What happens when a former executive chef walks away from the kitchen—and realizes she never learned how to take care of herself? When she brings up mental health the response is a best lukewarm, and at worst dismissive???
This week’s episode hit me hard. Jasmin Parks-Papadopoulos brings honesty, depth, and a kind of courage you don’t hear every day. And, I’m very excited to say, a vision of a better possible future and hope. She’s part of CHOW!—Culinary Hospitality Outreach and Wellness—and her story is one so many of us in the industry will recognize: long hours, blurred boundaries, trauma bonds, adrenaline highs, and a haunting quiet once the shift is over.
We talk about what it means to lead with empathy after years of leading with fear. About how dysfunction can feel familiar—and even comforting—if you grew up in chaos. And about the brilliant, deceptively simple power of asking someone how they’re feeling… on a scale of rare to well done!
Expect to learn why so many of us mistake survival for strength. Expect to hear about the cracks in the system—and the real work being done to fix them. And expect a conversation that might just make you rethink what hospitality could be.
Link to the organization HERE!
If this kind of honesty speaks to you, please like, share, and subscribe—it really helps.
Thanks for being here. I’m Andrew.
I talk to people in and around the service industry, trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess of a life. You can find more of my work at my blog, and all my social links are at the bottom of that page.
As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.
Cheers
Transcript
Andrew: – Welcome to Serves You Right! This is Andrew and I am glad you can make it. If you are a server, a bartender, backhouse warrior, this is the spot for you. Follow me as we try to work out and solve one fundamental question, whether or not you can truly be happy working in the restaurant industry. With everything involved in working in service, the alcohol, the late nights, low ages, angry guests, restaurants and bars offer a very strange blend of challenge and opportunity, let’s say. They do also serve a very large and underserved population in the US. So, I am trying to answer these questions. Are they flawed and ugly in some ways? Well, yeah, but the service industry also does serve a deep and fundamental need that drive for a fast, flexible work environment, a thrill of quick money, and, let’s be honest, the appeal of this slightly dangerous for some. Again, my name is Andrew and I’ve worked in restaurants for about 20 years. I’ve done everything from dishwashing all the way to being a general manager, and a little bit of everything in between. So, this is my record of what I’ve learned and what’s interesting to me. Follow along and see what we make of it all. Thanks for listening. Let’s do it. Thank you.
Today we are talking to Jasmine Parks-Papadopoulos. Jasmine joins us from CHOW!, Culinary Hospitality Outreach and Wellness. So, this was a very powerful conversation I was extremely happy to have. Jasmine’s background is in the back of the house. She does not shy away from telling us about her experiences in asking about mental health and the lukewarm at best reception that got. I was extremely touched by their temperature check. How are you feeling on a scale of rare to well done? I definitely think I am going to use that in the future. And we get to talk about the significance of May for their organization. Industry challenges, the goals and growth of Chow and definitely just a powerful episode where we really get into it. So I hope this serves you and thank you for listening to Serves You Right.
Andrew: – How did you end up, you know, joining CHOW!? How did all that happen?
Jasmine : – Yeah. I joined CHOW! as a meeting attendee. I had actually heard about CHOW! when I was still in the industry. I was the head of food and beverage and executive chef for a pretty high profile hotel group in Colorado. And I had made it about halfway through the pandemic, still working. A lot of the folks that were, that I was managing were in the process of being furloughed. And right at that point, you know, where that human struggle was really becoming, hey, this isn’t going to be a couple of weeks, but this might be long term. I started looking for resources to be able to support my staff. And I came across CHOW!, which at the time was just a very small grassroots support meeting in Denver, Colorado. And I asked the GM of the property that I was working for. I said, you know, there’s this group called CHOW! and they support mental health for food beverage hospitality workers. They do this thing called the temperature take where, you know, when folks clock in at the beginning of their shift, they ask how the staff is doing on a scale of rare to well done. And the GM said, okay, you’re going to open up that can of worms and you’re going to do what about it. So, you get a bunch of well done. What are you doing to send them home? We still have a shift to get through. You’re not a therapist. I don’t see the benefit of bringing this resource. You’re going to open up a can of worms that, you know, we can’t even fathom the consequences of just dropping it. And I did happily. I dropped it happily. It was, I am very candid about my experience in the in the food beverage hospitality industry. I was not a very motivating, supportive, or open-minded chef. I was a mentor very much the way that I was mentored, which was coming up and fine dining in Europe. There was a lot of aggression and violence there. And so, you know, I dropped it. And then I left the industry, and I didn’t know how to take care of myself in any capacity. I had had no work life balance. I had no hobbies. I had no friendships that weren’t the trauma bonds from the industry. I hadn’t done a lot of, you know, personal development in the years that I had been a chef. And so I pursued a coaching certification because I wanted to learn how to take care of myself, right? And so I was able to learn the basics. How long does a, does a person have to sleep to feel human? What does it look like to eat a meal that is not cold? And so, a couple of months into that, I reached out to the organization, and I said, do you need any volunteers? Is there, can I, you know, offer some coaching for the support groups that you all are running? And the volunteer that I had reached out to who is now CHOW!’s CEO, Aaron Boyle, that’s how long we’ve been working together, said, yeah, come to a meeting and check it out. And I thought to myself, I don’t want to go to this meeting. I just want to be able to give back to the community. I’m not trying to sit in a support group, trying to talk to people. And then three meetings in, I was absolutely hooked. It was incredibly powerful, even though I had been going to therapy at the time, because I recognized that I needed a lot of support to integrate into life. There was a lot of background context that I had to explain to a traditional therapist, right? There was a lot of, well, boundaries in the industry look like this. So it’s not like, you know, I can.
Andrew: – I got one Saturday off last month. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Jasmine : – Yeah. Yes, yeah. 110. Or, you know, gosh, even being able to celebrate holidays for the first time in however many years and not knowing, you know, what to do with myself outside of that, not even not to mention so much of my identity, right, as a chef who’s wrapped up in my in my profession. And so I walked into a child meeting and everybody was like, yeah, we get it been there. And so I started off as a meeting attendee and then slowly as the organization started to grow during the pandemic, you know, a lot of our programming became hybrid. So you can now access those support groups from anywhere in the world. And then there was a need for education. So we developed educational courses. And then after that, it was like, how do we resource broker for folks who might not know how to get connected to relevant organizations. And so, it grew so quickly and there was more of an internal need for support, and I’ve now been with CHOW! almost since the very beginning about five years. I think about three or four of those have been full time in a non-volunteer capacity.
Andrew: – Awesome. You know, hearing you talk through all that. It may be wonder, is it something to do with the hospitality industry itself. It, you know, because on this podcast, I’ve talked to a chef now, distributor, a couple of servers bartenders mostly because that’s my main background before I got management. And every one of them, there’s some tale of working long hours, drinking too much, having too much fun or not enough fun or some combination of all those things and is it the nature of the beast or the animal?
Jasmine : – Oh, I love that question. It is the hospitality. What came first, the chicken or the egg, there’s a great chef, Patrick Mulmady, who heads up an organization called I got your back out of California, who asks the very impactful question, did folks come to the industry broken or did we break them when they got here? My personal experience is that I’m a third generation chef, my father is a chef, my father, parents, exactly the way he chefs are very aggressively very loudly. The dysfunction that I played an active participation role in in the industry was very similar to the dysfunction that I experienced in my family of origin for a very long time. I’ve had these conversations on a personal level with so many folks that worked in the industry where the chaos is something incredibly recognizable to you if you grow up a certain way, right? The dysregulation of the noise, the really up and down kind of fluctuating paces, the havoc that it wreaks on your nervous system, it can feel comfortable for folks who grew up in dysfunctional environments. That was certainly my experience and it was true for me. There was a lot of what I was looking for and what I experienced as mentorship and support was essentially some kind of verbal abuse. As a person who had received so much of it, I was then able to really step into the role of the aggressor as a leader. I don’t, you know, a lot of the amends that I make still years out of the industry is how damaging I was to the people that I worked with because that was all I knew. To me, mentorship, I care about you means I yell at you. I use fear to make you submit. I use volume to make you stop what you are doing or to redirect you. And so, you know, I’ve heard from a lot of folks that that dysfunction is incredibly familiar, that pace that messes with your nervous system can be really, really comfortable when you’ve grown up in chaos.
Andrew: – Yeah, no, I mean, that actually brings very true. I haven’t really thought of it that way. But when I, because, you know, before I got into restaurants, I worked at like a movie theater, you know, sort of servicing jobs. But when I started serving was when I kind of felt at home and I met chaos. I think some people hated or thrive in it. I was really thriving in it. I thought. And then 20 years later, you look back and you’re like, Oh, that’s that was a lot. That was a lot.
Jasmine: – Absolutely. You know, shout out to Chef Greg Baker, who talks about the quiet hour. And you know, you had asked how what kind of a role does this play. You know, Chef Greg Baker talks about how when we work in these in this marginalized pace where we work the hours where the world is active and operational. And then, you know, he says the restaurant quote unquote spits you out at 1am in the middle of the street where everyone you know and love is already asleep. And the only thing that’s open is the neighborhood dive bar. And you somehow have to find a way to come off of the incredible adrenaline surge of the service that you got through, you know, you haven’t eaten, you haven’t slept. And, you know, that there’s, you know, nowhere for you to go except to go have a couple of drinks and wind down. And at what point does that then become the new surround your neck? Right.
Andrew: – No, no, I mean, I grew up in Santa Fe. Well, I grew up in Texas, but spent most of my professional career in Santa Fe and there’s a dive bar there the Matador and they can tell you they saw me most nights.
Jasmine: – You’re real very relatable for most industry folks for sure.
Andrew: – I did want to, you know, one of my notes going through some of the stuff that you all did, who came up with the rare to well done and describing emotional like temperature, because I think that’s genius.
Jasmine: – It’s wonderful. We love food specific impact. CHOW! believes that the community care that is going to create a sustainable workforce for food beverage hospitality workers is going to come with vocationally specific tools. So instead of using things that are really polarizing that we have to learn from scratch, we can borrow the skillset the soft skills that as hospitality workers we already have to be able to ultimately serve ourselves. And so the very first meeting that took place. Our founder, John Hinman, who is still very an active hospitality member in the Denver food beverage hospitality industry. He is the owner and operator of Hinman pies. So he had worked in food beverage hospitality and then, you know, started his recovery journey and then returned to the industry. And he saw a lot of those things that had influenced his substance misuse. He saw them still present in the industry. And so his goal became to talk about the pain that we can’t see is what he calls it. And, you know, his question was if we as hospitality workers get hurt on the job and instead of stepping off the line and, you know, we don’t go to the urgent care to get stitches we just glue it so that we could get through the shift. So if we are having such a challenging time addressing physical pain and sitting with physical pain. How challenging is it for us to even talk about that hurt that never even shows up. And so he invites a bunch of folks over to his bakery. He says, you know, we’re going to talk about the pain that we can’t see. And this meeting should have probably been just a couple of people, you know, getting together and having chat. And as it were, Anthony Burdane completed suicide just a couple of days before that. So it ended up being a full room of people. And he didn’t know how to start this conversation. And so he said, you know, here’s what I know about all of us is that we have so many descriptors for our food, both front of the house that has to sell that marbled juicy tender steak as well as the chef. We are all we have more words for food than we have for our feelings. So what if I correspond I make each temperature correspond with a set of feelings. And for folks who are listening who can’t picture it visually we actually at the beginning of all of our CHOW! discussion meetings, we put up a thermometer and with that thermometer is every single temperature from rare to well done and each temperature has five words under it that are you know frustrated and used stressed anxious so that you can kind of start to correlate these human feelings with the descriptors that you might already have in your back pocket because of your job.
Andrew: – Yeah, definitely want to be more on the rare side from looking at it. No, but there’s so many days out walking to work and if I could just tell people filling a little medium well today. You know, like that that would help a lot when you kind of just internalize and keep it quiet.
Jasmine: – You know that was the that was a really great learning opportunity for me when I came to CHOW! I had this big question like what is the point of asking, because that’s what I left the industry with right like why are you going to ask these people if there’s nothing you can do about it folks are going to check in at a well done it’s not like you can send them home, we’re under staffed we’re trying to get through service. And that was my big question when I came to CHOW! what is the point of asking people how they’re doing if I can’t do anything about it and what I’ve done in the in the last few years is that wanting to do something about it and to fix it is is a way to try to control the narrative. Folks don’t often share about how they’re feeling because they expect you to fix every part of it. They just want to be seen and heard, they want to know that there’s room for their personhood that they don’t have to continue to check stuff at the door, so that they could plaster a smile on their face and you know focus on, on the interaction at the dinner table. And so, yeah, there’s, there’s this. I recently went and I spoke at a conference where I modeled the temperature taken a room full of people, and I checked in at a medium well, I said I was medium well because I’m well done is, you know, I’ve been on the grill for far too long. juicy is rare, rare is juicy full of life. And so I checked in at a mid well and I said because I’m really excited to be here and I want to be in my body because I love this conversation but my shoes hurt so much right now that it makes it hard for me to think of anything and I was really excited and I asked everybody who attended. Did you feel moved to take your shoes off and give them to me. Did you feel like I wasn’t valuable in the skills that I was teaching you simply because my feet hurt and they were all like no why and I’m like well there you go and that’s why we can sit with a well done because we all are inherently valuable, even when we show up at a well done in fact we’re probably giving permission for someone else to be like, I’m also at a mid well thanks for saying that because now I can get a vent out and you know really like myself and go out and get the job done.
Andrew: – Yeah, no, you know, there’s a value in just being able to say it out loud, because yeah, you hold on to all this stuff and yeah, that’s no good. So I wanted to kind of ask you if it’s okay to. So, let’s say I was interested in going to one of these meetings, like how would I go about that.
Jasmine: – So our, our meetings are hybrid, which means that they have physical locations and they are also online. So you would visit www.chowco.org. And you would click on our meeting calendar, our meeting calendar will tell you what times we’re meeting these times and dates don’t ever change. Okay, so we do that so that folks can, you know, depend on a certain meeting consider it their home group. So they never change. We have dedicated spaces for women and for men. And we are rolling out within the next quarter our Spanish speaking meeting and our LGBTQ plus meeting. And so what you would do is you would visit the calendar you look at a timeframe that best matches your availability you click on it and it would give you a physical address or zoom room, and you can join us in either capacity. And what ends up happening is that if you’re in a zoom room, you can keep your camera off you can use an alias if you’re feeling like you want to protect your identity and you are not very confident. Just yet showing up and, and, you know, being forward facing. So you can use an alias you can keep your camera off you can share in the chat. And it looks like as every single meeting starts off with an icebreaker, just so that we can get to know ourselves and each other. It’s really brief exercise then we launch into the temperature take which is you know on a scale of rare to well done. And then every meeting has a topic. And so the meeting is moderated by someone that we call an expert so much like in a restaurant right is facilitating the conversation between the front of the house and the back of the house, which can introduce resources if they are requested. So if somebody shows up and they just want to vent about, or they want to save place to share for example make share about intimate partner violence, they’re well within their rights to do that and then they can stay on for an additional half hour after the meeting and say I need some time to do that. So for folks who are experiencing intimate partner violence and the expert is trained to sit with them, get them to the right organization spend time with them while they’re filling out forms or doing the research and then checks in with them afterwards to see what progress they’re making. So there’s a topic or a theme to discuss that typically comes as a result are expos are expertly trained folks who for example if you have a room with a bunch of folks who are checking in at a well done one because they haven’t had one person is sharing they haven’t had a day off and another one because you know they’re experiencing a breakup and another one is experiencing a friendship breakup, they can kind of like find a warm common theme between all of them and they might say today let’s talk about insecurities or lack of balance. And we’ll ask thoughtful open ended questions to get a conversation started the meetings typically last about an hour, you can drop your email in the chat if you want somebody to check in with you after the meeting or you can leave it in person if the meeting is happening in person, and that’s kind of what a CHOW! meeting looks like.
Andrew: – That’s cool. Yeah, and it wasn’t quite clear on the website. Is that the same as the muse or is that something different.
Jasmine: – So we actually, after doing the meetings for a couple of years. We had folks asking us really great questions. Like, hey, you know, have you, for example, you know it’s really bothersome that we use language like chef is really OCD about his night pearl. OCD is an actual diagnosis and it kind of feels achy that we use language like that and we’re like yeah, that’s actually a really, really good point. Also, have you, you know, so many folks that I that I work with in the industry who are absolute rock stars or folks for example who are neurodivergent and might have ADHD because they’re phenomenal at hyper focus and like managing multiple things at the same time. So we started to wonder, like, what is the connection? How does mental health show up specifically in our industry? How does recovery from substance misuse show up in our industry? And what are the kind of skills that we can give to folks so that they can recognize all of these things and the way that these issues affect workplace wellness and then give them resources so they can support themselves in each other. And so we came up with a four hour course and the four hour course is our amuse mental health course, which is offered multiple times about three times a month. It is completely free. You purchase a $15 placeholder, which is returned to you on the day that you show up for your training. And you show up and you take a four hour course, which is accredited now and you learn all about how mental health and recovery show up in the food beverage hospitality industry as well as about assertive communication and what we call the eight ingredients of wellness and how that intersectionality can create a culture of wellness.
Andrew: – Okay, so amuse for our course, the meetings are about one hour. If I understand, meetings, do they cost or
Jasmine: – No, they’re completely free.
Andrew: – That’s great to. Yeah. So yeah, I guess you really just need to pay the placeholder and then that gets returned to you and
Jasmine: – That’s Right. And that’s only for the amuse mental health course. The meetings are completely free. We are very fortunate. We work. We get donations from government funding. We receive government funding and we work with donors as well who are able to, you know, donate funds so that we can keep all of our programming free of cost in recognition of the fact that for food beverage hospitality workers which are often underpaid and underinsured, it can be incredibly challenging to go to therapy and honestly, there’s a staggering statistic that the food beverage hospitality industry is so big and growing it’s such a fast rate that currently we’re a very clinical mental health care provider where to fill up their docket completely with food beverage hospitality workers, we would actually outnumber them 29 times over. Yeah, and so CHOW! is born out of a need. We that’s why we say CHOW! is us helping us so being able to sit shoulder to shoulder with folks and share about the things that we know and have been through so that, you know, my experiences road map. We’re not going to align with yours right we’ve already identified a key difference between front of the house and back of the house for example, but you and I can definitely relate on lack of boundaries not ever having had a Saturday off right. And we can have a conversation together we can support each other even though our life experience is just a little bit different because we’ve all experienced the same vocationally specific challenges.
Andrew: – Yeah, well that’s really, really cool. How many people do you think come through CHOW! every year, or do you have statistics and how many people you end up helping month by month or.
Jasmine: Yeah, we do. We do we’re actually we are honing in on systems to trace our impact 2025 I think is going to be the year that we get those systems down completely I think last year. We have an awesome infographic up on our website for every single year that we’ve been operational that tallies up on average we give about 300 training hours a month. We have between 200 and 400 meeting hours. We have 300 training hours a year in between 200 and 400 meeting hours a year as well. Our goal is to get to 20,000 people in 2025. And I think the coolest number that we found so far is that we have a 90% I think this month we’re at 90% a 90% return rate. So folks who attend a CHOW! meeting 90% of them come back to attend a second CHOW! meeting, which is very, very cool for us.
That is awesome. Yeah. So wow 16,000 people 16,000 or 100,000. Wow, I said it and I said
that’s a big number. Yeah. Well, we didn’t really talk about this beforehand but I definitely want to talk after this because I’d like to share the link with our restaurant group. So see if some of the people in my restaurant group need help that sort of thing so.
Jasmine: – I would love that and I, you know, anyone who’s listening to I would encourage you we have really cool materials outreach materials we have a poster that talks about CHOW!’s mission and a super easy to scan QR code that takes you directly to a meeting, and we can ship those out to anyone who’s interested. We encourage folks will ship it to you for free put it up on a communication board, you know, share it with the groups that you work for you work with, or that you’re an owner and operator for it’s a great great free resource for folks to take advantage of and folks can’t take advantage of it if they don’t know, you know that it exists.
Andrew: – For sure. Yeah. A couple other things I wanted to ask you about. I saw on the site, there’s a statistic that for every dollar spent in mental health. It was a return of four. I was wondering where where that number came from or how how you calculate that.
Jasmine: – Yeah, so we have been we are very big on collaboration so we have partner organizations and this was actually very baffling to me coming from the industry in the very first year that I worked at CHOW! I was like don’t let anybody take our research We should trademark our education and Aaron Boiler CEO was like hey, collaboration not competition, everybody, you know, the more people know about all the programs that is success that is the sustainable workforce. And so we work with partner organizations like seven shifts for example seven shifts works primarily with POS systems and what they do is they collate data based on what employees are reporting what owners and operators are reporting and so we also work with all of the other organizations for food beverage hospitality workers like Chad and not nine to five restaurant after hours Southern smoke which does financial assistance we actually CHOW! belongs to what we call the more coalition, which is all of the organizations that are in the community and set to support food beverage hospitality workers in some way or another right through financial mental health, any kind of assistance we follow a full spectrum in this coalition. And so we all share information between us. And then we coupled it with something that we called listening tours and think tanks. We were in the state of Colorado and we conducted anonymous surveys with staff members and then we took that information and talked to the owners and operators to see what was working and what wasn’t and if that information that had been reported actually resonated with them if they were aware. So, a lot of those numbers that we put together, including the ones shared by partners which is that every dollar invested in mental health yields a $4 investment return is because all of the cultural shifts that folks have started to invest in and I’ll give you a very practical one for you to think about. So, we’ve had restaurants share with us that when they eliminated when they were able to tally up how much they were spending in shift drinks, they were able to actually come up with a comprehensive budget that the restaurant voted on what they wanted to invest it in. And so, the employees voted that they wanted to do that. And so, they actually got a wellness allotment per month instead of getting that shift drink like let’s do a pizza party with the money that we would have spent on a shift drink. The employees voted that they wanted a wellness allotment and so everybody got X amount of money per month to be able to pay for their yoga subscription or to be able to pay for their gym membership or to be able to pay and they notice that their turnover. And so, the employees who were most often treated that is the, I think that’s what we’re hearing where the number comes from is that in a place where we are all just kind of treated like hustle workers right. There’s this understanding erroneous understanding that most folks who work in hospitality they’re just college students who are taking a couple of shifts until they end up where they’re supposed to end up in their career. And so, from personal experience, I worked with plenty of people who took this very seriously as their career this was the place. And it can be very hard for folks like that to feel like a business is investing in them professionally, because it’s like, okay, well you’re a chef, you’re going to be a chef for as long as you stay here until you go chef somewhere else. It is very rare and very new and innovative and we’re seeing this a vast increase of it of owners and operators who are saying great. Okay, so I’m going to invest in an EAP for my employees so that they have financial assistance so that this chef can, you know, get a 401k and she can get, you know, coaching so that she can come up with a reserve so that she can take her dream vacation every year, right. And so, this is the cultural shift that we are hoping to see we’re trying to we’re trying to push for personal and professional development that is going to absolutely yield a great return of investment because folks end up staying for longer they end up staying happier they end up staying healthier they end up referring their friends to bring them to the business. And everybody thrives right.
Andrew: – No, that’s awesome. Yeah, that’s super cool. Yeah, I mean turnover alone. That that’ll each you live and training costs and
Jasmine: – onboarding. Oh my goodness.
Andrew: – Yeah. If nothing else in the time wasted and filling out the paperwork every time.
Jasmine: – Of course, yeah, and you know for those of you listening who don’t know it is wow so much paperwork in the in the food beverage hospitality industry.
Andrew: – I did want to ask you to. I think it was the green rooms. What are those because I wasn’t sure if I understood the concept but it seemed cool.
Jasmine: – It is I mean I were new to them 2024 was the year that we launched them and we’re perfecting them in 2025 so we started hearing from folks were listening organization right so folks typically come to us and they’re like have you considered this and we’re like, huh, okay, walk me through that what does that mean. And so we started hearing from folks that so much of what folks who are not in the food beverage hospitality industry experience as fun is like, you know, a conference of festival of food festival. And this is like, you know, in Colorado, for example, come spring season, it’s food festival season right. And so you are going to go somewhere and you are going to enjoy a variety of foods that are being. There’s one in Colorado Springs that is phenomenal. And you get all of the best restaurants that are, you know, you pay for an entry ticket and you go around and you get all of the little tidbits and stuff and so for most people, these cool events that they go to our. Put on and worked at by food beverage hospitality workers who are exhausted and who often don’t get to experience that themselves and so we started actually setting up green rooms at these conferences. Food festivals anywhere where there’s hospitality workers working for hours to frame an experience for folks to come and enjoy food at a venue. We will go set up a green room and what that looks like is we have any partners who come out and they make mocktails. And then we have massagers that you can sit in we have leg massagers head massagers shoulder and massagers and we set up in an area. And so folks either before they start, you know, the food festival, for example, or the conference or after they finish we run a green we run the green room for the duration of the festival so that whenever folks are getting breaks they can literally come get a massage. They can come grab a protein bar they drink some water they have a mocktail they have a conversation with somebody at CHOW! that can check in with them and then they go right back to the stand. So the green rooms are essentially a way to treat the rock stars like rock stars and give them a little bit of space and a little bit of self preservation and self service in those experiences where they are typically the memory makers the folks who are foundationally working an event so that everyone else can enjoy it and giving them the space to be able to invest in their wellness and just chill for a second and experience that that rock star treatment before going right back to it.
Andrew: – Yeah, that would have been nice. I’ve worked several of those. Have you ever heard wine and Chile and Santa Fe.
Jasmine:- I have not no.
Andrew: – It’s a huge festival. It’s exactly what you’re talking about but yeah,
Jasmine:- yeah,
Andrew: – if you work all day you barely eat you serve 1000 people and you go get drunk afterwards.
Jasmine: – So yeah, so yeah, for most of I mean for me it was like large scale catering events were like that it was like a blurry you’d wake up the next day your whole body was hurting and then you had to like clock into work and you were like, what and I actually I love that that affirmation. That’s what we hear from folks a lot. I wish this had been available when I was doing X, Y, Z right.
Andrew: – Yeah,
Jasmine:- how we know our temperature gauges is landing in the in the appropriate place and we’re being supportive and in the most helpful and relevant way right.
Andrew: – I did want to ask you to how much do you think this organization came from COVID and the reaction to COVID because I feel like that changed the dialogue a lot.
Jasmine: – That’s a great question. Well, I think personally we benefited from COVID. I think the reason why we quote unquote blew up like this was because you know we started out out of Denver and so it was sure that first meeting was 32 people in John Hinman’s bakery. But what ended up happening is that COVID happened a few weeks after that and so then folks were referring people outside of the state of Colorado and all of a sudden like you were logging into a room and there were people in Portugal and in Australia and in Canada and you were like what. And so being able to take all of our programming online was a massive benefit to us because we now consider ourselves an international nonprofit. Our attendees are from everywhere in the world. Our rooms are so mixed. So it was a benefit for us. I my personal opinion is that that the pandemic uncovered a lot of existing blind spots. I think these things had been historically happening in the food beverage hospitality industry. People didn’t have their phone in their hands as much as what I think because there was there’s so much of what we call mask aisle abuse now right which is the abuse that folks who worked through the pandemic were receiving from patrons who refused to wear a mask when they were going into. You know their establishment and had to and there were folks who were taping right so throughout the pandemic if your experience was anything like mine every other week there was a viral video of somebody losing their mind and an establishment saying you will not tell me what to do with my body I will not wear a mask I want to pick up this. The new part was these videos going viral at the frequency that they were going viral for me. But in truth even though my experience with front of the house was very very brief in my beginning before I landed in back of the house that had always been true folks had kind of always acted a little bit of abusive and entitled. And we just didn’t. You know we weren’t at home watching behind our phones. And so what I think is that and we’ve heard a lot from folks that you know folks in the food beverage hospitality industry you know they got unemployment now nobody wants to work. Well it is my personal opinion that if folks are finally making a fair and dignified wage on unemployment for the first time in their lives even though they’ve been working in a certain career field for 15, 16,10 years. That means that that blind spot was there before folks have been historically underpaid and it wasn’t until the pandemic that folks were like hey I work with my body in a kitchen that keeps me overheating for hours I haven’t eaten I haven’t sat down. And I can make more money on unemployment at home. Something’s wrong with this picture right. And so to me the pandemic uncovered the fact that we had been historically marginalized and largely invisible. I think it’s been a process of being treated or being asked to be essential workers which we have been I think all along and not compensated as such which then became glaring during the pandemic.
Andrew: – Ture. Sure. And I was also kind of thinking about it in terms of this the ratio of people willing to work to spots that are open. And you know a lot of the ownership and management it’s easy to ignore problems when you have three other people who are ready to start tomorrow. But when people aren’t coming into apply all of a sudden that balance of power does start shifting to where oh we need to take care of these people we need to you know really take the mental health and wellness of my staff to heart. Absolutely. No one will show up otherwise.
Jasmine: – No you’re absolutely. You know we have this. It’s very funny when I came to the United States and I started working here I started hearing the term the band of misfit toys, which is you know a phrase that folks regularly use to describe people who work back at the house. And it wasn’t until I came to Chow that I was like what an intentional derogatory term that I have at times used about myself because if I believe that I am just a member of a band of misfit toys. I’m not really standing up to my full boundary to say I deserve health care I deserve fair hours I deserve fair compensation. And so there’s so many different small ways in which culturally and historically we’ve minimized the contributions of food beverage hospitality workers. And you’re hitting on a great point here it used to be up until recently that if you left you got into a verbal fight with your manager and you left at midnight you know by 11 o’clock the next day you could have filled out an application somewhere else and you’d be employed right. And that has that is changing too so the investment of employees into a business and the investment of the business in employees as well, which we hope leads to what we call the sustainable workforce right where it’s mutually beneficial, we are we celebrate personhood and the contributions of every person who’s a part of the industry is saying I don’t care who you are as long as you clock in put a smile on your face and get this done right.
Andrew: – Yeah. For sure. So, what what does Chow have coming up what what are you excited about her.
Jasmine: – Gosh, so many things.
Andrew: – So many things.
Jasmine: – So many things. Well, may is mental health awareness month. And that is a really big month for us. We do this really cool project where we put together all of our resources, invitations for all of our programming, we, you know, put through all of the descriptions for every single thing that we offer we put together a bunch of merch, we put it in a binder and we send it to businesses so that they can find out about Chow and what we do. May is also our for cause partnership month and it’s where businesses that we’ve partnered with in the past that we go out and we do pre shifts in the community, or either virtually, virtually or in person, we go and we sit with a team for 20 to 30 minutes and walk them through all of the Chow programming walk them through the temperature take when is an appropriate time to do it with your with your team. So we do our pre shifts and typically folks who have worked with us in some capacity in the past are really passionate about supporting financially to make sure that our programming remains free of cost. And so we do our for cause partnerships where there’s businesses that will support Chow in the month of May and say, we are going to be selling mocktails for example and donating the proceeds of those mocktails or we want to have a mental health centered event and we’re going to be donating the proceeds to Chow. So May is an incredibly busy month for us because it is a very warm touch point in the community it’s where most folks come to us and they’re like okay, walk us through a mental health conversation and how can we help. And so it’s a big month of partnership and collaboration and then shortly after that we are launching our Spanish speaking and LGBTQ plus meeting so it is going to be a very fruitful and busy few months for us. And then recovery month in September, which is huge for us as well.
Andrew: – Awesome. Awesome. You got a lot to do. It sounds like.
Jasmine: – Yes, and you know I tell folks this all the time but I’m only half joking. I have a daughter who’s 10 who thinks she might be a chef when she grows up. So I’ve got about eight years to fix the industry. Before she integrates so you know I got a I’m rolling up my sleeves and really hoping that sustainable workforce works at a really good pace to welcome her when she’s of age.
Andrew: – People that are interested in your projects and your goals, or should they follow you or where can they find out more.
Jasmine: – Yeah, so we are most active on Instagram and Facebook. And we have I would encourage everybody to check out our blog. We have a wellness blog where we just put together a whole bunch of free opportunities that even other organizations are doing. So, you can like visit our website that’s chowco.org on a Monday, and we’ll have provided you with a summary of really cool free stuff for food, beverage, hospitality workers and from other organization as well, in what everyone is working on. So our website, and we are active on TikTok as well and you can find us on LinkedIn. We are present on all the social medias platforms, except the strangely political ones.
Andrew: – Fair enough, uh, Well Perfect! Jasmine Thanks you. I don’t think I introduced you in the beginning, because we were so excited to just started talking. If you are listing all those links to all the social will be at the show notes. Yeah, thank you again for everything you are doing, and taking the time. and I’m really excited and hopefully we can work together.
Jasmine: – Absolutely, thank you and to everyone that’s listening and to you as well. You know, when I first started doing this kind of work, our outreached work, there were so many closed doors at the beginning. Folks were like, I don’t know what you are talking about, we don’t have a problem. So, it is such a privilege, truly a privilege of the work that we are doing and a part of my job that I love so very much when folks are able to reach out and give us the platform to talk about the work that we’re doing. It’s collaborations and conversations like this that I truly believe are normalizing, right, being able to talk about mental health and being able to exchange a little bit of our of our stories. And so, I’m incredibly grateful to be here today and I want to thank you for the opportunity to talk about our mission that’s super important to us.
Andrew: – Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you again
Andrew: – Thank you for taking the time to listen today. If you enjoyed this, please leave a review, like, even just one moment to hit that like button does really help people find this show. Everyone who listens, thank you, you are my people, keep rocking on, have a great service, and please come back to check us out. We send out every episodes Tuesday and starting soon Thursday. Rock on.
Today we are talking to Jasmine Parks-Papadopoulos. Jasmine joins us from Chow, Culinary Hospitality Outreach and Wellness. So this was a very powerful conversation I was extremely happy to have. Jasmine’s background is in the back of house. She does not shy away from telling us about her experiences in asking about mental health and the lukewarm at best reception that got. I was extremely touched by their temperature check. How are you feeling on a scale of rare to well done? I definitely think I am going to use that in the future. And we get to talk about the significance of May for their organization. Industry challenges, the goals and growth of Chow and definitely just a powerful episode where we really really get into it. So I hope this serves you and thank you for listening to Serves You Right.
How did you end up, you know, joining Chow? How did all that happen? Yeah. I joined Chow as a meeting attendee. I had actually heard about Chow when I was still in the industry. I was the head of food and beverage and executive chef for a pretty high profile hotel group in Colorado. And I had made it about halfway through the pandemic, still working. A lot of the folks that were, that I was managing were in the process of being furloughed. And right at that point, you know, where that human struggle was really becoming, hey, this isn’t going to be a couple of weeks, but this might be long term. I started looking for resources to be able to support my staff. And I came across Chow, which at the time was just a very small grassroots support meeting in Denver, Colorado. And I asked the GM of the property that I was working for. I said, you know, there’s this group called Chow and they support mental health for food beverage hospitality workers. They do this thing called the temperature take where, you know, when folks clock in at the beginning of their shift, they ask how the staff is doing on a scale of rare to well done. And the GM said, okay, you’re going to open up that can of worms and you’re going to do what about it. So you get a bunch of well done. What are you doing to send them home? We still have a shift to get through. You’re not a therapist. I don’t see the benefit of bringing this resource. You’re going to open up a can of worms that, you know, we can’t even fathom the consequences of just drop it. And I did happily. I dropped it happily. It was, I am very candid about my experience in the in the food beverage hospitality industry. I was not a very motivating, supportive, or open minded chef. I was a mentor very much the way that I was mentored, which was coming up and fine dining in Europe. There was a lot of aggression and violence there. And so, you know, I dropped it. And then I left the industry, and I didn’t know how to take care of myself in any capacity. I had had no work life balance. I had no hobbies. I had no friendships that weren’t the trauma bonds from the industry. I hadn’t done a lot of, you know, personal development in the years that I had been a chef. And so I pursued a coaching certification because I wanted to learn how to take care of myself, right? And so I was able to learn the basics. How long does a, does a person have to sleep to feel human? What does it look like to eat a meal that is not cold? And so a couple of months into that, I reached out to the organization and I said, do you need any volunteers? Is there, can I, you know, offer some coaching for the support groups that you all are running? And the volunteer that I had reached out to who is now Chow’s CEO, Aaron Boyle, that’s how long we’ve been working together, said, yeah, come to a meeting and check it out. And I thought to myself, I don’t want to go to this meeting. I just want to be able to give back to the community. I’m not trying to sit in a support group, trying to talk to people. And then three meetings in, I was absolutely hooked. It was incredibly powerful, even though I had been going to therapy at the time, because I recognized that I needed a lot of support to integrate into life. There was a lot of background context that I had to explain to a traditional therapist, right? There was a lot of, well, boundaries in the industry look like this. So it’s not like, you know, I can. I got one Saturday off last month. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Yeah. Yes, yeah. 110. Or, you know, gosh, even being able to celebrate holidays for the first time in however many years and not knowing, you know, what to do with myself outside of that, not even not to mention so much of my identity, right, as a chef who’s wrapped up in my in my profession. And so I walked into a child meeting and everybody was like, yeah, we get it been there. And so I started off as a meeting attendee and then slowly as the organization started to grow during the pandemic, you know, a lot of our programming became hybrid. So you can now access those support groups from anywhere in the world. And then there was a need for education. So we developed educational courses. And then after that, it was like, how do we resource broker for folks who might not know how to get connected to relevant organizations. And so it grew so quickly and there was more of an internal need for support and I’ve now been with Chow almost since the very beginning about about five years. I think about three or four of those have been full time in a non volunteer capacity. Awesome. You know, hearing you talk through all that. It may be wonder, is it something to do with the hospitality industry itself. It, you know, because on this podcast, I’ve talked to a chef now, distributor, a couple of servers bartenders mostly because that’s my main background before I got management. And every one of them, there’s some tale of working long hours, drinking too much, having too much fun or not enough fun or some combination of all those things and is it the nature of the beast or the animal? Oh, I love that question. It is the hospitality. What came first, the chicken or the egg, there’s a great chef, Patrick Mulmady, who heads up an organization called I got your back out of California, who asks the very impactful question, did folks come to the industry broken or did we break them when they got here? My personal experience is that I’m a third generation chef, my father is a chef, my father, parents, exactly the way he chefs are very aggressively very loudly. The dysfunction that I played an active participation role in in the industry was very similar to the dysfunction that I experienced in my family of origin for a very long time. I’ve had these conversations on a personal level with so many folks that worked in the industry where the chaos is something incredibly recognizable to you if you grow up a certain way, right? The dysregulation of the noise, the really up and down kind of fluctuating paces, the havoc that it wreaks on your nervous system, it can feel comfortable for folks who grew up in dysfunctional environments. That was certainly my experience and it was true for me. There was a lot of what I was looking for and what I experienced as mentorship and support was essentially some kind of verbal abuse. As a person who had received so much of it, I was then able to really step into the role of the aggressor as a leader. I don’t, you know, a lot of the amends that I make still years out of the industry is how damaging I was to the people that I worked with because that was all I knew. To me, mentorship, I care about you means I yell at you. I use fear to make you submit. I use volume to make you stop what you are doing or to redirect you. And so, you know, I’ve heard from a lot of folks that that dysfunction is incredibly familiar, that pace that messes with your nervous system can be really, really comfortable when you’ve grown up in chaos. Yeah, no, I mean, that actually brings very true. I haven’t really thought of it that way. But when I, because, you know, before I got into restaurants, I worked at like a movie theater, you know, sort of servicing jobs. But when I started serving was when I kind of felt at home and I met chaos. I think some people hated or thrive in it. I was really thriving in it. I thought. And then 20 years later, you look back and you’re like, Oh, that’s that was a lot. That was a lot. Absolutely. You know, shout out to Chef Greg Baker, who talks about the quiet hour. And you know, you had asked how what kind of a role does this play. You know, Chef Greg Baker talks about how when we work in these in this marginalized pace where we work the hours where the world is active and operational. And then, you know, he says the restaurant quote unquote spits you out at 1am in the middle of the street where everyone you know and love is already asleep. And the only thing that’s open is the neighborhood dive bar. And you somehow have to find a way to come off of the incredible adrenaline surge of the service that you got through, you know, you haven’t eaten, you haven’t slept. And, you know, that there’s, you know, nowhere for you to go except to go have a couple of drinks and wind down. And at what point does that then become the new surround your neck? Right. No, no, I mean, I grew up in Santa Fe. Well, I grew up in Texas, but spent most of my professional career in Santa Fe and there’s a dive bar there the Matador and they can tell you they saw me most nights. You’re real very relatable for most industry folks for sure. I did want to, you know, one of my notes going through some of the stuff that you all did, who came up with the rare to well done and describing emotional like temperature, because I think that’s genius. It’s wonderful. We love food specific impact. Child believes that the community care that is going to create a sustainable workforce for food beverage hospitality workers is going to come with vocationally specific tools. So instead of using things that are really polarizing that we have to learn from scratch, we can borrow the skillset the soft skills that as hospitality workers we already have to be able to ultimately serve ourselves. And so the very first meeting that took place. Our founder, John Hinman, who is still very an active hospitality member in the Denver food beverage hospitality industry. He is the owner and operator of Hinman pies. So he had worked in food beverage hospitality and then, you know, started his recovery journey and then returned to the industry. And he saw a lot of those things that had influenced his substance misuse. He saw them still present in the industry. And so his goal became to talk about the pain that we can’t see is what he calls it. And, you know, his question was if we as hospitality workers get hurt on the job and instead of stepping off the line and, you know, we don’t go to the urgent care to get stitches we just glue it so that we could get through the shift. So if we are having such a challenging time addressing physical pain and sitting with physical pain. How challenging is it for us to even talk about that hurt that never even shows up. And so he invites a bunch of folks over to his bakery. He says, you know, we’re going to talk about the pain that we can’t see. And this meeting should have probably been just a couple of people, you know, getting together and having chat. And as it were, Anthony Burdane completed suicide just a couple of days before that. So it ended up being a full room of people. And he didn’t know how to start this conversation. And so he said, you know, here’s what I know about all of us is that we have so many descriptors for our food, both front of the house that has to sell that marbled juicy tender steak as well as the chef. We are all we have more words for food than we have for our feelings. So what if I correspond I make each temperature correspond with a set of feelings. And for folks who are listening who can’t picture it visually we actually at the beginning of all of our child discussion meetings, we put up a thermometer and with that thermometer is every single temperature from rare to well done and each temperature has five words under it that are you know frustrated and used stressed anxious so that you can kind of start to correlate these human feelings with the descriptors that you might already have in your back pocket because of your job. Yeah, definitely want to be more on the rare side from looking at it. No, but there’s so many days out walking to work and if I could just tell people filling a little medium well today. You know, like that that would help a lot when you kind of just internalize and keep it quiet. You know that was the that was a really great learning opportunity for me when I came to Chow I had this big question like what is the point of asking, because that’s what I left the industry with right like why are you going to ask these people if there’s nothing you can do about it folks are going to check in at a well done it’s not like you can send them home, we’re under staffed we’re trying to get through service. And that was my big question when I came to Chow what is the point of asking people how they’re doing if I can’t do anything about it and what I’ve done in the in the last few years is that wanting to do something about it and to fix it is is a way to try to control the narrative. Folks don’t often share about how they’re feeling because they expect you to fix every part of it. They just want to be seen and heard, they want to know that there’s room for their personhood that they don’t have to continue to check stuff at the door, so that they could plaster a smile on their face and you know focus on on the interaction at the dinner table. And so, yeah, there’s there’s this. I recently went and I spoke at a conference where I modeled the temperature taken a room full of people, and I checked in at a medium well, I said I was medium well because I’m well done is, you know, I’ve been on the grill for far too long. juicy is rare, rare is juicy full of life. And so I checked in at a mid well and I said because I’m really excited to be here and I want to be in my body because I love this conversation but my shoes hurt so much right now that it makes it hard for me to think of anything and I was really excited and I asked everybody who attended. Did you feel moved to take your shoes off and give them to me. Did you feel like I wasn’t valuable in the skills that I was teaching you simply because my feet hurt and they were all like no why and I’m like well there you go and that’s why we can sit with a well done because we all are inherently valuable, even when we show up at a well done in fact we’re probably giving permission for someone else to be like, I’m also at a mid well thanks for saying that because now I can get a vent out and you know really like myself and go out and get the job done. Yeah, no, you know, there’s a value in just being able to say it out loud, because yeah, you hold on to all this stuff and yeah, that’s no good. So I wanted to kind of ask you if it’s okay to. So, let’s say I was interested in going to one of these meetings, like how would I go about that. So our, our meetings are hybrid, which means that they have physical locations and they are also online. So you would visit www chowco.org. And you would click on our meeting calendar, our meeting calendar will tell you what times we’re meeting these times and dates don’t ever change. Okay, so we do that so that folks can, you know, depend on a certain meeting consider it their home group. So they never change. We have dedicated spaces for women and for men. And we are rolling out within the next quarter our Spanish speaking meeting and our LGBTQ plus meeting. And so what you would do is you would visit the calendar you look at a timeframe that best matches your availability you click on it and it would give you a physical address or zoom room, and you can join us in either capacity. And what ends up happening is that if you’re in a zoom room, you can keep your camera off you can use an alias if you’re feeling like you want to protect your identity and you are not very confident. Just yet showing up and, and, you know, being forward facing. So you can use an alias you can keep your camera off you can share in the chat. And it looks like as every single meeting starts off with an icebreaker, just so that we can get to know ourselves and each other. It’s really brief exercise then we launch into the temperature take which is you know on a scale of rare to well done. And then every meeting has a topic. And so the meeting is moderated by someone that we call an expose so much like in a restaurant right is facilitating the conversation between the front of the house and the back of the house, which can introduce resources if they are requested. So if somebody shows up and they just want to vent about, or they want to save place to share for example make share about intimate partner violence, they’re well within their rights to do that and then they can stay on for an additional half hour after the meeting and say I need some time to do that. So for folks who are experiencing intimate partner violence and the expose is trained to sit with them, get them to the right organization spend time with them while they’re filling out forms or doing the research and then checks in with them afterwards to see what progress they’re making. So there’s a topic or a theme to discuss that typically comes as a result are expos are expertly trained folks who for example if you have a room with a bunch of folks who are checking in at a well done one because they haven’t had one person is sharing they haven’t had a day off and another one because you know they’re they’re experiencing a breakup and another one is experiencing a friendship breakup, they can kind of like find a warm common theme between all of them and they might say today let’s talk about insecurities or lack of balance. And we’ll ask thoughtful open ended questions to get a conversation started the meetings typically last about an hour, you can drop your email in the chat if you want somebody to check in with you after the meeting or you can leave it in person if the meeting is happening in person, and that’s kind of what a child meeting looks like. That’s cool. Yeah, and it wasn’t quite clear on the website. Is that the same as the muse or is that something different. So we actually, after doing the meetings for a couple of years. We had folks asking us really great questions. Like, hey, you know, have you, for example, you know it’s really bothersome that we use language like chef is really OCD about his night pearl. OCD is an actual diagnosis and it kind of feels achy that we use language like that and we’re like yeah, that’s actually a really, really good point. Also, have you, you know, so many folks that I that I work with in the industry who are absolute rock stars or folks for example who are neurodivergent and might have ADHD because they’re phenomenal at hyper focus and like managing multiple things at the same time. So we started to wonder, like, what is the connection? How does mental health show up specifically in our industry? How does recovery from substance misuse show up in our industry? And what are the kind of skills that we can give to folks so that they can recognize all of these things and the way that these issues affect workplace wellness and then give them resources so they can support themselves in each other. And so we came up with a four hour course and the four hour course is our amuse mental health course, which is offered multiple times about three times a month. It is completely free. You purchase a $15 placeholder, which is returned to you on the day that you show up for your training. And you show up and you take a four hour course, which is accredited now and you learn all about how mental health and recovery show up in the food beverage hospitality industry as well as about assertive communication and what we call the eight ingredients of wellness and how that intersectionality can create a culture of wellness. Okay, so amuse for our course, the meetings are about one hour. If I understand, meetings, do they cost or No, they’re completely free. That’s great to. Yeah. So yeah, I guess you really just need to pay the placeholder and then that gets returned to you and That’s right. And that’s only for the amuse mental health course. The meetings are completely free. We are very fortunate. We work. We get donations from government funding. We receive government funding and we work with donors as well who are able to, you know, donate funds so that we can keep all of our programming free of cost in recognition of the fact that for food beverage hospitality workers which are often underpaid and underinsured, it can be incredibly challenging to go to therapy and honestly, there’s a staggering statistic that the food beverage hospitality industry is so big and growing it’s such a fast rate that currently we’re a very clinical mental health care provider where to fill up their docket completely with food beverage hospitality workers, we would actually outnumber them 29 times over. Yeah, and so Chow is born out of a need. We that’s why we say Chow is us helping us so being able to sit shoulder to shoulder with folks and share about the things that we know and have been through so that, you know, my experiences road map. We’re not going to align with yours right we’ve already identified a key difference between front of the house and back of the house for example, but you and I can definitely relate on lack of boundaries not ever having had a Saturday off right. And we can have a conversation together we can support each other even though our life experience is just a little bit different because we’ve all experienced the same vocationally specific challenges. Yeah, well that’s really, really cool. How many people do you think come through Chow every year, or do you have statistics and how many people you end up helping month by month or. Yeah, we do. We do we’re actually we are honing in on systems to trace our impact 2025 I think is going to be the year that we get those systems down completely I think last year. We have an awesome infographic up on our website for every single year that we’ve been operational that tallies up on average we give about 300 training hours a month. We have between 200 and 400 meeting hours. We have 300 training hours a year in between 200 and 400 meeting hours a year as well. Our goal is to get to 20,000 people in 2025. And I think the coolest number that we found so far is that we have a 90% I think this month we’re at 90% a 90% return rate. So folks who attend a child meeting 90% of them come back to attend a second child meeting, which is very, very cool for us. That is awesome. Yeah. So wow 16,000 people 16,000 or 100,000. Wow, I said it and I said that’s a big number. Yeah. Well, we didn’t really talk about this beforehand but I definitely want to talk after this because I’d like to share the link with our restaurant group. So see if some of the people in my restaurant group need help that sort of thing so. I would love that and I, you know, anyone who’s listening to I would encourage you we have really cool materials outreach materials we have a poster that talks about child’s mission and a super easy to scan QR code that takes you directly to a meeting, and we can ship those out to anyone who’s interested. We encourage folks will ship it to you for free put it up on a communication board, you know, share it with the groups that you work for you work with, or that you’re an owner and operator for it’s a great great free resource for folks to take advantage of and folks can’t take advantage of it if they don’t know, you know that it exists. For sure. Yeah. A couple other things I wanted to ask you about. I saw on the site, there’s a statistic that for every dollar spent in mental health. It was a return of four. I was wondering where where that number came from or how how you calculate that. Yeah, so we have been we are very big on collaboration so we have partner organizations and this was actually very baffling to me coming from the industry in the very first year that I worked at child I was like don’t let anybody take our research We should trademark our education and Aaron Boiler CEO was like hey, collaboration not competition, everybody, you know, the more people know about all the programs that is success that is the sustainable workforce. And so we work with partner organizations like seven shifts for example seven shifts works primarily with POS systems and what they do is they collate data based on what employees are reporting what owners and operators are reporting and so we also work with all of the other organizations for food beverage hospitality workers like Chad and not nine to five restaurant after hours Southern smoke which does financial assistance we actually child belongs to what we call the more coalition, which is all of the organizations that are in the community and set to support food beverage hospitality workers in some way or another right through financial mental health, any kind of assistance we follow a full spectrum in this coalition. And so we all share information between us. And then we coupled it with something that we called listening tours and think tanks. We were in the state of Colorado and we conducted anonymous surveys with staff members and then we took that information and talked to the owners and operators to see what was working and what wasn’t and if that information that had been reported actually resonated with them if they were aware. So, a lot of those numbers that we put together, including the ones shared by partners which is that every dollar invested in mental health yields a $4 investment return is because all of the cultural shifts that folks have started to invest in and I’ll give you a very practical one for you to think about. So, we’ve had restaurants share with us that when they eliminated when they were able to tally up how much they were spending in shift drinks, they were able to actually come up with a comprehensive budget that the restaurant voted on what they wanted to invest it in. And so, the employees voted that they wanted to do that. And so, they actually got a wellness allotment per month instead of getting that shift drink like let’s do a pizza party with the money that we would have spent on a shift drink. The employees voted that they wanted a wellness allotment and so everybody got X amount of money per month to be able to pay for their yoga subscription or to be able to pay for their gym membership or to be able to pay and they notice that their turnover. And so, the employees who were most often treated that is the, I think that’s what we’re hearing where the number comes from is that in a place where we are all just kind of treated like hustle workers right. There’s this understanding erroneous understanding that most folks who work in hospitality they’re just college students who are taking a couple of shifts until they end up where they’re supposed to end up in their career. And so, from personal experience, I worked with plenty of people who took this very seriously as their career this was the place. And it can be very hard for folks like that to feel like a business is investing in them professionally, because it’s like, okay, well you’re a chef, you’re going to be a chef for as long as you stay here until you go chef somewhere else. It is very rare and very new and innovative and we’re seeing this a vast increase of it of owners and operators who are saying great. Okay, so I’m going to invest in an EAP for my employees so that they have financial assistance so that this chef can, you know, get a 401k and she can get, you know, coaching so that she can come up with a reserve so that she can take her dream vacation every year, right. And so, this is the cultural shift that we are hoping to see we’re trying to we’re trying to push for personal and professional development that is going to absolutely yield a great return of investment because folks end up staying for longer they end up staying happier they end up staying healthier they end up referring their friends to bring them to the business. And everybody thrives right. No, that’s awesome. Yeah, that’s that’s super cool. Yeah, I mean turnover alone. That that’ll each you live and training costs and onboarding. Oh my goodness. Yeah. If nothing else in the time wasted and filling out the paperwork every time. Of course, yeah, and you know for those of you listening who don’t know it is wow so much paperwork in the in the food beverage hospitality industry. I did want to ask you to. I think it was the green rooms. What are those because I wasn’t sure if I understood the concept but it seemed cool. It is I mean I were new to them 2024 was the year that we launched them and we’re perfecting them in 2025 so we started hearing from folks were listening organization right so folks typically come to us and they’re like have you considered this and we’re like, huh, okay, walk me through that what does that mean. And so we started hearing from folks that so much of what folks who are not in the food beverage hospitality industry experience as fun is like, you know, a conference of festival of food festival. And this is like, you know, in Colorado, for example, come spring season, it’s food festival season right. And so you are going to go somewhere and you are going to enjoy a variety of foods that are being. There’s one in Colorado Springs that is phenomenal. And you get all of the best restaurants that are, you know, you pay for an entry ticket and you go around and you get all of the little tidbits and stuff and so for most people, these cool events that they go to our. Put on and worked at by food beverage hospitality workers who are exhausted and who often don’t get to experience that themselves and so we started actually setting up green rooms at these conferences. Food festivals anywhere where there’s hospitality workers working for hours to frame an experience for folks to come and enjoy food at a venue. We will go set up a green room and what that looks like is we have any partners who come out and they make mocktails. And then we have massagers that you can sit in we have leg massagers head massagers shoulder and massagers and we set up in an area. And so folks either before they start, you know, the food festival, for example, or the conference or after they finish we run a green we run the green room for the duration of the festival so that whenever folks are getting breaks they can literally come get a massage. They can come grab a protein bar they drink some water they have a mocktail they have a conversation with somebody at child that can check in with them and then they go right back to the stand. So the green rooms are essentially a way to treat the rock stars like rock stars and give them a little bit of space and a little bit of self preservation and self service in those experiences where they are typically the memory makers the folks who are foundationally working an event so that everyone else can enjoy it and giving them the space to be able to invest in their wellness and just chill for a second and experience that that rock star treatment before going right back to it. Yeah, that would have been nice. I’ve worked several of those. Have you ever heard wine and chili and Santa Fe. I have not no. It’s a huge festival. It’s exactly
what you’re talking about but yeah, yeah, if you you work all day you barely eat you serve 1000 people and you go get drunk afterwards. So yeah, so yeah, for most of I mean for me it was like large scale catering events were like that it was like a blurry you’d wake up the next day your whole body was hurting and then you had to like clock into work and you were like, what and I actually I love that that affirmation. That’s what we hear from folks a lot. I wish this had been available when I was doing X, Y, Z right. Yeah, how we know our temperature gauges is landing in the in the appropriate place and we’re being supportive and in the most helpful and relevant way right. I did want to ask you to how much do you think this organization came from COVID and the reaction to COVID because I feel like that changed the dialogue a lot. That’s a great question. Well, I think personally we benefited from COVID. I think the reason why we quote unquote blew up like this was because you know we started out out of Denver and so it was sure that first meeting was 32 people in John Hinman’s bakery. But what ended up happening is that COVID happened a few weeks after that and so then folks were referring people outside of the state of Colorado and all of a sudden like you were logging into a room and there were people in Portugal and in Australia and in Canada and you were like what. And so being able to take all of our programming online was a massive benefit to us because we now consider ourselves an international nonprofit. Our attendees are from everywhere in the world. Our rooms are so mixed. So it was a benefit for us. I my personal opinion is that that the pandemic uncovered a lot of existing blind spots. I think these things had been historically happening in the food beverage hospitality industry. People didn’t have their phone in their hands as much as what I think because there was there’s so much of what we call mask aisle abuse now right which is the abuse that folks who worked through the pandemic were receiving from patrons who refused to wear a mask when they were going into. You know their establishment and had to and there were folks who were taping right so throughout the pandemic if your experience was anything like mine every other week there was a viral video of somebody losing their mind and an establishment saying you will not tell me what to do with my body I will not wear a mask I want to pick up this. The new part was these videos going viral at the frequency that they were going viral for me. But in truth even though my experience with front of the house was very very brief in my beginning before I landed in back of the house that had always been true folks had kind of always acted a little bit of abusive and entitled. And we just didn’t. You know we weren’t at home watching behind our phones. And so what I think is that and we’ve heard a lot from folks that you know folks in the food beverage hospitality industry you know they got unemployment now nobody wants to work. Well it is my personal opinion that if folks are finally making a fair and dignified wage on unemployment for the first time in their lives even though they’ve been working in a certain career field for 15 1610 years. That means that that blind spot was there before folks have been historically underpaid and it wasn’t until the pandemic that folks were like hey I work with my body in a kitchen that keeps me overheating for hours I haven’t eaten I haven’t sat down. And I can make more money on unemployment at home. Something’s wrong with this picture right. And so to me the pandemic uncovered the fact that we had been historically marginalized and largely invisible. I think it’s been a process of being treated or being asked to be essential workers which we have been I think all all along and not compensated as such which then became glaring during the pandemic. Sure. Sure. And I was also kind of thinking about it in terms of this the ratio of people willing to work to spots that are open. And you know a lot of the ownership and management it’s easy to ignore problems when you have three other people who are ready to start tomorrow. But when people aren’t coming into apply all of a sudden that balance of power does start shifting to where oh we need to take care of these people we need to you know really take the mental health and wellness of my staff to heart. Absolutely. No one will show up otherwise. No you’re you’re absolutely. You know we have this. It’s very funny when I came to the United States and I started working here I started hearing the term the band of misfit toys, which is you know a phrase that folks regularly use to describe people who work back at the house. And it wasn’t until I came to Chow that I was like what an intentional derogatory term that I have at times used about myself because if I believe that I am just a member of a band of misfit toys. I’m not really standing up to my full boundary to say I deserve health care I deserve fair hours I deserve fair compensation. And so there’s so many different small ways in which culturally and historically we’ve minimized the contributions of food beverage hospitality workers. And you’re hitting on a great point here it used to be up until recently that if you left you got into a verbal fight with your manager and you left at midnight you know by 11 o’clock the next day you could have filled out an application somewhere else and you’d be employed right. And that has that is changing too so the investment of employees into a business and the investment of the business in employees as well, which we hope leads to what we call the sustainable workforce right where it’s mutually beneficial, we are we we celebrate personhood and the the contributions of every person who’s a part of the industry is saying I don’t care who you are as long as you clock in put a smile on your face and get this done right. Yeah. For sure. So, what what does Chow have coming up what what are you excited about her. Gosh, so many things. So many things. So many things. Well, may is mental health awareness month. And that is a really big month for us. We do this really cool project where we put together all of our resources, invitations for all of our programming, we, you know, put through all of the descriptions for every single thing that we offer we put together a bunch of merch, we put it in a binder and we send it to businesses so that they can find out about Chow and what we do. May is also our for cause partnership month and it’s where businesses that we’ve partnered with in the past that we go out and we do pre shifts in the community, or either virtually, virtually or in person, we go and we sit with a team for 20 to 30 minutes and walk them through all of the Chow programming walk them through the temperature take when is an appropriate time to do it with your with your team. So we do our pre shifts and typically folks who have worked with us in some capacity in the past are really passionate about supporting financially to make sure that our programming remains free of cost. And so we do our for cause partnerships where there’s businesses that will support Chow in the month of May and say, we are going to be selling mocktails for example and donating the proceeds of those mocktails or we want to have a mental health centered event and we’re going to be donating the proceeds to Chow. So may is an incredibly busy month for us because it is a very warm touch point in the community it’s where most folks come to us and they’re like okay, walk us through a mental health conversation and how can we help. And so it’s a big month of partnership and collaboration and then shortly after that we are launching our Spanish speaking and LGBTQ plus meeting so it is going to be a very fruitful and busy few months for us. And then recovery month in September, which is huge for us as well. Awesome. Awesome. You got a lot to do. It sounds like. Yes, and you know I tell folks this all the time but I’m only half joking. I have a daughter who’s 10 who thinks she might be a chef when she grows up. So I’ve got about eight years to fix the industry. Before she integrates so you know I got a I’m rolling up my sleeves and really hoping that sustainable workforce works at a really good pace to welcome her when she’s of age. People that are interested in your projects and your goals or should they follow you or where can they find out more. Yeah, so we are most active on Instagram and Facebook. And we have I would encourage everybody to check out our blog we have a wellness blog where we just put together a whole bunch of free opportunities that even other organizations are doing. So you can like visit our website that’s chowco.org on a Monday, and we’ll have provided you with a summary of really cool free stuff for e of the work that we are doing and and a part of my job that I love so very much when folks are able to reach out and give us the platform to talk about the work that we’re doing. It’s collaborations and conversations like this that I truly believe are normalizing, right, being able to talk about mental health and being able to exchange a little bit of our of our stories. And so I’m incredibly grateful to be here today and I want to thank you for the opportunity to talk about our mission that’s super important to us. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you again
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