Courtesy Photo / Saint City Culinary Foundation
Saint City Culinary Foundation founder Joel Rivas speaks to a group.
Joel Rivas launched San Antonio-based Saint City in 2017 to assist people in the food and beverage industry, many of whom don't have access to traditional health insurance options. However, he told the Current he could no longer sustain the organization due to dwindling donor funds.
“The number of people that needed help was growing immensely as our name became more popular on a national level, [but] the amount of funds being raised was actually getting smaller," said Rivas, who has a background in restaurants, bars and healthcare business development.
"A lot of donors, in general, are reactionary givers. So when things like Ukraine happened, or abortion access being limited, a lot of people that usually donate to us redirected those funds to those other worthy causes. An organization like Planned Parenthood, where the CEO makes $1.2 million a year, if somebody redirects their $10 a month away from that organization, it doesn't make that huge of a difference. But for smaller nonprofits like ours, it does. It makes a huge difference.”
Corporate donors have also tightened their belts as they gear up for a possible recession, Rivas also said. Plus, a growing number of nonprofits serving hospitality workers created more places for donor dollars to go.
“In 2017, there were only three organizations in the U.S. that were doing what we were doing in terms of mental health for the food and beverage industry," Rivas said. "During the pandemic, several more sprung up. Those organizations are all doing amazing work, but competing for those funds, from corporate givers and things like that, became a lot tougher.”
To fund its mission of providing mental health resources and telehealth services for foodservice workers, Saint City held annual fundraisers, including Awkward Prom and The Battle of the Boil. Each helped launch and maintain the San Antonio branch of Heard, a national organization that operates in-person and online support group programs inclusive to anyone in the service industry.
Saint City also took significant steps to protect foodservice pros during the pandemic by organizing multiple free COVID-19 vaccination clinics. At the time, one in seven San Antonians worked in the hospitality industry, and few of them had been inoculated against the virus that has killed more than 94,000 Texans, according to numbers published by The New York Times Wednesday.
“I think what what happened during the pandemic, and the awareness that was raised, really empowered a lot of frontline workers to do better for themselves," Rivas said. "They’ve started to pay more attention to their personal wellness. We see a lot more sober bartenders and workers that are in recovery than we have ever before. We've seen more workers that are not going to tolerate being paid less than their worth, and they're unionizing all over the U.S."
He added: “I just I hope that, as I move forward, I can continue to empower frontline workers to really pay attention and move their focus towards their mental health and their wellness. I'd also love to work with owner-operators that [want] to do whatever we can to steer away from that old way of doing things.”
Moving forward, San Antonio's Heard chapter will continue as an online mental health support group under the leadership of Baltimore-based Amie Ward, who oversees Heard’s national online programming.
“Amie and our online moderators have done such an amazing job volunteering their time to keep the online support group going," Rivas said. "And I just felt that [program] was best in the hands of people that are really there — they all work in the service industry. They're all very passionate about it, and I just needed to make sure everyone that we were working with, as far as industry workers, [was] taken care of, and they had a place to go before we started closing things up.”
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