“We did our due diligence to figure out where this money was going, and what we found is that it’s all going to infrastructure and probably not going to be spent for another two or three years,” Brown said. “But the dishwashers that were literally standing on their roofs and had to be rescued from floods, they need it now.”
Shepherd is a James Beard Award-winning chef who has hosted a TV show and serves as Food and Wine’s “Editor in Chef.” With Brown, a restaurant public relations professional, he launched the Southern Smoke Foundation in 2015 to raise money for multiple sclerosis after a friend was diagnosed with the disease. The nonprofit then pivoted to emergency relief for food and beverage workers affected by Hurricane Harvey.
“If anything happens, there’s no safety net. Nobody’s stacking cash in their bank accounts.”
Since 2017, the foundation’s Emergency Relief Fund has given $16.8 million in grants to food system workers facing medical emergencies, personal hardships, and other crises. The average grant amount is $3,500.
Southern Smoke pivoted again during the pandemic to give free mental health counseling to food and beverage workers through partnerships with universities. The Behind You program provides 20 free counseling sessions, and then participants can pay for additional support on a sliding scale. The idea was to proactively keep food system workers out of a crisis before one hits.
“How do we fix things before we have to pay for them?” Shepherd said.
The foundation has provided more than 12,400 no-cost counseling sessions in 12 states plus Washington, D.C., since 2020. Behind You recently expanded to Colorado and North Carolina, with pilot programs in two more states, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, launching by the end of this year. In June, they received a James Beard Foundation Impact Award for their work supporting food system workers.
Civil Eats spoke to Shepherd and Brown about the foundation’s work, the challenges that food system workers face, and where the foundation hopes to make an impact next.
When you look back on your careers, how did you come to understand the vulnerabilities that food system workers face?
Shepherd: I was a broke-ass cook. My first job was as a dishwasher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at a sushi bar, making $4.25 an hour, trying to figure out how to make that work.
The cook’s lifecycle, when you first start out, is you get paid, you pay your bills, and you might have $22 left for the next two weeks. If anything happens, there’s no safety net. Nobody’s stacking cash in their bank accounts.
When I finally made it, my first salary position [in Houston] was $17,000 a year as a sous chef. I thought I was doing great. Then I left for a job making $8 an hour. . . . I’ll never forget how I’d get paid, pay my bills, I had $5 left, and had to borrow $20 from my buddy so I could get gas and make it back and forth to work. Then I just ate at work. There was no going out, nothing.
Then I got a flat tire, a blowout. Luckily, I had my parents in Houston at the time, so they helped me out here and there, but a lot of people don’t have that structure.
Brown: At so many restaurants, they are the first people to step up when anything is happening—raising money for an employee who is sick, feeding people on the front lines of any sort of natural disaster. All of my clients were constantly doing charity events, but who takes care of them?
“We want people to know that an unforeseen crisis can be something as small as a flat tire that you can’t afford. You don’t have to have a massive catastrophic event to reach out to us.”
Health and medical [expenses] have increased. That is the No. 1 thing [on Emergency Relief Fund applications] right now by a long shot.
A lot of people don’t come to us until it’s the second or third crisis, where it literally becomes a waterfall. It could be everything from your child gets sick, you lost your job, then you get in a car accident, and once they get completely overwhelmed, they’re like, “I need to ask for help now.”
We want people to know that an unforeseen crisis can be something as small as a flat tire that you can’t afford. You don’t have to have a massive catastrophic event to reach out to us.
The standard five reasons that people are coming to the Behind You program are anxiety and depression, work-related burnout, relationship issues, trauma, and substance abuse.
Who are you still not reaching?
Brown: We have so much more awareness now, but there are plenty of people who don’t know who we are. Another big focus in big chains. We fund everyone in the industry, not just independent restaurants. When we get applications from workers at Waffle House, McDonald’s, or Chilis, we’d feel like we’ve really broken through.
We don’t find a lot of people in the wine industry—the people working the vineyards, the bottling line, or in tasting rooms. We would like them to know about us. We would also like to grow awareness with farmers or fishermen or cattlemen, the whole grower industry.
Shepherd: There are the markets in the city that we haven’t hit, even in Houston, like the Vietnamese restaurants don’t really know who we are, and all of the smaller mom-and-pop places. Also bottling line workers in Kentucky.
The Southern Smoke Foundation team at the James Beard Foundation Awards. From left, Catarina Bill, chief mission officer; Chris Shepherd, co-founder; Lindsey Brown, executive director and co-founder; Caroline Nabors, director of development and marketing; and Kaitlynn Perez-Mockett, assistant director of program operations. (Photo credit: Getty Images)
The Emergency Relief Fund is open to workers nationwide, and Behind You just expanded to Colorado and North Carolina. What does it take to expand into a new state?
Brown: There are two main things we need. One is an interested university with a clinical psychology or social work program. It helps if they are a member of the Association of Psychology Training Clinics (APTC). They use the same guidelines in each of these universities we work with. It shows us that we’re offering a consistent level of care, no matter what state you’re in, which is very important. You could never guarantee that in private practice.
