Rock Bottom Foundation, the giving arm of Rock Bottom Restaurants, has a community involvement program strategically aligned with the business goals of the company. And it’s working to further integrate the programs within company activities.
The Foundation has three main operating funds to cover its giving programs: a fund for hunger and homelessness, an internal HOPE fund to help employees in crisis situations, and a general fund for events et cetera. All three of these help to support the company mission to ‘run great restaurants for the benefit of its guests, communities, and employees.’ HOPE (Helping Our People in Emergencies) is a unique fund in that the foundation sets aside money purely to help employees, rather than giving to charitable causes. This can be especially helpful to young employees just starting out on their own.
Jessica Newman, Executive Director of the Foundation, stresses that this helps build a community of employees and increases retention: Rock Bottom averages about an 80% turnover when its primary competitors in the notoriously difficult restaurant industry average between 100 and 110%. Furthermore, the HOPE program serves as an internal mechanism for encouraging employees who’ve been helped by the company to help out other people in the community.
Rock Bottom helps out with money, percentage of sales campaigns, awareness building, events, and food. While employees must volunteer on their own time, the company strongly encourages them to help out, and usually gets a good turnout. Some events have more than 500 volunteers. It chose to target just one external cause with its giving programs because it wanted to have a deeper relationship with partners. This cause is hunger and homelessness, which is linked to the restaurant industry; the restaurants even donate food to food banks and shelters at the end of the day. This allows them to prevent wasting resources and help people in need at no cost.
The foundation is currently working on finding a national nonprofit that can help them have a standardized nation-wide program for giving unused food. With the combination of employee focus and funds for giving to charitable causes, Rock Bottom has the ability to custom tailor events to employee needs. Newman gives the example of the opening of the Denver Chop House many years back. The purchase and renovation of the building required displacing many homeless people using the building as a home. After employee concerns were voiced, the restaurant and Rock Bottom Foundation decided to sponsor a Christmas dinner for hungry people. The event has since become a tradition for the restaurant, which now serves dinner to about 6,000 people on Christmas in Denver alone. These ‘Mini-Miracle’ days have now expanded to serve 12,000 people nationwide on various holidays.
Newman recommends using other resources out there to guide development of these programs. For her, these are Boston College research and the Points of Light Foundation. She is currently using them for pointers as she works to further integrate the giving programs, implement education about the giving programs into employee training and marketing, and to be a vehicle for helping others get involved. She emphasizes that it was difficult to integrate these programs into the company as a whole after-the-fact.
The foundation was started as a side-project for the company, without fully thinking through how it would be aligned to the strategic goals of Rock Bottom Restaurants. By thinking through programs and what one needs from a partnership with nonprofits, the process can be much more efficient.
By Louise Doyle
Based on interview with Jessica Newman, executive director of the Foundation at Rock Bottom, conducted by Susan Hyatt.
More information on Rock Bottom Restaurants Inc. and Rock Bottom Foundation, can be found at: http://www.rockbottom.com
