Notley’s new HomeFront Initiative is Get(ting) Shift Done For Austin

Austin experienced 58,700 job losses in the hospitality industry during March & April. Even as restaurants begin to partially reopen, social distancing rules and customer fear have prevented restaurants from needing to hire as many workers as they had before the pandemic, and the reality that another shutdown is likely looms overhead. The cancellation of SXSW and ACL, combined with customer fear, has decimated hotel occupancy. Hospitality group owners and managers are anxious to take care of their people.

This COVID-19 pandemic could be a breaking point for many in already at-risk populations — as workers were furloughed and schools closed, hunger relief demand has surged. Thousands of cars now line up daily at Central Texas Food Bank’s drive-through food pantry to receive 28-pound boxes of shelf-stable food. Meanwhile, the volunteer pool has correspondingly shrunk as many of the usual weekday volunteers are retirees and therefore in a vulnerable age group or are parents with children suddenly home from school.

Even before the pandemic, one in four Austin children did not know where their next meal was coming from. As the fastest-growing city in the United States, Austin was already facing an affordability crisis. Many of us have benefited from that growth through increased property values, employment opportunities, and standard of living. Yet, that growth has also meant increases in the cost of housing, utilities, and transportation. At Notley, we are launching an initiative called HomeFront to address these and other issues associated with Austin’s affordability crisis, including homelessness, food insecurity, and unequal access to economic opportunity.

A couple of weeks into the crisis, I shared with a friend and mentor, Bob Campbell, that we were looking for an innovative way to move the needle on food insecurity in Austin. Bob told us about Get Shift Done, an initiative co-founded by his friend, Anurag Jain, that uses the Shiftsmart App to connect underemployed and furloughed hospitality workers with food banks who need volunteers, and better yet, to pay the workers for their time with donated funds. Bob connected us with Anurag, and we knew right away that the Get Shift Done model would be a perfect fit for HomeFront to launch in Austin.

Thanks to the generosity of Austinites, on July 6th, less than three weeks after my call with Anurag, Get Shift Done for Austin launched to provide workers left jobless or underemployed by the coronavirus pandemic wages of $15 an hour to work shifts at local non-profit food pantries including Central Texas Food Bank and El Buen Samaratino. The workers are paid from donated funds, and several pillars of the Austin community, including Capital One, Notley, Tito’s, Vital Farms, Mutual Mobile, Stealth Power, the Reissa Foundation, and Gottesman Real Estate provided the initial funding for Get Shift Done for Austin’s launch.

The launch of Get Shift Done for Austin came at just the right time to help keep Austin ISD students fed. During the summer months, Austin Independent School District provides approximately 44,000 meals per week to over 1,400 students in need. The district closes over the July 4th week (this year July 6–10), and in the past, local food banks have been able to support this gap. However, this year, given the pandemic, Central Texas Food Bank only expected to be able to meet half the need. Shortly before the Get Shift Done for Austin launch, my partner at Notley, Kelli Mason, connected me with Robert Nathan Allen of Keep Austin Together who had raised the money to cover the meals and needed a distribution site and workers to distribute the meals each day. We were able to provide Notley’s East Austin campus, The Center for Social Innovation at Springdale General, to serve as one of two distribution centers as well as Get Shift Done for Austin workers to distribute the donated food.

We know we are a resilient city, that we have a great deal to offer, and that our hospitality industry will recover. In the meantime, our hospitality workers, known for their hustle, can earn a steady income through Get Shift Done For Austin while also providing our food banks with much-needed human power to meet their increased demand.

For more information on how to support this effort, to download the App to work paid shifts at food pantries, or to request workers at your nonprofit organization, visit getshiftdone.org/austin ​or homefrontatx.com.

Lawton Cummings

Lawton is a partner at Notley and oversees the HomeFront initiative. Prior to joining Notley, Lawton was the Executive Director and CEO of Austin100, practiced and taught commercial law, and co-founded and served on the boards of nonprofits that advocate for civil rights. While in law school at Georgetown, Lawton co-founded the American Constitution Society, which now has active lawyers chapters in over 200 cities and student chapters at almost every law school. Lawton is proud to perhaps have the singular distinction of having served simultaneously on an ACLU board of directors and as a legal analyst for the Fox News Network.