Hospitality Pathways

Restaurants are the hubs at which celebrations take place, where serious questions are asked and business strategies hashed out. They are places of respite from a city so demanding that it has been accused of never sleeping. Restaurants too, are crucial to the economics of NYC and never more so than now as the city struggles to recover from the devastation of the pandemic.

The pandemic has changed the hospitality industry forever. Millions of people left the workplace, many never to return, decimating an industry that now finds itself in dire need of staff. Everywhere in NYC sections of restaurants cannot open because there are no longer enough qualified staff left in the industry to work those sections. Nearly 1 million people that were employed by restaurants pre-pandemic have not yet returned to the industry, the city itself shed nearly 200,000 industry jobs.

This means that restaurants cannot turn the profit they need to claw their way back to solvency. New Yorkers are ready to get back to restaurants where so much of life takes place, but restaurants cannot accommodate them.

We are Hospitality Pathways, and we offer a solution by providing a bridge between the restaurants that need staff but do not have the human or economic resources to train the people they need and the people that have the desire to work in restaurants but not yet, the skills or knowledge needed to be successful. Hospitality Pathways will train the next generation of hospitality professionals and will provide pathways to employment in guest forward positions with your help. 

With your support we will be able to offer permanent training cohorts to be populated by community-based organizations, city agencies and restaurants in the beginning of 2022. This funding will help stabilize our programming and allow us to offer it consistently rather than on an ad hoc basis which has been the case until now.

Throughout this process, we will actively seek additional funding from private philanthropy, government, and community partners to expand the program in the coming years, bringing the training to as many stakeholders as we can.  We will also use this time to refine the training program for our forever changing world.

Additionally, Hospitality Pathways will develop a Cannabis specific training for what is in New York State a new industry, helping those businesses train folks for retail cannabis positions from seed to sale (budtenders).  

Hospitality Pathways’ mission is to assist people in gaining in-demand job skills that lead to sustainable employment, livable wages, and future growth opportunities, within the restaurant, hotel, retail and cannabis industries. For students with a strong desire to develop soft skills and niche expertise (restaurants, cannabis), we provide a pathway to employment through our training programs. Given that the birthplace of this nonprofit was in Harlem, and began as a way to support the community, we look to do the same for other communities within the five boroughs.

Hospitality Pathways specifically serves people that would not necessarily have access to this high level of training. As the cannabis industry expands, we work to find and leverage economic opportunities for the communities that have been disproportionately harmed by cannabis criminalization and inequitable law enforcement.