A Seat At The Table

Empowering our team to get out the vote

Earlier this year, we made a commitment to create sustainable change at sweetgreen, including supporting our team’s ability to vote. According to RRTV, the restaurant industry employs more than 11 million people. Imagine the impact that could be made at the polls if all 11 million of those employees had the tools, knowledge, and time to vote this fall.

In the 2016 Presidential Elections, over 100 million Americans did not vote with 35% citing that voting conflicted with work or school. Now more than ever, voting has been a challenge with social distancing requirements and changes to polling locations.

That’s why over the past few months, we’ve been looking inward and focusing on the following areas to support our team in the voting process:

• Providing up to 3 hours of paid-time off for all hourly employees to vote on election day and to vote early, so team members do not have to choose between work and casting their vote.
• Enabling Employees to Register to Vote at Work: To make it easy to register, we created a custom sweetgreen registration portal, as well as a QR code for back-of-house, in partnership with When We All Vote. We’re also encouraging our team to vote early and absentee where possible, given the realities of COVID.
• Education on Voting Rights + Issues on the Ballot: From speaker series programming to webinars, we’ve been inviting industry leaders to educate us on voting in the time of coronavirus, how to vote early and safely, and what is at stake this election.
• Joining Voting Coalitions like Time to Vote, Vote Early Day, Business for America’s Vote Safe, Civic Alliance and ElectionDay.org encourage a wide range of actions including vote-friendly workplace policies, Congressional support of secure mail-in ballots, safe in-person polling places and more.

We’re also supporting the communities we are in by supplying bowls to the polls. In the 2018 midterm elections, we donated meals to polling places. This year, we’re partnering with World Central Kitchen to provide meals at historically busy polling sites between Vote Early Day (10/24) through Election Day in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington DC. We’re also partnering with Business for America to provide meals to poll workers at the City & County of Denver’s Elections Division.

No matter where you stand on the issues, it is important that all our voices are heard and if you haven’t voted yet, there is still time. You can head to this link to find state-specific info on registration and voting deadlines.

We know that small acts have the power to make a big change. As we look to the coming months, let’s continue to leave people better than we found them and keep our mission in focus: Let’s keep connecting people to real food.

Thank you,

Jonathan, Nicolas and Nathaniel