Introducing Our New Industry Portal

To help independent restaurants survive this crisis, rebuild better, and thrive for the long term, we're excited to announce openforgood.com. Below we discuss how this new resource came to be. 

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As COVID-19 hit, the James Beard Foundation quickly refocused our programming on providing tools and resources to best help the hospitality industry navigate the early stages of the pandemic. We launched a webinar series, published articles, created playbooks, and partnered with chefs and advocates to help keep our country’s independent restaurants open for good.

Not long after, we were called to confront another systemic illness—the murder of innocent men, women, trans, and non-binary folx at the hands of the police. We organized webinars, events, and posts that attempted to confront the systemic inequality in our industry and our own organization. As we continue this introspective work, we are also looking at how to move forward and center the BIPOC on whom our industry so heavily relies.

Our hope is that our new website, OpenForGood.com, will be a way to bring together all of the resources the Beard Foundation and other organizations have been collecting on one easy-to-use platform. OpenForGood.com will house blog posts, playbooks, videos, and events so that our chef community has access not only to past resources, but also tips, advice, and insights on how we can build back better.

In addition to these resources, OpenForGood.com will also feature Mentorship presented by KitchenAid and a public forum for crowd-sourced support.

Mentorship presented by KitchenAid will be open to all backgrounds and is a first step in addressing the historic inaccessibility of mentors to BIPOC, women, and trans folx. Through this portal, users will have access to experts on a wide array of topics and can create their own mentorship schedule. Everything from a quick one-one-one question to a long-term mentorship relationship will be accessible through this portal. The forum will also be available for questions or crowd-sourced support and advice.

We hope you’ll join us as we launch this exciting new venture. For any questions or comments, or if you’re interested in becoming a mentor, please send an email to erothkrug@jamesbeard.org.

For more information, sign up for our industry support newsletter.

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Emily Rothkrug is Impact Programs manager at the James Beard Foundation. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.