before. You know, we work closely with Healthy Hospo, Pilot Light to name but a couple Unilever's Fair kitchens.

There's a real group of us who are really trying to join forces to kind of not overlap and to really do as much as we can for the industry we serve.

Sarah Kettel
00:11:55.521 - 00:12:12.985
Fundraising is quite difficult right now. There's a lot of people who don't necessarily have the spare pennies in the bank account to just chuck in a charity's direction.

But I know that you've come up with some quite innovative ways of fundraising. So tell us about what sort of fundraising you're doing at the moment.

Jeremy Gibson
00:12:13.065 - 00:14:43.665
We were until very recently very reliant on income from fundraising events. And fundraising events are fantastic. They raise our profile.

We're an event oriented industry, so it's kind of a logical way for us to, to raise funds. But Obviously that has just ended overnight. Like every other charity, our entire events program has been canceled.

It's been canceled for the rest of this year, probably Q1 next year too.

So we had to kind of really think on the background of demand for our help never being higher, we had to really kind of think about how we, it was a really interesting one. On the day all this broke and we knew that lockdown was coming, we just kind of, in a very non strategic way just said, let's go for it.

Let's just try and make as much money as we can to help as many people as we can as quickly as we can. So there was, there was very little science to how we started this.

We just literally launched an emergency appeal on social media and that went very well. We got, you know, a huge influx of cash donations and a lot of that came from the public.

We were really, we were really struck by the affection that people had for eating out. I think that it's something that had just been really taken for granted.

And the prospect of losing your favorite pub or a restaurant or even the familiarity of where you get a coffee in the morning, that really spoke to people. And we got a lot of cash donations from the public, which was amazing. Fast forward to now and obviously that wave's come and gone.

But I suppose the confidence that we got from that initial cash appeal gave us the urge to do what we've done recently, which was to develop a proposition called Invisible Chips, which is kind of quite a silly sounding thing.

But our kind of strategy is that we know that events are going to be really difficult and we've seen that people are warm to hospitality, they want places to survive. So by asking people to kind of make a small incremental donation when they eat out, if we can get enough people doing that.

So we've got kind of a high volume, low value model. We hope that we can continue to support people into the future. Invisible Chips is just really simple.

So the idea is that we're just asking operators and diners to buy a portion of virtual chips when they eat out. Everyone loves chips. What's not to like about chips, right?

And by pricing it at the point of a normal side dish, we just felt it was a really non threatening way to get people to make a charity donation that was talkable, that was fun. And also in this current climate of fear of going back out, we just want it to be part of the conversation of destigmatizing it.

Sarah Kettel
00:14:44.445 - 00:14:59.345
And I think it's really important to mention at this point that there's an amazing video on your website, which is a tutorial as to how to make invisible chips, which is hosted by Heston Blumenthal. He's an amazing mime artist. Who knew.

Jeremy Gibson
00:15:00.085 - 00:15:27.845
So what we wanted to do with invisible chips is kind of. We wanted to capture people's imagination.

And we're so lucky in this industry that, you know, there are the celebrity chefs and there's an organization. We're incredibly lucky, those people who give us time.

So we've made two videos so far, one with Fred Cyrix talking about how nice invisible chips are, and the other one was we were so lucky to get some time with Heston and he's made his triple cooked invisible chips. Lots of dry ice and silliness.

Timothy R Andrews
00:15:30.465 - 00:15:32.649
I just think that concept is genius.

Jeremy Gibson
00:15:32.737 - 00:15:33.347
Thank you.

Sarah Kettel
00:15:33.481 - 00:15:49.755
So, Jeremy, I am someone who's in the industry and there'll be a lot of us who, before this crisis in honesty, didn't have anything to do with hospitality action. Maybe because we didn't need you, but now I think we're all on board. What can we do?

Jeremy Gibson
00:15:50.255 - 00:16:54.381
I think there's a number of things that you can do if you own a business. The single biggest thing that you can do, in my opinion, to help your workforce is to take an eap.

I'd love it to be ours, but any eap, really, I think that by having an Employee Assistance Program, you know, ours is £5.50 per employee per year. It's not wildly expensive. I just think that it's the easiest and quickest way that you can put in a safety net.

An Employee Assistance Program EAP is a package of services that anybody within an organization can access.

So it's predominantly accessed on the telephone or online, and it puts employees in touch with trained counsellors to deal with lots of different issues. So the full kind of spectrum of mental health issues, you know, addiction, suicidal feelings and things like that.

We can also connect you to experts who can help with family issues, bereavement, you know, issues with childcare, debt advice, legal advice. So it's a support package that just gives an employee one place to go to get expert advice.

Timothy R Andrews
00:16:54.573 - 00:16:57.865
How can people donate and get involved?

Jeremy Gibson
00:16:58.715 - 00:18:00.775
So the easiest way to donate is go to our website, where you can make a donation on your credit card. We're a charitable organization. The clock sets to zero every year and we start again. Demand for our help has never been higher.

So far this year, we've given out double the amount of grants January to September than we would have done in the past. We've never been busier and worked harder and the best way to support us is to donate or become an invisible chip stockist.

The easiest thing to do is stick some invisible chips on your menu. They don't take up any freezer space. Start sharing, Start following. Talk about invisible chips.

Share our videos and you know, if you do have a friend or colleague in the industry who's worried who you're worried about, then put your arm around their shoulder and send them our way. Visit hospitalityaction.orguk you'll also find the number for our helpline. So our helpline is available 24.

7 with trained counselors and we can either help you on the spot or refer you into somebody that can.

Timothy R Andrews
00:18:01.155 - 00:18:06.051
Yeah, we're really delighted to be able to share your stories and let people know about all the good that you're doing.

Jeremy Gibson
00:18:06.203 - 00:18:06.851
Thank you.

Timothy R Andrews
00:18:06.963 - 00:18:07.883
Keep it up.

Jeremy Gibson
00:18:08.019 - 00:18:08.675
Thank you.

Sarah Kettel
00:18:08.795 - 00:18:09.859
Thanks Jeremy.

Jeremy Gibson
00:18:09.987 - 00:18:11.283
Excellent. Cheers folks.

Sarah Kettel
00:18:11.419 - 00:18:13.963
So if you are struggling right now and you do need some help, call.

Timothy R Andrews
00:18:14.019 - 00:18:24.735
Hospitality action on 080-880-20282 and the website is Hospitality Action.

Sarah Kettel
00:18:26.895 - 00:18:48.435
Thank you for listening. Please share, subscribe and like. We look forward to you joining us in the next episode of Talking Hospitality.

Available on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play and YouTube. Talking Hospitality