photo by: Bremen Keasey

Codi Bates, owner and operator of Lawrence restaurants the Burger Stand and Bon Bon!, was a key part of mobilizing the Lawrence Restaurant Association's Hospitality Workers Relief Fund during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Five years later, they are still raising money to ensure more stability for industry workers.

When COVID scrambled the economy in March of 2020, one profession in particular was flipped upside down: Those who made a living feeding others in restaurants now needed help to feed their families and pay their bills after the industry practically shut down overnight.

Here in Lawrence, it was the Lawrence Restaurant Association that stepped up to serve the servers — even just a month after COVID struck. As it became less and less clear when restaurant employees might be able to return to work, the group of business owners and managers began brainstorming a way to support their workers, said Codi Bates, the owner and operator of Bates Co., whose restaurant brands include The Burger Stand and Bon Bon!

What they created was the Hospitality Workers Relief Fund. In April 2020, it began handing out $250 grants directly to workers. Soon, those grew to $500. By the middle of 2021, Bates said it had raised over $100,000 in donations, and it received another $100,000 from Douglas County that same year.

This pool of money helped hundreds of food service workers weather the pandemic, assisting them with rent, utility payments or any other expenses they might be struggling with.

It’s been nearly five years now since the first shutdowns, but Bates, who is vice chair of the restaurant association’s board, says the mission of supporting hospitality workers in crisis is still on the menu. The fund is still operating — albeit in a slightly different way — and this week is its biggest fundraiser of the year, Lawrence Restaurant Week, which runs through Jan. 26.

When diners order from one of the special Restaurant Week menus at 57 participating restaurants, 10% of the money they pay will go to the Hospitality Workers Relief Fund, where it can benefit a baker, a bartender, a barista or any other worker in the industry who needs financial help.

“Knowing there is support out there for our staff is helpful,” Bates said. “(The fund) is one more tool to manage the unknown.”

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When the fund started in 2020, Bates said that if someone was struggling financially, all they had to do to get a grant was fill out an application and show a pay stub to prove they worked in the industry.

And as the donations came in and the word got out, the money didn’t stay in the fund for long.

“Once we got money, we had a long list of folks to pay,” Bates said.

Over its first two years, the fund provided $240,000 to more than 700 hospitality workers, according to the Lawrence Restaurant Association website.

The initial crisis of the pandemic had died down by the end of 2021, and the industry was starting back up. Employees were returning to work, and the relief fund, too, changed how it operated.

In late 2021, the fund started distributing the money not as direct grants from the restaurant association, but rather through four community organizations — the Ballard Center, Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center, Centro Hispano, and Heartland Community Health Center. The idea was that these partners could work directly with people to guide them not just to the hospitality fund assistance, but to other kinds of resources that could help them.

Workers are still relying on the fund, though not as much as they were during the pandemic. Bates said that in 2023, the fund distributed $20,000 in assistance to workers. In 2024, that number rose 10% to $22,000, and people are still reaching out by email about how to access resources.

One of the most important things for Bates and the association is ensuring that workers know that the resources are still available. She said the group has printed posters in English and Spanish to inform employees who might feel hesitant to ask someone about how to access the funding.

Bates also wants workers to know that the funds aren’t limited to only restaurant workers. People who work at coffee shops, bakeries or bars are also eligible to receive the assistance.

“We’ve tried to make it as broad as we can while still keeping the truth of our mission,” Bates said. “It encompasses quite a bit of folks.”

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Direct grants were the most sensible way to help the hospitality workforce during the COVID emergency, Bates said. But that’s not how the fund operates today.

Although each household can access up to $1,000 a year in support from each partner organization, they won’t necessarily get a check for $1,000. Instead, the organizations can use the funding to provide the services that they specialize in — things like “childcare, whole health and dental care, counseling and utility and rent assistance,” according to the restaurant association’s website.

To get help, the site says, workers can go to one of the organizations, “Tell them you are a hospitality worker, and they will be able to utilize Hospitality Worker Relief Fund grant funds to provide you with services and support.”

The two more general service providers are the Ballard Center and, for Spanish-speaking employees, Centro Hispano. The restaurant association’s website says the Ballard Center can help with general financial crisis support, as well as support with rent and utilities, child care and clothing and household items. Bert Nash and Heartland, meanwhile, provide primary care, dental and mental health services, and Bert Nash also can provide some housing assistance.

Kyle Roggenkamp, the CEO of the Ballard Center, said he thinks the way the relief fund is structured is a better way to help hospitality workers seeking relief.

“It creates a beautiful bucket of money for the hospitality industry workers,” Roggenkamp said. But, when a worker reaches out to the Ballard Center, they don’t necessarily dip into that bucket right away.

The social service workers with the center will instead get to know the person and their family’s needs and figure out not just what the relief fund can do to help them, but also what other community resources they could benefit from. Roggenkamp said that opens up more options for the person who needs help, because the nonprofits can ensure they find “the most appropriate and accessible resource,” rather than just giving them a check and leaving them to figure things out on their own.

“We can stretch that money so much further,” Roggenkamp said.

The money from the Hospitality Workers Relief Fund, Roggenkamp said, helps the Ballard Center serve an additional 30 to 50 households each year.

Not every household uses the maximum amount of $1,000 in assistance, and there’s some flexibility in how the providers can administer it. In some cases, Ballard Center might use that money to offer a worker free child care. In other cases, it might involve giving someone a couple hundred dollars to help them back on their feet. Whatever form the assistance takes, Roggenkamp said the fund allows the center to better address the community’s needs.

One thing that struck Roggenkamp about the partnership is how community-minded the restaurant owners were. In meetings he has attended with the Lawrence Restaurant Association, he said it was clear that they were giving the nonprofits agency about how to help people, and that they were passionate about providing the money for that assistance.

“It’s nice when someone who is sending you resources, you can tell they’re fully committed,” Roggenkamp said. “The fund is just wonderful.”

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In any community, a fund like this would be welcome for hospitality workers, but it’s especially welcome in Lawrence because of the industry’s large footprint here.

Bates said that during the pandemic, she and other restaurant owners looked at data that said the hospitality industry was one of the top employers in Douglas County. According to Data USA, in 2022, 7.29% of workers in the county were a part of the industry, which would make it the fifth-largest sector of the local economy. Meanwhile, visitor spending in Lawrence in 2023 reached its highest level ever recorded, as the Journal-World reported, and a report found that $89 million was spent here on food and beverages alone.

That might make it look like the hospitality industry is back to full health. But industries can have long COVID just as people can, and Bates said “the industry is still recovering.”

Restaurants have notoriously thin margins. Bates said that if you’re running an efficient restaurant and conditions are “perfect,” the owner might still make only an 8% profit.

Currently, the conditions are more like “1-2%,” she said.

There are many reasons for the fluctuation in the margins — the supply chain is unpredictable, and inflation means expenses are higher and people have less disposable income — but that stress “extends to the workers too,” Bates said.

Although the legal minimum wage in Kansas is $7.25 an hour, the minimum wage for someone who collects tips is just $2.13 an hour, meaning a particularly slow night or time of year can really hurt someone’s paycheck. Bates has tested doing away with tipping at her restaurants, adding a hospitality fee of 15% at The Burger Stand in 2020 to ensure that all servers earned a $15 minimum wage. The Burger Stand removed that hospitality fee last May, and Bates said now they’ve made changes at the restaurant to make sure all the employees make at least 16 dollars an hour.

Beyond tips, there’s the part-time hours many workers have, and even the weather can matter — a winter storm can close a restaurant or mean that fewer people go out to eat. That’s a lot of instability, and a lot of ways that things can go wrong for a restaurant worker’s finances.

That’s why Bates said the Lawrence Restaurant Association is so focused on growing the relief fund. And this week will be one of the most important ones of the year for that.

Lawrence Restaurant Week not only helps bring in more customers during a typically slow stretch of the year, but it’s also the biggest fundraiser for the relief fund, Bates said, and it helps remind diners that they can donate to support as well. There are specials at restaurants not just in downtown Lawrence, but all over town; you can see a full list and view the menus at explorelawrence.com/lawrence-restaurant-week.

“It’s a huge way to be visible in the community, supporting the hospitality workers,” Bates said.

And through the community’s help, Bates hopes that the relief fund — born at a time when restaurant work was more unstable than ever — can provide some kind of safety net for the many people making a living in hospitality.

“There is so much instability in our industry,” Bates said. “Things like the Hospitality Workers Relief Fund work to make a little bit more stability in a really volatile and hugely vital industry.”