Hundreds of Nonprofits Train People to Work in Restaurants. What Happened When COVID Shut the Restaurants Down?

On the evening of Saturday, March 14, 2020, the staff at Café Momentum served only seven diners. The downtown Dallas restaurant was consistently listed as one of the best in the city, but suddenly, fears about an emerging pandemic were keeping folks home. Café Momentum is more than just a restaurant, though. It is also a nonprofit that has spent 30 years training at-risk youth exiting the juvenile detention system to work in hospitality.

As restaurants shut down due to COVID-19, these organizations found that the on-the-ground hospitality training that their work is predicated on was no longer possible. The problem was bigger than whether they could continue to employ current or future participants; most of these nonprofits also provide a host of social services, ranging from housing to on-site schooling. Keeping their participants employed is a key part of helping them remain stable, and, in some cases, keeping them housed.

For many organizations, the first step to dealing with pandemic shutdowns was just to help their participants and alumni get through the initial weeks. Drive Change offered direct financial assistance to the most at-risk fellows. Café Reconcile offered gift cards and meals, and started connecting people to unemployment and other social services. Other groups sent food and toiletries to alumni.

Many of the workforce development organizations that had previously only focused on restaurants and hospitality also pivoted to feeding food-insecure populations. “The real game changer for us has been that we’ve picked up a lot of production cooking, or batch cooking, which we never did before,” says Café Reconcile’s Duhon. This included taking on work for Second Harvest Food Bank and World Central Kitchen, with both organizations paying the cafe to produce meals for them to distribute.

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