Equity at Work Hospitality Cohort
A Beloved Community project, with support from Made in New Orleans Foundation (MiNO).
The Equity at Work hospitality cohort seeks to create more equitable and inclusive work environments for 20+ restaurant employers, 125+ managers, and 1250+ employees.
Together, Beloved Community and Made in New Orleans Foundation are building a culture of equity across this sector.
Above: Holding a protest sign is civil rights activist, Virginius B. Thornton. Civil Rights student leaders from all over the South gathered at Atlanta University in May of 1960 to meet with Martin Luther King on desegregation strategy and organizing sit-ins. Howard Sochurek — The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.
When the restaurant industry operates with an equity lens, we see increased belongingness for employees, stronger people practices, higher quality jobs, and actual career trajectories.
Made in New Orleans Foundation (MiNO) envisions a New Orleans hospitality industry that leads the world in growing, supporting, and financing the success of BIPOC. Beloved Community’s Equity at Work Hospitality cohort brings together leadership teams from 20 restaurant groups, spirits purveyors, and restaurant support organizations on a 2-year equity journey, with support from MiNo.
Beloved Community will support a select group of hospitality employer partners in New Orleans to assess their practices, operationalize their equity commitments, develop sustainable equity solutions for their businesses and inclusive, and advocate for equitable practices for the New Orleans workforce.
Through Beloved’s support, industry leaders will learn how to disrupt their individual biases and interrogate the practices that they assume are neutral. Each team will develop a multi-year equity roadmap with strategies, key activities, and metrics that create more inclusive and equitable workplaces for Black and Brown youth.
Beloved facilitation, in-person and virtual, includes engaging pedagogy, opportunities for self-reflection, team time, functional breakouts, myriad resources, and modeling practices that every team can take back to their organizations immediately. All teams will conduct an organizational Equity Audit and complete year one with a multi-year Equity Work Plan. By the end of their 2-year cohort, hospitality industry leaders will have deepened their will and skill to lead equitable change across the sector.
The Equity at Work hospitality cohort will create more equitable and inclusive work environments for 20+ restaurant employers, 125+ managers, and 1250+ employees.
New Orleans Equity at Work: Hospitality Cohort 2024-2026
Our Racial Equity Toolkit for Hospitality Professionals is here!
This toolkit was originally developed as part of a 2 year Hospitality Cohort in the Greater New Orleans area. The members of this cohort went through nearly 56 hours of racial equity sessions, hours of coaching calls, dozens of hours of pre and post work, and an extremely in depth equity audit. While you don’t need to set aside 56 hours to prepare to use this toolkit, it is crucial to make sure you’re operating from a certain baseline so that you can most effectively implement what you learn. At Beloved, we believe that people change systems. If you want to change systems and make some shifts, then the work begins with you!